Mozilla shuts project Iodide: Datascience documents in browsers | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla shuts project Iodide: Datascience documents in browsers

github.com

46 pointsritwiksaikia6 comments

I did this! I killed it and I didn't mean to.

Ten (10) days ago, I filed an issue in the iodide project: "Compatibility with 'percent' notebook format" https://github.com/iodide-project/iodide/issues/2942

And then six (6) days ago, I added this comment to that issue: https://github.com/iodide-project/iodide/issues/2942#issueco...

And now it's almost dead, and I didn't mean to kill it.

But I also suggested that it would be great if conda-forge had a WASM build target:

- "Consider moving CPython patches upstream" https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide/issues/635#issueco...

For students, being able to go to a URL and have a notebook interface with the SciPy stack preinstalled without needing to have an organization manage shell accounts and/or e.g. JupyterHub for every student should be worth the necessary budget allocation. Their local machines have plenty of CPU, storage, and memory for all but big data workloads.

Iodide is/was really cool. Pyiodide (much of the SciPy stack compiled to WASM) is also a great idea.

Jyve with latest JupyterLab, nbgrader, and configurable cloud storage could also solve.

Google Colab is an alternative to consider if you need to share Jupyter notebooks: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/intro.ipynb.

Have any made any statements about commitment to maintain this? It's tough to justify using these minor Google products these days, given their reputation...

Not just past reputation, but there must be a very real cost or providing free GPU and TPUs even if they are older models.

I think it is inevitable Google will kill it unless they can monetize it and turn a Google-sized profit. Right now the Pro version is not even available outside the USA and I doubt it is priced to make a profit.

There are many ways to share reproducible Jupyter notebooks.

Google Colab now supports ipywidgets (js) in notebooks. While you can install additional packages in Colab, additional packages must be installed by each user (e.g. with `! pip install sympy` in an initial input cell) for each new kernel.

repo2docker builds a docker image from software dependency versions specified in e.g. requirements.txt, environment.yml, and/or a postInstall script and then installs a current version of JupyterLab in the container. Zero-to-BinderHub describes how to get BinderHub (which builds and launches containers) running on a hosting provider w/ k8s. awesome-python-in-education/blob/master/README.md#jupyter

Google AI Platform Notebooks is hosted JupyterLab.

awesome-jupyter > Hosted Notebook Solutions lists a number of services: https://github.com/markusschanta/awesome-jupyter#hosted-note...

awesome-python-in-education > Jupyter links to many Jupyter resources like nbgrader and BinderHub but not yet Jyve: https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...

I have to admit that I wasn't aware of Iodine although I do try to keep up with Mozilla's activities.

I do think that it's challenging for a large organization to promote all its projects. But I feel that there are lots of smaller projects that Mozilla and other orgs would benefit from promoting and we miss them out.

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