

Ask HN: Is my web app idea worth the effort? - freebsd_dude

I am building a web app that provides a graphical rich web interface to the functions of the statistical programming language R.<p>Here is my elevator pitch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3YYndEVNc0<p>I know this wont appeal to programmers/hackers. Thats not the goal. The target user is Joe Data Analyst who doesn't program but needs to analysis and he cannot/is slow to use the command line - we all know people like this.<p>What do you think? Are there enough of these light weight data analysts out there (who will pay for the service) to make it worth my while?<p>Thanks.
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pedalpete
Does Joe Data analyst exist? and if so, is he able to gather enough data, and
conceptualize what he is actually looking for? I put this in the realm of
wolframalpha, where most people (even hackers & programmers) can't word a
query well enough to get the data they want back.

From my experience non-programmers aren't able to manage large enough volumes
of data to require data analysis. At the company I used to work for, there
were people in IT who's job was specifically to build and run reports at the
request of retail managers. The problem would not be resolved if you could
just give the retail managers a data analysis tool, as they didn't know how to
get the data out of the databases. In some ways, is this the market that pipes
or dapper.net are trying to do?

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jdietrich
I believe that you will need to make a quantum leap in usability. As pedalpete
mentioned, very few people have the skills to process meaningful datasets,
even those working in industries where we might expect such skills to be
commonplace. The people who do have the mathematical knowledge know how to use
the existing software tools.

If this were my idea, I would be looking at smaller niches where I could offer
a boneheadedly simple way of doing tasks that are commonplace in a particular
industry. I'd focus on accepting the dirtiest, nastiest inputs - excel
spreadsheets, tables copied from word documents, tabulated lists - and giving
the user a big set of simple preset operations, organised by industry and job
role. I'd look further down the food chain to people who might deal with data
as part of their job, but have no mathematical background whatsoever.

This might be an odd analogy, but I'm reminded of software synthesisers.
Nowadays it's relatively rare that musicians have the technical understanding
of synthesis to create their own sounds, even with the most basic tools. Those
that do understand synthesis have usually invested a lot of time in learning
the interfaces of particular synthesisers and are loathe to discard that
investment. Developers are focussing on the unskilled mass market with
products that make it easy to access, tweak and combine a big library of
preset sounds.

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TrevorBurnham
Have you seen this? <http://yeroon.net/>

It's a bunch of web-based graphical wrappers around R created by a UCLA stats
prof, Jeroen Ooms. Slick stuff, for a hobby project.

I agree with jdietrich: In order to be more than a hobby project, you need a
"quantum leap in usability." But I'm optimistic. I think someone will
definitely figure out how to do this in the next 5 years.

Justin also has a good point that a tool aimed specifically at students would
be great. Most intro stats courses are taught using SPSS or Stata, and most of
the kids in the course have never done programming before; as if stats weren't
a perplexing enough subject in itself!

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dustinchilson
I Like this idea. If you were looking for a target audience you should also
include students learning statistics. In college you get to use some of the
software but this would be more ideal, hopefully working cross platform. When
I took statistics it was a pain running windows on my Mac just for statistics
software.

