
Show HN: DataFart - easy command line graphing - paulrosenzweig
http://datafart.com
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AustinGibbons
A cool tool with an unfortunate name. I'm not going to send a link to
datafart.com/mygraph to someone with whom I only have a professional
relationship.

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paulrosenzweig
This wasn't really intended to share graphs. In addition to the name, each
graph is deleted after 10 minutes.

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Scramblejams
A neat utility. The short-lived nature of the graphs doesn't bother me at all.

But with that name I couldn't even recommend it to a number of people I can
think of in my professional circle.

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st0p
Well, then those people have no sense of humor. When people don't have any
sense of humor, I'd rather not work with them.

So I'm not seeing any problem here.

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Permit
>So I'm not seeing any problem here.

I suppose if the target audience of this application is "st0p", then you'd be
correct. The rest of us don't necessarily get the luxury of choosing what sort
of sense of humor our employers have.

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st0p
Hmmmm. Dunno. If you have baisc experience and a proper grasp of programming
and live in the westeren world, you might not know beforehand if an employer
had humor, but you can still choose your employer.

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Wilya
If by "basic experience of programming", you mean 10+ years of experience or a
Stanford/MIT/Berkeley degree, and by "western world" you mean Silicon Valley
(and a few other very select areas, all of them within the US), yeah, I agree.

Outside that, the number of decent opportunities you'll get as a developer
will be too low for you to be picky.

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tsm
The web dependency situation is absurd. Am I unreasonable for wanting a
locally-installed program that produces a standalone window all by itself?

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readme
The web dependency is awesome. It makes it that much easier to share the chart
with others. Since you're probably on the internet at all times, what exactly
is the detractor here?

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tsm
I'm now storing my data on someone else's servers, and they promised to remove
it after 10 minutes. Not good for sharing. And if the site is down...I'm out
of luck.

Edit: And there's not even a straightforward way of saving the graph...it's
not a real image. Do I save it as a webpage? That's inconvenient for embedding
it elsewhere. Do I screenshot it? That's cumbersome...

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joe_bleau
Super picky FYI: there's no connection to GNU, so it's "gnuplot", not "GNU
Plot". (FAQ entry:
[http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html#SECTION0003200000000000...](http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/faq.html#SECTION00032000000000000000))

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paulrosenzweig
Thanks! I assumed it was part of GNU. I made the change, but the page is
cached, so it might take a while to update.

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danso
Don't know if I have a use case for datafart, but it did point me to a new d3
wrapper I hadn't yet heard of

<http://nvd3.org/>

Will have to play around with it...still trying to find that perfect line
between lightweight and convenient

~~~
pyre
There was recent discussion on HN when the company tried to revoke its ggpl
license, but then renegged.

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kingfishr
You could also do this without a server at all. You could just have a script
put your data into the html/js template and open up the page with something
like bcat.

<http://rtomayko.github.com/bcat/>

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paulrosenzweig
That's pretty awesome. I hadn't seen it before. DataFart has the one advantage
that you don't need to pipe the data in locally. If the source data is on your
local machine, this is a much better solution.

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gcmartinelli
Plenty of downvotes coming my way, but: good job sir, on that startup name.

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fragsworth
The notion that it's the name of his startup is pretty hilarious, but I think
it's just a name for a command line tool

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jbackus
What an outrageous name for a command line graphing tool. I'm honestly
curious, why?

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joelhaasnoot
This would be even better if it supported dates. In my day job I'm struggling
to find tools for plotting time-based data nicely and efficiently. Splunk
works, but only if you have that.

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mikegioia
HighCharts (<http://www.highcharts.com>) handles dates pretty well.

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mturmon
Seconded. I'm able to plot thousands of date-tagged points with good
responsiveness to zooms, and per-point popups-on-mouseover showing more
information about each point.

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Void_
Related idea: Python library that would render graph in Node.js using D3/NVD3
generating an SVG.

Is there any such thing?

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yummyfajitas
Well, there is a python library that will render nice graphs on your computer
in a variety of formats (on the screen, as a png/jpg/svg, etc).

<http://matplotlib.org/>

I'm not sure what rendering it in Node.js/D3 buys you on top of that.

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Void_
Dunno, maybe you could make the transition from static file to interactive
interface more easily? Or maybe I just find those graphs much better looking.

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hk__2
Why don’t you use a format like CSV?

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paulrosenzweig
That's a good idea. My immediate use case only involved whitespace delimited
data, but I might as well just scan each line for numbers.

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wookietrader
I don't have any output. No url is returned. :( Idea sound pretty cool, I'd
use it.

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rossj
Make sure your numbers are space separated rather than comma separated, you
could pipe your data through sed like..

cat myfile.csv | sed 's/,/ /g' | curl --data-binary @- datafart.com

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niggler
You don't need cat:

    
    
        <myfile.csv sed 's/,/ /g' | ...

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mrud
sed 's/,/ /g' myfile.csv | ... works as well

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naftaliharris
Awesome! I love how cheeky this is. The installation instructions are sweet.

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aaronpk
This is awesome. Thanks!

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mcartyem
It's great. I wanted this literally two days ago.

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tharshan09
how does the alias work? Are you routing the data from the shell to a certain
api end point?

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jat850
The alias employs curl to send data to the server hosted at datafart.com. The
parameter @- supplied to curl means, send the data on stdin as the body of the
request. So the user, via the alias, sending data to the server where it is
processed, and the curl response is a URL to the temporary location of a
viewable plot.

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gprasanth
What?? No!! You should always have option to fart silently.

one https, and one make-private-ability please! :P

Nice project.

