Google Releases Colaboratory | Hacker News Reader

Google Releases Colaboratory

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351 pointssigna1169 comments

I know its free. This is begging, not ranting. For those of us who code/automate for our business and who are not data/ml scientists, can we PLEASE have real world examples and an abstraction layer or two so we can start using these tools as part of our workflows?

I have two classifiers running for my business with about 70% accuracy. Good enough for my purposes. So grateful to the bloggers kind enough to provide real world examples and sample code that helped me understand and apply this stuff to my business.

Anything that makes ML less of a walled garden is most appreciated.

Colaboratory is just a collaborative version of Jupyter/iPython, which is just a notebook-based editing environment. It's not specific to ML. Presumably, you can run just about any Python code in Colaboratory, such as these examples: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/A-gallery-of-interes..., http://nb.bianp.net/sort/views/

IPython is uppercase I. We don't charge $999 for IPython X :-)

You should! You see that market cap!

Nobody would pay that price because IPython X doesn't have animoji.

I agree. Have you read any "ML for dummies" types books that you could recommend? I use python, for better or worse, almost exclusively...

I'm not an expert, but the best one I could find is this:

https://machinelearningmastery.com/deep-learning-with-python...

Really neat intro, simple examples, using high level libraries (Keras and TF).

ML is gonna be the next commodity on the stack. It takes time, but considering some of the complexity, I'm impressed by the speed at which this is becoming reality.

The demo notebook has a TensorFlow example, which is a machine learning library.

However, it’s not a full ML example, which is what the OP wants. (but since the VM has only 2 vCPU, training a model with TensorFlow may not be pragmatic)

Can you share some of these blog posts that show the examples you've used?

While this doesn't provide real world examples (yet), we are trying to make a free list of short, concise, to-the-point tutorials for anyone to get familiar with the basics of Deep Learning. Best part is that each item is a wiki, so you can make it better and you'll automatically be credited in the sidebars. Leave any suggestions on the structure in the comments. Here it is: https://www.commonlounge.com/discussion/81f5bbcfea4e44b9b2bd...

This is just Google Docs for IPython notebooks. If you don’t already have a use for IPython notebooks, you likely do not have a use for this.

What do you need classifiers for in your business? I mean, why did you need to build it yourself? Is it like spam filtering of some sort? I'm surprised you had to build it yourself, in this day and age, as there would be services that provide this?

+1 would be curious to hear more about this.

Same here, but if it's not same day, it usually falls off the map of the OP. Unless they're a regular, they probably don't ever look at 'threads'

Sad!

While you're on the waiting list: https://notebooks.azure.com/

Supports more than Python 2.7: https://notebooks.azure.com/help/jupyter-notebooks/available...

(disclaimer: work for Microsoft (though not Azure)).

Another competitor is CoCalc (https://cocalc.com/) created by the SageMath developers.

Does this support real-time editing with someone else (similar to Google Docs?).

I've been using JupyterLab [0] + Google Drive [1] plugin for this. It uses Drive's API for doing real-time collaboration and let's you code in real time with someone else. It's the only solution I've found for this that doesn't require you to pay an arm to use.

[0] https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab

[1] https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-google-drive

I really like the Azure notebooks, and its hard to see what extra Google are bringing here.

Was disappointed to see 2.7.12 only.

Just tried azure, looks legit. 2.6, 3.5, 3.6, and R

F# too!

Last time I tried this you couldn't import libraries.

  !pip install <>

There is also JuliaBox (https://www.juliabox.com) if you prefer Julia to Python.

I'd like to test various deeplearning frameworks, but would prefer not to setup my own testing server in the cloud.

Is there a guide to installing frameworks in azure notebooks? I don't mind paying for using it.

The implications of this for education are huge! I've often wanted a way to write and share tutorials in Python.

If anyone else has access already, here's a tutorial I wrote on generating L-system fractals:

https://colab.research.google.com/notebook#fileId=1pftvKmXYN...

(This is the first time I've used colab outside of Google so let me know if it doesn't work!)

You have head of Jupyter Notebook / Jupyter hub, right?

Those don't have Google docs style collaborative editting.

Well actually... https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-google-drive

This is not new. Check: https://github.com/jupyter/colaboratory

Colab is the "mature" verison of Jupyter Colaboratory, which was previously only used internally at Google.

And the Soon-to-be-released jupyterlab already have google-rt-collaboration plugin https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab-google-drive

Yes, another good one (that allows execution) is mybinder: https://mybinder.org

But it's great to have more options!

You should check out Binder which can spin up docker containers and installs dependencies from requirements.txt by just giving it a GitHub repo.

I've used it in my class for those Windows users who always have trouble installing things and it's worked very well so far.

https://mybinder.org/

The VM used for Colaboratory appears to have 13GB RAM and 2 vCPU when checking using psutil (so a n1-highmem-2 instance). Not bad for a free product.

However, the VM uses Python 2.7. (Per the FAQ, Python 3 support has no ETA)

What's wrong with Python 2.7? (real question, not flamebait)

See similar thread made yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15647727

That didn't say anything about what's wrong with 2.7

Python 2.7 is frozen. It just get security updates. The community is investing in Python 3. All the main numerical libraries are already compatible with Python 3 and, unless you need a very specific library, there is no reason to start developing new projects in Python 2 nowadays.

Unicode text handling.

This is wrong with Python 3 as well in real world use.

How so?

Maybe the parent commenter is referring to issues brought up by Armin Ronacher (among others): http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/

Don't know what has changed since 2014. My perception is that Armin feels he's been pigeonholed as being more anti-Py3 than he actually is, at least with the state of Python in 2016:

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2016/11/5/be-careful-about-what-you-...

> In fact, I myself campaigned for some changes to Python 3 that made it possible to achieve better ports (like the reintroduction of the u prefix on Unicode string literals) and the bulk of my libraries work on Python 3 for many years now. It's a fact that in 2016 the problems that people have with Python 3 are different than they used to have before.

That’s because Google uses Python 2.7 internally. They have a ton of code for it, and any migration is harder than they might seem.

As per public statements, Google has ~100 million lines of Python code. Also, Google has used Python very heavily from the start, meaning that some of that code was written in Python 1.x or early 2.x days, before the language had packages, before standard modules like 'logging' or 'unittest', even before booleans(!).

It's just a lot of code to migrate. It takes time.

Disclaimer: Work at Google, wrote some of that code.

Sure, but why not support it in an external facing product? No one externally depends on that old google code.

Started as an internal tool, at least according to medium & other blog posts.

They can release a version that supports 2.7 much sooner

Jupyter switch really easily from Python2.7 to Python 3 to C# because the front end and backend are separated. Not sure why they are having issue here.

It is in the works [0], and like people said since Google uses Python 2.7 that's the verison that was supported by default.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46941308/python-3-suppor...

We use Colaboratory internally and it’s wonderful. It especially makes teaching and learning ML quite a bit easier. :)

I’m excited to see others getting access to this tool.

Wikimedia PAWS is similar, from what I gather.

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/PAWS

I don't think it's a production service, but I've talked to a couple of people involved and it sounds like it's getting a good response when it's been introduced in educational environments.

As u/halflings pointed out, the current version of Colaboratory offered was spun off some time ago (3+ years ago?) from this jupyter-associated repo: https://github.com/jupyter/colaboratory

In another begging-not-ranting, I was surprised that Colaboratory currently only supports 2.7x. It looks like it began around 2014. IIRC most of Google's projects were 2.x upon public release (Tensorflow, the API client) but have since ported over. Jupyter notebooks and iPython, too. Anything particular about Colaboratory that makes a 3.x-port a time-intensive feature, or just something that was not needed during internal development?

(Asking as a casual Jupyter user with no knowledge about what code/features is specifically 2.x bound)

This is huge! This is now the easiest way to show someone how powerful Jupyter Notebook is for data analysis.

This is pretty cool! I know it's new and all, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself when saying that it would be nice if it supported other languages aside from Python. I know that iPython supports Ruby, Perl and Javascript, and there's a plugin for Julia, but it doesn't appear to be supported right now. I am still on the waiting list to play around with this however.

Also, integration with Google docs for the purposes of data processing and data handling would be incredible! But that's just me dreaming.

Anyone know if we can beg/pay our way into a GPU backed instance?

Looks like it defaults to providing a python2 2.7.12 environment.

I don't see anyway of selecting python3, any one found the option? Or are they only supporting Python2?

Looks like it is in the works

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46941308/python-3-suppor...

Microsoft release Azure Notebooks. It works and it's available now. (I'm not MS assoc).

IBM kinda has similar service called "Data Science Experience" and it's more than just a Jupyter environment.

https://datascience.ibm.com/

A chrome-only jupyther notebook environment. Seriously? Did they put extra effort into making a browser agnostic html-app chrome only?

Just use Azures jupyter notebook environment if you need a no-setup in the cloud notebooks.

I quite like the theme. Even though Anaconda 5 has finally upgraded Jupyter's look for me and I need Python 3, the visuals and look are... cute. I hope they get open sourced.

nice. same as gryd (https://gryd.us) which is free for students and has a tight autograding integration + sharing etc. would like to see if colab will be maintained and expanded going forward or if this is it.

Very old version of Tensorflow there (1.0). Even Azure Notebooks is more up to date (1.1).

They still haven't said anything about the issues with Python 2.7?

Doesn't work in Safari. Very disappointed.

Requires third-party cookies in Chrome. Also disappointed.

lol google and their releases with waitlists.

The first thing I saw was:

  [ ] print 'Hello, Colaboratory!'

Ah, so this is apparently a Python 2 Jupyter notebook system. The lack of parentheses tells us so much about the service and the product's vision.

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