
Ursa Labs: an innovation lab for open source data science - stablemap
http://wesmckinney.com/blog/announcing-ursalabs/
======
neves
Just to be clear, the author is Python Pandas creator and main maintainer. He
knows what he is talking about. These are great news.

Hope they get a lot of funding.

~~~
wesm
I'm not the main maintainer anymore (Jeff Reback has that honor), as I've
moved on to work on the "greater pandas ecosystem" (of which my work on Apache
Arrow is a part of this long development arc)

~~~
skadamat
Super excited. Just reached out to the email on the site on how I can help
technically in the future!

------
psychometry
I'm a little confused about what the product is. They are using Apache Arrow
to build...something. How would this stuff benefit me as an R programmer?

~~~
makmanalp
It would change things primarily under the hood for table-like data structures
... imagine having a data.frame or tibble object but in memory it's stored in
a very specific layout which allows it to a) make use of pre-created highly
optimized library code to do complicated queries b) be interchanged with other
programs with almost zero overhead, e.g. imagine doing a query on a massive
database in spark and then loading it into R or pandas instantly without
having to wait.

~~~
psychometry
Thanks. Do you think there is a use case for traditional "small data" analysis
in R, i.e. standard CSV->dplyr->output sort of transformations?

~~~
hadley
It should make things a bit faster, and a bit easier to collaborate with
people using other languages.

------
WhompingWindows
If the author comes in here, let me say: thank you for Feather. I am currently
using that for a project on very slow servers and it is helping me quite a
bit.

My question here is this: like the creator of Vue.JS has done, could Ursa Labs
go the way of Patreon, and have potential personal, academic, or corporate
clients simply donate to ensure contributed support and production of great
tools for data science?

------
makmanalp
Very happy to see Apache Arrow gaining support! It'd be very cool to see
modern columnar storage architecture gain widespread adoption: there's decades
of research in it and massive improvements for analytical workloads.

------
tmandry
I'm really happy to hear this. The vision for Arrow is solid, and I'm looking
forward to a future where C++, Python, and other languages like Rust can
interoperate more smoothly in an integrated analysis workflow. I hope Wes and
Ursa Labs will be a major factor in developing the way we approach data
science over the next 10+ years.

------
vtuulos
This is very exciting, thanks Wes! A robust, high-performance, polyglot, in-
memory runtime for data(frames) would be extremely useful.

The remarks about challenges related to OSS maintenance/innovation were spot
on too.

