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Comment by stillsut | Hacker News Reader

I'm really excited about IPython as a tool for MOOCs. For example check out this ComputerVision class: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1186001332/pyimagesearc...

Ultimately, instead of thousands of going thru the same material, I think small groups could break out and build an independent project in Ipython as it documents the results and source in one place.

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Are you talking about a small group all working together on an IPython notebook + source files? IPython doesn't (yet) support collaborative editing by itself, but SageMathCloud (https://cloud.sagemath.com/, source at https://github.com/sagemath/cloud) has patched IPython to have Google Docs-style collaborative editing. SageMathCloud is still using the latest IPython 2.x release (updated soon, probably in conjunction with upgrading the version of IPython in Sage). Still, it's probably your best bet right now for collaborative editing in IPython notebooks.

That said, several IPython developers are working on adding Google Drive support, and I believe they are working on the collaborative editing capabilities as part of that.

GoogleDrive-type editing is really neat, but I was thinking along the lines of an applied project e.g. if one person has a microscope they can collect images for everyone to analyze: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/sutt/BossLab/blob/master/...

Is SageMathCloud really based on the IPython notebook? I had assumed it was based instead on the earlier Sage Notebook.

SageMathCloud is a completely new thing, which is much more comprehensive than either the IPython notebook or the previous Sage notebook. It provides the ability to run arbitrary services and connect to them, and provides a very easy way to launch an IPython notebook server. Log in, create a project, click "New", and then click "IPython notebook". It starts up an IPython notebook server (patched to allow collaborative editing) and tunnels the connection out so that you are interacting with the IPython notebook server it started up. Beyond that, it has a completely new Sage notebook, terminal, latex editor (all allowing real-time collaboration), automatic snapshots every few minutes, and many more things.

Check out Colaboratory. They have added google drive collaboration support to IPython. You can ru. It with your own local kernel, or they have packaged the whole thing up into a Chrome app that uses PNaCl sandbox to run the Python kernel.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colaboratory-noteb...

It's nice (I tried it some time ago), but I pity that without LaTeX support (one of key things I would need to Google Docs-style collaborating).

On the other hand, I tried to enter CoLaboratory from http://colaboratory.jupyter.org/welcome/ and it does support LaTeX, but has issues with connecting to local kernel (I couldn't make it working). And it seems to be no longer id development: https://github.com/jupyter/colaboratory/commit/a4a7176e46c94...

The plan is to integrate the features from Colaboratory back into IPython, but it will probably take a couple more releases.

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