

Introducing Sense – A Next-Generation Platform for Data Science - tristanz
http://blog.sense.io/introducing-sense-a-platform-for-data-science/

======
stdbrouw
Why does every data science infrastructure provider want to be full stack? I
really don't want to use an online IDE, I really don't want to be locked into
one particular way of distributing workloads, I really don't want to move my
code from GitHub. All of the individual components look great, but the all-or-
nothing proposition is really off-putting.

~~~
choppaface
When approaching a beachhead market, it's best to try to deliver a whole
product rather than to spread one's self thin specializing for disparate
consumers. Clearly users will appreciate some features of their offering more
than others; shooting for full-stack at launch both gets the company more
feedback and allows them the most control over the initial relationship.

I totally agree that the full-stack offering can be rather off-putting, but
the business side of DS still doesn't understand how to reliably make money
from this market. Cloudera (and friends) have made money from a full-stack
offering, so it's easy try to imitate this success.

IMO the online IDE is very useful for expositions and small projects, but
indeed a limiting playground for larger projects. I'd love to see SAAS/PAAS do
better at co-locating their offerings so that, e.g., I could run part of the
stack on my own hardware (which is where the data lives). Perhaps Docker would
help facilitate this business model.

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williamstein
We were just looking at it. It's a nice interface -- it's logical and someone
gave it a thought. They also have some of the features we (at SageMathCloud)
were talking about with regards to socializing: e.g. following a user and in
reverse having followers, etc. Also nice is that they have project templates
(for python, julia and R, basically), where you get some explanatory *.md
files to read. (I.e. not an empty project). You can also start a project from
a git/github source and so on.

It seems to be heavily broken right now, or heavily unstable. Hmpf... I'm
trying to start the ipython notebook (you have to do this on demand), then you
can start editing the files ... but it is stuck. Now it's completely broken.

The terminal works fine now, and a project is running in some kind of isolated
container in beefy linux ubuntu 14.04, running under a common "sense" user
(which is the only user). They are also running some node.js client and their
"butterfly" server.

Ok, well, I tried to test it further or add a collaborator, but the website
just says "502 application not responding".

It didn't seem like they have real-time editing or LaTeX.

few more details. ... now it runs fine again. two screenshots attached. ...
one is the project view, the other one the "workbench".

They run a plain "R" terminal, but with a neat HTML output. It's a vertically
split editor, where the .r file is on the left, and you can select lines of
text which are then executed via "ctrl+return". That's exactly how those R
people work (instead of having cells like ipython or sagews)

The same for python files: one or all lines are fed into the "ipython
terminal", not the notebook (!), and then translated to some html output on
the right. plots work fine, etc.

So, on the right of the screenshots, you can see the copies of the input
lines.

By default, they add a .gitconfig file with the username and email address.
That's cool, and I guess this could be done for SMC as well.

There is no auto-save for files, just lost the content.

\-- William Stein and Harald Schilly

~~~
tristanz
Sorry about that! We just got a huge spike in traffic from HN and VentureBeat
so are trying to handle the demand.

~~~
williamstein
Thanks -- it started working, and I've updated the comment above.

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mswen
I took a look - registered for the free personal version to try it out. I like
the ideas and a nice working demo that sucked me in. I fiddled around with
modifying the R code and running it again.

It was a little confusing in places. Eventually I figured out that I need to
save the modifications, before running it again. I think I ended up starting
up a couple console sessions that I didn't really need. Eventually figured out
they were open and that just navigating away from a session didn't shut that
session down. I went back in and manually stopped them.

Things that resonate with me. Running on a server in the cloud - including
instances that are substantially more powerful than my laptop Dead easy
deployment (being a sysadmin or devops type admin is low on my priority list
of things to learn) Interesting demo for me to play with Online collaboration
- even though I mostly work solo Encouragement to practice version control
with research code Scheduled jobs and automating pipelines

I will certainly keep an eye on how it develops and create a project of my own
on there in order to better understand the features, what works and what is
missing

Thanks for the hard work to get to this point

I suspect that I will continue to play around with it and post some of my own
code

~~~
apatil
Thanks for the feedback. We're always thinking about how to improve the
workflow and will take your comments into account when we next revise. Please
ping us on intercom with any other thoughts!

------
tristanz
Hey all.

We just opened up Sense to the public. Happy to answer any questions you may
have about Sense and building a modern data science platform.

Tristan

~~~
polskibus
Who do you think is your biggest competitor right now? Do you think that
you'll be fighting with Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning offering for the
same audience ? How do the two platform compare?

~~~
tristanz
SAS is the huge incumbent, but open source tools like R and Spark and cloud-
centric platforms are going to win, no question. We're already well into this
transition and tools like Sense should accelerate it.

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baltcode
Nice. I like it. I just replied to you too. I couldn't see any error messages
when I ran a modified example with errors.

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tixocloud
Just signed up to test things out. Really nice interface and great job with
having the onboarding process although I did get slightly lost when it came to
editing the R file. Will continue to test it out a little bit later.

Excited to see if this takes off - working on a startup where an integration
could be beneficial to both sides. Just curious who you feel your target
customer is?

------
serialpreneur
Looks interesting. Seems like they're attempting to solve similar problems as
Project Jupyter[1] & ScienceBox[2].

[1] [http://jupyter.org/](http://jupyter.org/) [2]
[https://yhathq.com/products/sciencebox](https://yhathq.com/products/sciencebox)

~~~
williamstein
Here's an incomplete list of some related web-based coding/data
analysis/Python services:

\- [https://wakari.io/](https://wakari.io/) \-- closed source, IPython,
freemium/enterprise

\- [https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com) \-- open source;
more academia oriented; completely free (right now) [disclaimer: I founded
this]

\- [https://c9.io/](https://c9.io/) \-- open source, freemium

\- [http://runnable.com/](http://runnable.com/) \-- closed source, no business
model

\- [https://www.pythonanywhere.com/](https://www.pythonanywhere.com/) \--
closed source, freemium

\- [https://www.terminal.com/](https://www.terminal.com/) \-- closed source;
freemium

\- [https://www.nitrous.io/](https://www.nitrous.io/) \-- closed source;
freemium

\- [https://codio.com/](https://codio.com/) \-- closed source; freemium (free
for public)

\- [https://codenvy.com/](https://codenvy.com/) \-- closed source;
freemium/enterprise

\- [https://koding.com/](https://koding.com/) \-- closed source; freemium

\- [http://www.wolframcloud.com/](http://www.wolframcloud.com/) \-- closed
source; expensive

------
daemonk
The interface looks nice. How do you get data into the platform? The field I
work in (genomics) usually uses a bunch of flat text/binary files instead of
databases. How would this platform interface with that kind of data?

~~~
tristanz
You can upload small to medium files directly into your project, which lives
on a distributed filesystem. For larger data, we typically recommend pulling
data directly from S3 or production databases.

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robbiet480
Freaked out for a second there, because I thought that this was announcing
that Hello.is pivoted before I got my Sense Sleep Monitor.

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tuan5
Good Saas, but obviously not graph stylish friendly

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thehoff
This is fantastic!

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auos
nice. good work!

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intrasight
sense.io gives... a blank page

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billwilliams
Nice work.

