Hacker News Reader

Comment by thearn4 | Hacker News Reader

I really like Jupyter, but somehow I'm not in love with it. Like, every time I fire it up to use it for quick data analysis, I seem to inevitably end up back in sublime + bash, sending plots to disk. Am I the odd one out?

View on HN

If you know what kind of short analysis you want to do, the benefits of Jupyter are not obvious. If you have to do a lot of exploration, and do longer analyses then it becomes indispensable.

It's also really valuable for sharing. At NPR, I did an analysis of Trump's tweets that was used in a digital post and Morning Edition piece. The notebook was easy to share with the reporter, editor, and readers and accessible enough for them to understand (https://github.com/nprapps/trump-tweet-analysis/blob/master/...).

I guess I could see that. Maybe I need to learn more of the keyboard shortcuts and magic methods.

1 thing that might help

%run the_script_you_wrote_in_sublime.py

will evaluate the script and expose the script globals in the interactive namespace. Then you can mess around with the values and do plots. This gives you the interactivity of the notebook as well as the benefits of the editor you already use

I really like what's offered by Jupyter Lab. It's in alpha right now, but I haven't had too many problems with it. It allows you to open text files, terminals, and notebooks in the interface.

I'll give this a shot, I like the idea of editing a file within a separate tab of the web interface.

Anything to help refactor things into and from file and the notebook is nice.

You're not the only one. I don't want notebooks, I want my own damned editor. For Atom, there is https://github.com/nteract/hydrogen which embeds Jupyter/iPython output right inside of your editor, not so different from how RStudio works.

There is also a way to embed Jupyter inside emacs: https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook

My main criticism is the ipynb files. I don't like that it stores input and output in the same file. Ideally I'd like at least an option for it to put the output in a directory, with images stored as normal, separate files. It's commonly known that the current approach is terrible for version control, for one thing.

I'm with you, but I still end up using notebooks because I haven't found anything better for doing analysis. The two things I want the most are:

1. A variable window where I can browse through the values of each variable (like R Studio) 2. Be able to set breakpoints

So basically something in-between PyCharm and Jupyter.

You have created some excellent bash scripts over the years to do data analysis? I find pandas much easier to use in general, especially with:

pd.read_clipboard()

pd.read_excel()

Reply on news.ycombinator.com