Introducing the PiCloud Notebook | Hacker News Reader

Introducing the PiCloud Notebook

blog.picloud.com

54 pointsusaar33319 comments

The iPython Notebook is really amazing which is seriously under utilised and under marketed.

Every "I will teach beginner to program" site these days creates a new platform which starts with "Enter you name in quotes" ends up re-inventing the whole server-client console thing. Not every one of these platforms does a great job at it.

All you need really is an iPython notebook (which btw can also be used for alternative languages, there is a fork that runs ruby) which has alternative "markdown cells" and the "console cell".

The tech behind the whole thing is rather impressive. It uses zMQ, Tornado and can connect multiple client terminals to the given server.

This can be integrated for development with web frameworks like django/flask and can be very useful for debugging.

Was expecting a Raspberry Pi Laptop connected to iCloud or something.

That's exactly what I was expecting, there was a home made one the other day posted, I was expecting to see that productised and available for preorder or something..

Yeah I don't see any reason for this to be PiCloud over PyCloud. I don't know how long it's been named PiCloud but it seems like they're trying to cash in on Raspberry Pis success.

PiCloud has been around for years and has been presented at conferences and whatnot. Raspberry Pis are only a year or two old.

PiCloud dev here. PiCloud has been in existence since early 2009. That we share a "Pi" with Raspberry Pi is just a coincidence; it didn't even exist when we were founded.

We aren't named PyCloud as that would imply we are solely for python, which we are not. While we have very close ties to python (namely the powerful language bindings), we support every programming language.

Things the service needs to explain before I'd consider buying it:

Similar technology already exists in the form of Sage [1]. How is this different or better?

From a business standpoint, it's great to host the running code server-side: You can measure usage and charge heavy users, and you have a decent excuse to do so (market expectation that servers resources cost money). But what advantages does this offer that client-side Python in the browser, Skulpt [2], does not?

Also, "a notebook...allows you to explore the system that a job sees...You can...Peek around the filesystem...Run non-Python programs..." I really hope each user runs in their own VM for security's sake.

[1] http://sagemath.org

[2] http://www.skulpt.org

PiCloud dev here.

The IPython notebook feature itself is comparable to other offerings. The advantage of PiCloud's offering is that it is not just a web-based python; it also is the interface to a supercomputer that you can leverage with the cloud library (http://www.picloud.com/platform/). As long as you wish to make use of that supercomputer, the notebook allows you to run an interactive interpreter on your already configured PiCloud environment.

As far as security goes, every user is run in separate LXC containers. (http://lxc.sourceforge.net/)

Any of you had success setting up ipython notebook with IPC transport? Been trying to setup an out of the box project for running it on the free Openshift paas, in which you can only bind to an internal ip and some internal/external ports, but only managed to use ipc by forcing the config value somewhere on the call stack, as it always uses tcp.

from the feature merge on ipython repo, it seems it may be a bug or unfinished work.

will look deeper.

Seems to me like hosted ipython notebooks could be a product all its own.

I can imagine an instant evaluation aspect to this - on keyup (_.debounce'd).fireEvent('play') - an awesomely tight feedback loop, light-table-esque.

makes me excited for some better tools on their way.

I always liked this way of working since first touching Mathematica; does it exist for other languages? (I think there already was one for Python before, not browser based?)

ipython has notebooks, but they are browser-based.

Yeah which is fine; I just remembered another Python notebook environment but that might have been just this one :) Unfortunately I don't get to work with Python much.

It somewhat reminds me of http://www.sagemath.org/.

The IPython notebook came after the SAGE notebook, but it seems to be gaining popularity faster in the broader scientific Python community. (The SAGE community tends to be more oriented towards pure math.) SAGE is a very powerful system and introduced many cool things very early on, but it definitely is a bit of its own island in the scientific python landscape. I don't know if that's because of the licensing (it's GPL) or the software distribution logistics or what.

You might be thinking about Wakari: http://continuum.io/blog/introducing-wakari

Wakari is much more than just "IPython notebook in the cloud"; however, we do have great support for it. For instance, we have just recently enabled a feature which lets you host & share your IPython notebooks: http://continuum.io/blog/ipython-notebook-sharing-in-wakari

Right now Wakari is in closed beta, meaning you have to register and we manually approve accounts (which we do very quickly).

Take a look at Mathics [1]. It's a FOSS Mathematica clone with browser-based notebooks. You can try it free online [2]

[1] http://mathics.org/ [2] http://www.mathics.net/

Disclaimer, I'm the Mathics vice developer.

This is using the IPython Notebook [1], which uses Python by default, but can use various %magic commands to run R.

[1] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook

Sage Math has a browser-based notebook for its dialect of python http://sagemath.org

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