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Comment by visualR | Hacker News Reader

In my experience the public at large is satisfied with Excel/Numbers, while scientists prefer their power tools like R or Matlab. Perhaps you should pivot and build something like RStudio but for numpy.

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Isn't IPython essentially RStudio for Python? I'm greatly enamored of IPython Notebook's general approach to organizing data analysis (see http://ipython.org/notebook.html), although 1) it currently lacks interactive plotting tools and 2) I think it's targeted toward a more technical audience than this.

To take that a step further, Continuum Analytics has a product called Wakari[1] that is pretty much a web-based, sandboxed, nicely glued together version of everything mentioned in this thread: python environment, IDE, IPython notebook, interactive plotting, collaborative sharing, SSH console, file manager, dataset manager. It hooks into various APIs, S3, etc., and based on my usage so far it is very good UI/UX decisions... almost as if actual scientists designed it.

Of course, it is not free! Right now it's in beta and (I think) anyone can try it though. I'm not sure what their plan is for pricing, although I do believe they mentioned a local install option for clients who don't want their data walking out of the building.

(I am in no way affiliated)

[1] http://www.wakari.io

Actually, it is free!

There are paid plans but there will always be a free tier, at least if I have anything to say about it. The pricing plans are here: https://www.wakari.io/plans

There is also an enterprise version that customers can install on their own premises or cluster.

Thank you for your kind comments.

The lowest tier of service will remain free after the beta is finished. The free tier gives you access to a lot less resources, but it should still be useful.

Within the next week, we'll be pushing Ipython clustering. You'll be able to pay for additional compute nodes of various sizes and Wakari will provision them and integrate them into an Ipcluster.

Thanks for correcting me, both of you. Goes to show that you can't trust everything people say on the internet :-)

Seriously though, great work on your whole product suite! I keep finding myself going "I wish it would.... oh, it does.", and that's the kind of thing that will keep me around.

side note: when viewing a slice of the yahoo dataset plotted interactively in wakari, the zoom tool seems to completely crap out. the whole notebook hangs. updated chrome on win 7.

How big was the slice? Were you trying to plot with bokeh or matplotlib?

Bokeh, and it was a complete vertical slice through the stocks "dataframe"... so one point for how every many tickers there are... probably around 3300?

It's a lot of points, but I was just pointing out that it wasn't slow, it failed.

Thanks for letting us know! We are actively working on Bokeh, and the version that's there is still pretty early-stage. This will definitely improve in the coming months.

Thanks for the feedback.

Back to my previous post, the ipython clustering I mentioned was pushed to production tonight. There might be some rough edges around it, but we want to get it out so people can start using it.

Feel free to send feedback through our support channel or even chat through the integrated chat service. It's mostly developers fielding the chats. But mainly we'd love to hear about your perspective. We want to make sure the service is geared around data, people, and workflows and not just the latest or hippest technologies.

IPython is not like RStudio, at all. The closest Python thing to RStudio is Spyder (spyderlib.googlecode.com).

IPython Notebook can serve similar purposes of data exploration as RStudio, however.

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