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jpallenon Show HN: Academic Bio – A simple static site generator for academic webpages

That would be amazing, thanks!

jpallenon Show HN: Academic Bio – A simple static site generator for academic webpages

I set up academic.bio to try to make it easy for academics to have a website without needing to learn anything new (html, Jekyll, github, etc) and without the complexity of WordPress et al.

I want to keep it all open though so you still 'own' your website, with the option to host at academic.bio (simple s3 static site), download the compiled html/CSS to host yourself, or use the Jekyll theme directly (github.com/academicbio/academic-minima) depending on the level you're comfortable at.

Thoughts and feedback welcome!

PS the next step is allowing quick import of publications. Where would people like to import from? Bibtex? ResearchGate?

jpallenon A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype

>> In fact, we wrote the LATEX source text of this paper using an experimental collaborative text editor that is based on our implementation of this CRDT. We are making the character-by-character editing trace of this document available as supplemental data of this paper

If anyone else wants to feel at the cutting edge of science, you can write your LaTeX paper collaboratively at https://www.sharelatex.com :P

I can't pretend we've got any original algorithms (we lean on ShareJS a lot, which is operational transform based), but we've got a few years and billions of key strokes of experience in making it robust and practical.

jpallenon DataJoy is shutting down

Indeed, and one of the reasons is the success of ShareLaTeX means that it takes our team's whole attention to keep up with the growth of ShareLaTeX, and keep investing in feature development to keep up with demand. ShareLaTeX isn't going anywhere.

jpallenon DataJoy is shutting down

The short answer is we didn't find product / market fit. It made some people happy, and was useful to some people, but it didn't make people go out and tell everyone they know to start using it. ShareLaTeX on the other hand was growing organically and had people singing it's praises even when it would sometimes randomly lose 30 minutes worth of your latest changes... (yes really! That's very fixed now though don't worry). ShareLaTeX just filled a much deeper need for people. There are so many other Python/R options out there that we never filled a deep need with DataJoy.

The exception to that is in teaching. It did fill a big need there, but we never managed to make the business model work (long high touch sales cycles, but universities only willing to pay very low prices per class). We also never found a growth model for this.

jpallenon DataJoy is shutting down

In our defence, this post has had more than twice the attention of our Show HN post! I think there's more drama in something like a shutdown and so it's more 'viral'. Getting people to take interest in a new product is much harder.

(Also, HN is not really a good target audience for us, so if you get news from here, it makes sense you'd see this but not the product itself).

jpallenon DataJoy is shutting down

DataJoy Co-founder here. A lot of the DataJoy code IS available (https://github.com/sharelatex/web-sharelatex/tree/datajoy). Our other product ShareLaTeX has an open-source version that you can run locally and is very similar to the version we host at sharelatex.com. DataJoy naturally shares a lot of code with ShareLaTeX (if you look at the two products, you'll see they're very similar). However, with DataJoy, we never got the product to a stage where we felt it made sense to invest time into 'good open source' (documentation, installation guides, etc), but the 'code dump open source' version has always been there.

The main thing that isn't open source with DataJoy is our backend for running code. At the moment this is so tied into Docker, S3, and how we deploy it in our infrastructure, that I don't think it would be much use to anyone else. The innovations here have been in how we deploy and provision it, not in the code itself.

jpallenon We have an epidemic of bad posture

Take a look at /r/bodyweightfitness: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness. They've put together a routine for beginners that is excellent: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...

jpallenon Online, collaborative LaTeX editor

Exactly! That's what I meant by "possibly both, but only one at a time". At the moment you're in group (a), but might shift to group (b) later. I'd guess that if and when that shift occurs, we'd lose you as a paid user, regardless of whether we had an open-source version or not. This way at least you get an easier transition, and you'd still be using 'ShareLaTeX' which helps us from a brand recognition POV.

jpallenon Online, collaborative LaTeX editor

Possibly slightly, but it's outweighed by the benefits of having an open-source self-hosted option (both for our business model and the greater good of the world).

Our working hypothesis is that people fall into one of two categories (possibly both, but only one at a time):

a) Those who just want a simple to use LaTeX environment that just works for their task at hand.

b) Those who are more interested in the tech, and happy to install software locally, happy to explore things like git for collaboration and really refine their own personal workflows with the tools they like.

The paid plans are used by people in category (a) and would never be of much interest to those in category (b). But the self-hosted option is great for some people in category (b).

We also have a paid version of self-hosted ShareLaTeX, with direct support from us, and enterprise features like LDAP, admin controls for managing thousands of users, etc. The open-source version forms a natural part of this, (see GitLab, etc)

jpallenon Online, collaborative LaTeX editor

Thanks for the review/feedback! You've identified two things that we've put a lot of work into at ShareLaTeX: Good real-time collaboration, and fast good PDF previews. Getting these right have been core to the whole product - when it works you don't really notice, but if it doesn't work perfectly, it's really frustrating. Collaboration and our scalable LaTeX rendering infrastructure are probably where most of the complexity and 'cleverness' in our code lies, so it's nice to know it's well received :)

jpallenon Online, collaborative LaTeX editor

ShareLaTeX Co-founder here. I'm glad that it works well for you once set up!

As for the installation, I know, this bit kind of sucks, sorry :( How long ago did you last install/upgrade? My co-founder is working pretty much full time on improving the ease of installation and configuration. One of the difficulties is that we use a lot of small services, which is great for large scale deployment, but a bit of a nightmare for producing a single standalone installable service with a unified config system. We're getting there though, and it's a priority at the moment. If you've got any feedback or problems you hit, please reach out at team@sharelatex.com. Thanks!

jpallenon Mike the Headless Chicken

This sounds a lot more humane than current practices. I would be much more inclined to eat meat grown without a 'brain' to suffer with.

jpallenon The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

The VATMOSS rules mean that you need to collect, verify and store a bunch more info than previously: You need to be able to show evidence for the country the buyer is in, and check that ip address, address, credit card, etc match. It sounds like the cost came from the software development required to put the infrastructure in place to adhere to this and so wasn't something an advisor could help with.

With it being a new rule, there was very little info about the penalties for not complying. The penalties for normal UK VAT are only proportional to revenue, so not much risk for small companies getting it wrong. It wasn't clear that this was true for VATMOSS and so there was fear amongst even tiny company of big penalties for getting it wrong.

We went through the same worries last Nov/Dev, but were lucky that our billing provider dealt with adding in all the required logic. (Shout out to Recurly!)

jpallenon React, Flux, RethinkDB and SageMathCloud – Summer 2015 Update

At ShareLaTeX (https://www.sharelatex.com), our hosting costs are around $1500/month (can probably be doubled once you add in backups and other supporting services). This is for a similar service (LaTeX is just subset of what SageMathCloud does, but a resource heavy subset). However, ShareLaTeX handles orders of magnitude more traffic as far as I can tell. One of the big factors in a service like this is being able to get the cost-per-user down low enough that it's a viable business model given that a student/academic is not going to pay more than about $10/month and most won't pay at all.

One of the big wins for us has been using Docker to isolate projects. Sure, each project is resource heavy when run/compiled/executed, but if you have lots of users, they're probably not all resource heavy at the same time. The more lightweight the virtualisation/containers, the more they can share resources. It sounds like maybe each user is getting to hold on to too many resources that they aren't using, and so it's costing an order of magnitude more than if they could share all the resources perfectly?

I'd be happy to chat more about this stuff (almost all of the ShareLaTeX code is open source as well, except for the enterprisy stuff). We've also got a new project called DataJoy for Python and R (https://www.getdatajoy.com) which has similar scaling challenges that we've been working on.

jpallenon DataJoy: Shareable, Hosted R and Python Notebooks

Hey, thanks for posting this! (It's not really notebooks in the IPython sense, but it's interactive and session-based like IPython). Let me know if you've got any questions.

- DataJoy co-founder

jpallenon Markdown and LaTeX Editor

I'd guess that the rendering is done client side here and can be done with partial updates. ShareLaTeX and Overleaf have to do a full LaTeX pass on the server just to show the change of a small part of the document.

jpallenon Show HN: DataJoy, an online Python and R editor for scientists

Thanks. DataJoy is aimed at a totally different market from Cloud 9. We want to make it easy for scientists and people doing data analysis, statistics, etc rather that developing software packages. The difference is that this requires a much more interactive environment where the code you're running is constantly evolving and being iterated on (if you've ever generated a plot, you'll know how many times it takes to get perfect). So we're aiming to work well for that use case.

jpallenon Show HN: DataJoy, an online Python and R editor for scientists

This is a very good point, that we haven't worked out a good solution to yet (it's a notoriously hard problem). A requirements.txt file would certainly help, but then that's the sort of thing you'd probably need to maintain yourself? Fully reproducible environments that can be run offline is a stretch goal of ours for the future though.

The 'reproducible' part that we mentioned was meant to refer to the fact that it's easily reproducible on DataJoy. I.e. if you share you work with a collaborator, you're not going to have any headaches around getting the scripts working on their system, installing the right packages again, etc.

jpallenon Show HN: DataJoy, an online Python and R editor for scientists

DataJoy is our second product (we're also the team behind ShareLaTeX (www.sharelatex.com)). We realised that a lot of the technical problems we had solved to make ShareLaTeX possible could also apply to more general environments, like Python and R which are also very common in academia. We're hoping to make these tools easier for scientists to use, both when getting started and when collaborating on their data analysis, data clean up, statistics, etc. Let us know what you think!

jpallenon Could dark matter not exist?

Dark matter isn't a solution, it's a quantification of the unknown. It's more nuanced than just "I don't know", but it's not far from it. I think you're wrong that science is bad at those words, it's just that's it all plays out a little more subtly than that. There are lots of things we DO know about this unknown phenomenon that we've named dark matter, and we have lots of theories, but everyone will admit it's still a bit of a mystery.

jpallenon Announcing Docker 1.7: Multi-host networking, plugins and orchestration updates

I've had APIs subtly break on me between at least 2 releases (I think it's actually 3, but one time may have been user error). The main culprits were changing the parameters which are passed on container creation vs on container start, and changing error messages/response codes.

jpallenon Announcing Docker 1.7: Multi-host networking, plugins and orchestration updates

The volume plugins look very interesting for our use case, but I can't find any documentation about how to actually write a plugin? Do I have to reverse engineer it from the Flocker example provided?

Edit: Nevermind, I found it (https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/experimental/pl...)! Three clicks in, through various blog articles with lots of other links. Maybe consider making this more obvious?

jpallenon Show HN: MapChat – A simple location based chat in 300 lines of code

Looks like it's all fixed now :)

jpallenon Show HN: MapChat – A simple location based chat in 300 lines of code

This has serious XSS holes which need fixing! Here is a PR that should do the job (not tested): https://github.com/idoco/map-chat/pull/1

jpallenon Show HN: MapChat – A simple location based chat in 300 lines of code

Make your regexs global, i.e. .replace(/</g, "") (note the g at the end), otherwise only the first instance is replaced. I made it easy for you: https://github.com/idoco/map-chat/pull/1

jpallenon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)

ShareLaTeX/DataJoy - UK, full-time, REMOTE, second non-founder developer.

Help us empower scientists by building usable open-source research tools.

We're looking for a remote full-time developer to join our team at ShareLaTeX (https://www.sharelatex.com) and DataJoy (https://www.getdatajoy.com). ShareLaTeX is an online LaTeX editor with over 400,000 registered users, and DataJoy is our new app for online data analysis with Python and R. We're aiming to make these technologies more accessible and easy to use for academics doing data analysis, numerical modelling and statistical analysis.

You should be comfortable quickly learning new technologies and enthusiastic about improving the efficiency of scientists and their tools. Our current technology stack involves Node.js, MongoDB, Redis, Coffeescript, Angular.js, and Docker, so experience in these is useful but not required. We’d rather see that you have demonstrable interest in the problems we are solving, and that you’ve created some great stuff in the past. We would love someone with front-end experience and a good sense of usability design, but we won't discount people with more of a backend focus.

Some reasons you'd enjoy working for us:

* Around 80% of our codebase is open-source and we’re big fans of free software.

* We’re agile (with a lower case a). We test everything (unit and acceptance), we have a CI build process, a full staging environment to play with, and we automate as much as possible.

* We don’t expect you to have to fill up a 9-5, 40 hour work week. A work/life balance is important and we don’t think programming is an activity that can be neatly time boxed.

* You can work fully remotely (in fact, you probably will). All founders and employees work remotely at the moment.

* We’re a bootstrapped company with no outside investors.

Send us an email: team@sharelatex.com

jpallenon Einstein Notation applied in programming

When I was doing lots of tensor computations during my PhD, I found Cadabra (http://cadabra.phi-sci.com/) which has great support for Einstein notation.

jpallenon How small companies and freelancers can deal with the VATMOSS EU VAT changes

Recurly (https://recurly.com/) have done a great job to quickly roll out all the features and reporting required for us to be compliant with these changes by the 1st Jan. I'm not aware of any other payment provider that this is true for (but I haven't looked very hard.) They've made it very easy for us.

jpallenon Show HN: Mojulo – Pixelated Math Rendering Sandbox Toy

Nice! After playing with it for a bit too long, this was my favourite:

    sin(time * 0.2) * cos(time * 0.1) * (125+125*sin(0.01*(2 + sin(0.6*time)*cos(0.4*time))*((- 50 + x + 20 * cos(0.5*time))^2 + (- 50 + y + 20 * sin(0.3*time))^2)))