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Comment by santiagobasulto | Hacker News Reader

If you're a young technical entrepreneur looking for a 10-100M startup opportunity and with a very interesting technical challenge behind it: Create a collaborative replacement of Jupyter Notebooks. There's already some effort done in JupyterLab fork if you're interested [0], but with no significant advancements.

So yes, I agree that CDRTs are indeed a promising endeavor.

[0] https://github.com/jupyterlab/jupyterlab/issues/5382

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CoCalc is a collaborative replacement of Jupyter notebooks. It's a top-to-bottom re-implementation of the entire Jupyter stack designed specifically for realtime collaboration. You can use it via our hosted offering (https://cocalc.com), or install it on prem via https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc-docker.

We released the our collaborative Jupyter notebook in 2014 as a plugin to Jupyter classic. We then iterated on what we learned over the years, completely rewriting everything multiple times, including the entire realtime collaboration stack. Cocalc's Jupyter support is pretty mature and battle tested at this point, and also includes a TimeTravel slider that lets you view all past versions of a Jupyter notebook and integrated chat.

I was a college professor (at Univ of Washington), I started a company around this in 2015, so CoCalc has soo far been mainly aimed at serving the needs of academics teaching courses. It's been increasingly popular lately, e.g., in the last month over a half million distinct Jupyter notebooks were edited on https://cocalc.com. Of course, many of these notebooks are homework problems. Anyway, our company is doing very well, and we hope it will eventually be a "10M startup opportunity". :-)

Domino Data Lab has been around for a while and closed another $43M in funding earlier this year. They have a boatload of tools around collaborative notebooks. They go even further and have data science manager-level dashboards to track the notebooks, their resources, and who is working on what. There are others, but I'm calling this company out specifically because they've shown great traction and I've spent a little time with the cofounders when they were still at a shared incubator space.

https://deepnote.com/ is doing exactly this!

What does "young" have to do with it?

I actually just wrote about doing this with our code notebook product just the other day https://hex.tech/blog/a-pragmatic-approach-to-live-collabora...

Interesting decision process. I kept wondering if other people had implemented the Figma approach and it looks like you did a nice job with it. I also appreciate you putting those cool explainers up front

Blockpad (https://blockpad.net) isn’t such a bad attempt, but mainly focused towards civil engineers.

How is the system you imagine different from repl.it?

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