
Nature: IPython interactive demo - ivoflipse
http://www.nature.com/news/ipython-interactive-demo-7.21492
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rjtavares
They also have an article about it: [http://www.nature.com/news/interactive-
notebooks-sharing-the...](http://www.nature.com/news/interactive-notebooks-
sharing-the-code-1.16261)

I love the reproducible science movement and iPython is perfect for that. Glad
to see Nature talking about it.

~~~
leni536
As a physicist I'm really glad that Nature talks about IPython. Most of my
teachers are only familiar with Matlab or maybe Maple or Mathematica. I think
the main problem with them is not reproducibility. The main problem with these
software that you can't really verify the correctness of the results. You will
never know the exact algorithm being used for a given simulation or data
evaluation. Especially Mathematica uses complicated adapting methods for
numerically integrating, solving differential equations, nonlinear regression
and so on, but you will never know the exact algorithm being used.

~~~
Niksko
Perhaps that's what they use to teach because those languages are reasonably
easy to use from a math/physics point of view, even if they're somewhat
limited from a CS point of view. I taught myself to program early on, but for
others who went through honours in maths with me it wasn't so easy.

Don't be surprised if your lecturers use other languages on their own work. At
my university, everybody in the math department uses Matlab and Mathematica.
However I know that a lot of the guys who do smooth particle hydrodynamics use
Python and Fortran, and my honours supervisor said he once programmed in
PostScript (which isn't so much practical, but it's impressive and shows he
knows how to program in languages other than Matlab).

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jnoller
Kyle (lambdaops) did the architecture: [http://lambdaops.com/ipythonjupyter-
tmpnb-debuts](http://lambdaops.com/ipythonjupyter-tmpnb-debuts)

It's a pretty amazing story about brining full instant on scientific notebooks
to everyone.

It's running on the High Memory OnMetal instances here at Rackspace. Each
container gets 512mb of ram.

~~~
onalark
Yeah, Kyle is a rock star!

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jofer
Fantastic to see!!

As much as I hope things like this will be a tipping point for python in the
scientific community (from a major player to the dominant player), monoculture
hurts everyone. Fortunately, one of the great things about ipython/jupyter is
that it's designed to be language independent.

I'm sure a lot of folks here are already aware of this, but just in case
you're not: There are Julia, R, Haskell, Ruby, and who-knows-what-else kernels
for ipython/jupyter.

I know the basic idea has been around for a long time (e.g. Mathematica), but
ipython really is an incredibly well-done and flexible execution of the idea.

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baldfat
IPython needs to be called Jupyter asap or else everyone would think this is a
Python only application which happily as an R guy it is not.

Love that there are so many "good" open source options in the ecco-system and
people will not only show the work BUT also include the cleaning and tidying
up of the data which is equally important in my opinion.

~~~
peatmoss
This is huge. I keep wishing they would hurry that renaming process up. People
from the R side may have less motivation though, given that more people seem
to use the more publication-focussed knitr approach to reproducible computing.

~~~
baldfat
Knitr is better for me for creating PDFs and Word Documents (sadly needed) and
I think knitr with RMarkdown and pandocc is amazing and best in class with
code chunks.

I like IPython NOT for the reproduction but I like interacting with my script
with cells. If I was working with a team I would prefer IPython's approach.

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3rd3
It’s great to see IPython here. I think Mathematica is missing a huge
opportunity in this area by being proprietary and by not providing a
JavaScript implementation of the CDF player.

~~~
nevergetenglish
if they provide such an implementation and allow others to freely
modify/adapt, them they can get more competitors, so is a risky business.

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bayesianhorse
The biggest strength of the IPython Notebook interface is in communicating
computational thinking.

With computational thinking I mean any subject matter where the way of
arriving at the results is at least as important as the results themselves.

With IPython Notebook, you can perform live demos (e.g. live_reveal
extension), communicate with your future self or collaborators and even peer
reviewers.

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lake99
I see this: "It looks like we're full up. Every single IPython Notebook is in
use right now! Try again later and maybe you'll have better luck. Sorry for
the inconvenience!"

Can someone tell me something about the notebook? I want to decide if this is
something I should bookmark, and visit at a later date.

~~~
devilsdounut
It uses tmpnb ([http://lambdaops.com/ipythonjupyter-tmpnb-
debuts](http://lambdaops.com/ipythonjupyter-tmpnb-debuts)) to spin up docker
instances of a relatively basic IPython demo. I guess they are a bit
overloaded right now. Pretty nice gateway drug to show the benefits of IPython
to non-technical folks.

~~~
staz
It's not mentionned in the article so I don't see how they handled security?
Espcially network wise, how do they prevent spamming?

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BostonEnginerd
I imported smtplib and was able to connect to my SMTP server. I didn't try to
send any mail though.

~~~
ericfrederich
Apparently they're running on machines with 24 Xeon cores too

print(open('/proc/cpuinfo').read())

Seems to have network access... I git cloned a small repo from git hub. It
already has gcc installed. Looks like they should lock it down a bit more.

~~~
jnoller
It's a tech demo; it'll be more locked down (no network access). The main
thing is to tweak the host so the docker containers are routable to the proxy
but no external network.

The 24 core Xeons are our (rackspace) OnMetal high memory boxes, you don't
actually have 24 cores, docker just pulled that from the host, each container
is limited.

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calebm
I love IPython Notebook. Interactive public IPython Notebooks are very cool.

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nevergetenglish
A little nitpicking, I change x^2 to x _sin(x), then to x_ Math.sin(x), then
x*math.sin(x) to no avail. In wxmaxima you just have an iterative notebook and
you have available a lot of symbolic and numeric computations with no fuss.
Also you can create section, subsections, convert to pdf and html, save in
xml, and much more. What is missing in wxmaxima is a tool to use your mouse in
a much more dynamic way.

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mapcar
I'd never heard of dexy before but has anyone tried it?

~~~
akuchling
I haven't tried it, but here's a SciPy 2013 talk by its author Ana Nelson:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6_qtDJ6ciA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6_qtDJ6ciA)

