[jegoodwin3]

I saw this last night and signed up for oasis on my chromebook. I created a Jupyter notebook and entered an expression in it. Nice. Then I closed the lid to my chromebook for the evening.

Next morning I opened up the lid, and it helpfully told me it wasn't connected. I waited a bit longer and updated the expression. The cell text updated but after pressing 'play' the result value did not update, leaving my screen in an inconsistent, incorrect state (wrong value for displayed input to function). There was a little sign telling me I wasn't connected.

I had signed in originally with gmail. People are going to expect a similar interaction model to google docs. There was no obvious way to get back online, short of killing the tab... and getting back how? Remember a link? A bookmark?

This doesn't work yet -- not for most people.

Beautiful, beautiful job. Get the rest of the way there please...

[kentonv]

Thanks for the feedback.

The connection problem sounds like it may be a bug in Jupyter, or the Sandstorm Jupyter package, rather than Sandstorm itself. It would be great if you could file a bug on the package: https://github.com/jparyani/ipython/issues

Usually these kinds of issues are solved by a refresh, though that's obviously not great UX.

> and getting back how? Remember a link? A bookmark?

Go back to: https://oasis.sandstorm.io

All your stuff is listed when you log in.

[jegoodwin3]

Almost certainly -- and therein lies a problem for you. There is an ambiguity between who owns the tab -- you or Jupyter app? The user of course will think of you and the app as the same thing. If you let Jupyter throw up a message saying 'you're disconnected' the user will infer that they are disconnected from you.

It's not clear the user is wrong btw -- why does a mis-behaving, buggy app, throw me into offline mode? Is it just Jupyter that is offline, or the whole of sandstorm? The message says the tab is. And I can still see components of sandstorm. Of course, I bet if switch to another app it will heal itself -- or will it? Most users won't think of that (or a refresh, or a CTRL+F5, or looking at the debug console for a hint etc.)

So my challenge to you is to explain how the offline/online model works, in a way the user can understand. I suppose big organizations like Google just solve this problem by not hosting buggy apps in the first place. :) :)

It is probably worth your while, from an adoption standpoint, to 'take ownership' of a few key apps and treat their bugs as your bugs -- I would be showing this to coworkers tomorrow if this had worked better, and it probably isn't your fault. They are keen on Jupyter and this is the best delivery platform I've seen for that app. Sharing jupyter notebooks in an enterprise setting could be your killer app -- they contain private data, and a public cloud won't work in many use cases, but most enterprises won't have enough of a constituency of scientists and engineers and statisticians to want to host a notebook server with 'front line' support. We're in the carpet cluster days here...

[kentonv]

> 'take ownership' of a few key apps and treat their bugs as your bugs

Actually, we plan to do something like that! Though, Jupyter isn't part of the initial set -- our most popular apps are Wekan, Etherpad, Rocket.Chat, and Davros, so we'll be focusing on those.

[jegoodwin3]

That's good to hear and I see why those would be popular. I'm a bit surprised that a kanban board is so important.

I'll put in my vote for replacing Wekan with Jupyter -- it's more strategic to win mindshare outside the closed circle of developers. The average unsophisticated user who just wants apps, your target market, doesn't want their very own kanban board. A photo album yes. I speculate your early adopters are predominantly developers themsleves and that's why it's popular. It does fit my comment about private data being an important use case for you, of course.

Sharing homework assignments or spreadsheets of data would be more strategic for you, imho. It could help you break into the 'educational shared docs' submarket -- every school I know uses google docs right now for convenience. And don't forget homeschoolers, and teachers setting up courseware sites. I would think the educational market would be key for you to gain mindshare and grow beyond the community of early-adopter developers.

Anyway, best of luck. This is some really good work you are doing.

[jegoodwin3]

Not sure why this was downvoted. I'm professional QA and this was a very straight forward feedback review.

[ytsb]

I agree that you raised some valid points but I think your delivery in making those points were pretty abrasive though. At least that's how I interpreted it!

[jegoodwin3]

every social community I've seen eventually has to give up the downvote as a tool and just have upvotes or likes, or else they peak when the downvoting gets out of hand. I think HNN passed that point about 1-2 years ago. I see more and more worthwhile comments greyed out and I'm sure good contributers who advocate unpopular languages or discount the latest hotness are now driven away.

[ytsb]

I think the HN community is pretty diverse and for the most part attracts people who are genuinely interested in constructive discussions. The folks who blindly dismiss something as being the new "hotness" are probably down voted because they were simply doing that - blindly dismissing without providing any useful feedback.

There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with something, but I think it's important to provide useful feedback and even more important to provide it in a useful way.

I quite like seeing what the new hotness is, and I equally like reading about unpopular languages/projects too. I usually get more insight into those projects when I read through comments because a lot of smart people (probably a lot smarter than me) provide some awesome input. The posts that I see as having been flagged or down voted is usually because the comment was aggressive or completely non-constructive (trolling).

Personally, I'm indifferent in either case. If I don't like or necessarily agree with something I read, or it really doesn't add anything to the discussion, I just scroll down to the next comment. But I'm sure the people who are passionate enough to down vote a particular comment are the same people who will upvote others, and given the broad userbase HN attracts I'd assume that for a person who down votes a comment, there's probably another who upvotes - unless the comment is just a straight up troll then the community usually does a good job at moderating.

I think the up/down voting system works pretty well; it gives the community some ability to moderate a thread so that we can focus on the content that matters. That's not always the case of course, but I think it works most of the time.