

Show HN: Chartulo.us - Chart anything from the command line - dcraw
http://chartulo.us

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anusinha
You know, if you're already on the command line, gnuplot and github already
provide ~similar functionality. I can do the same in ~the same number of
keystrokes if things are aliased properly. Also, keeping things local is nice.

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bradleyland
I use gnuplot to work with large datasets I extract from telco carrier logs
(for client usage analysis). It's one of the few tools you can throw a 100,000
point dataset at and it graphs it in seconds. Try that with most scripting
language graphing libraries, and you'll be there for a few minutes.

The problem I have with gnuplot -- and maybe I'm the limitation, not the
software -- is that I find it difficult to use, and the result of some input
is inconsistent. Not to appear self-deprecating, but I really do think I might
be the limitation here. Regardless of that, I often waste time trying to
figure out why gnuplot is behaving as it is.

I have no idea if chartulo.us is going to choke on my datasets, but I hope
I'll be able to use it. I really could use a tool that is a little easier to
use than gnuplot.

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anonDataUser
Tableau does nearly instant plotting of millions of data points with a nice
user interface; it may be worth checking out if your job depends on
visualizing massive amounts of data.

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3amOpsGuy
Ahh cool, i see the attraction. I went through a phase of using the google
chart API instead of GNUplot (you just wget a URL piping your data). Coupled
with a big bash history it works fairly well.

I've learned enough R to be dangerous. Ggplot2 looks gorgeous without trying.
It's my current favourite torch for shining on perf and capacity issues (I
dream of one day identifying a perf issues root cause with nothing more than
the correlation function!)

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olefoo
It looks nice.

If you're looking for an open alternative there is
<https://github.com/mikedewar/d3py> which plays very well numpy/pandas.

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dcraw
Ah, that's a cool project! We will check it out.

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thronemonkey
I use ggplot2 all day baby. <http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/>

It has a bit of learning curve but its an extremely flexible way to quickly
visualize data in a lot of different ways to get a feel for what's going on in
your dataset (you should probably already have some R familiarity, the
language has its idiosyncrasies).

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egonschiele
Looks cool, I've been wanting something like this for a while.

Also, your animated quickstart is annoying. Leave it as text please.

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seehafer
That's great. Can you give us some idea of what kinds of data you're looking
to chart and what sort of ability you'd like out of a tool like this?

Noted on the animation.

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walrus
Not that it really matters, but

    
    
      chartulous < data.csv
    

<http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html>

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dcraw
Nice, we already won an award! :)

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Qworg
At least from my perspective, a major problem is maintaining control of your
information. How does Chartulo.us store the data? Where? Can it be removed
immediately post retrieval?

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duaneb
I would much prefer generating the graph locally and then uploading to the
service - it's very rare that graphs I generate need to be shared rather than
embedded in a paper.

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seehafer
OK. Are current tools (like gnuplot and the others mentioned in this thread)
good enough for you or is there some room for improvement?

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q_revert
another option/alternative is to use matplotlib, which is ideally integrated
with ipython notebooks <http://ipython.org/>, well worth a look if anyone's
interested.. their integration with numpy/pandas etc is superb.. and on top of
all the benefits of plotting with matplotlib, you get ipython and all its
features for free... for example <http://imgur.com/Le8px>

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dinkumthinkum
The animation of the command line is a little annoying because it has all this
cruft of the package installer messages. I got bored half way through and
missed and had to replay. Just put the two command lines there and be done
with it. :)

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tkahn6
This may be a dumb question but is this a startup or a project?

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hollerith
When (as in the current case) I don't see a way to download source code, I
assume it is a startup or a project that will become a startup if it becomes
sufficiently popular.

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seehafer
That's right. Right now we're trying to get a handle on the interest in a tool
like this.

