Example models, visually

[Jonah Sol Gabry]

I almost have the next shinyStan ready, and I think we should host shinyStan versions of some of the example models and other useful models for instructing people on stan-users. We can link to them from the manual and/or example models pages, and especially when relevant questions are asked on the message board. Then users can look at the code and also explore the model visually (they can see the Stan code in shinyStan too), and they can do this immediately, without having to organize, compile or fit the model. I think this would be really helpful, both for users and for us answering questions.

We could do all this easily using shinyapps.io. It would be free if a bunch of us rotated hosting them on the more limited unpaid accounts (some loyal users might also offer to host some), but we might have to keep changing the links. Alternatively, the cheapest paid plan is $40/month, but that would give us plenty of usage hours.

Jonah

[Ben Goodrich]

I think we did not fully resolve the question of whether it is possible to launch shinyStan through Jupyter on Allen's server. It listens on a different port but otherwise would be fairly natural and the cost is already sunk.

[Bob Carpenter]

So you'd store draws, too, or will there be some way to associate
data with the model and run from within Shiny? I'm a little unclear
on what you're proposing.

I'm sending info on budget off-list, but I don't think rotating is
a good idea. Far too much manual work and lack of reliability.
Now if you want to build a load-balancing app I think it's going to
piss of RStudio, because I doubt they want you doing end runs around
their throttling by distributing the load across accounts. And we
don't want to piss the RStudio folks off because they've been so helpful.

- Bob

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[Andrew Gelman]

This would be great.

On Aug 1, 2015, at 1:16 AM, Jonah Sol Gabry <jga...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Andrew Gelman]

Yes, I agree.

[Devin Pastoor]

Port shouldn't matter, as to host multiple apps they should (probably) sit behind nginx or some other reverse proxy anyway.

The dilemma with shinyapps IMO, is I don't understand what they mean by 'active-hours' in their pricing model. Even if they aggresively spin up/down instances, as the popularity/interest of stan grows, if people are casually pinging the examples it will very quickly exhaust those hours if it is a binary on/off for the calculation vs actual resource consumption.

There are some cool possibilities with solutions like https://sandstorm.io/ and using docker sandboxes, however I'm still in the experimenting, so I can't make any production-ready recommendations for a couple more weeks.