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Show HN: Observable Notebooks

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Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#31

Post by goatlover »

danso wrote: post #7

Just in case people were wondering, the site seems to have been overwhelmed for the past 10-15 minutes. But there's a YouTube demo of the tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275040 I guess an oversimplified description would be that this is like a Jupyter Notebook specifically for JavaScript. Libraries like D3 are pre-loaded and immediately accessible. Am definitely interested in hearing the details about wha…

There's a reason why you would want to run Python and that's the huge, well supported scientific computing libraries it has.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#33

Post by web007 »

Please, Observable, put something on the page that says what language this is!

I figured this was like Colaboratory (https://colab.research.google.com) or Azure Notebooks (https://notebooks.azure.com/) or some other hosted-jupyter variant. There was no information about how it should work when I went to the scratchpad, and I could barely tell it was Javascript when picking one of the sample notebooks.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#35

Post by goatlover »

mbostock wrote: post #23
polalavik wrote: post #19

How is this different than Ipython/Jupyter notebooks? Whys everyone freaking out about this.

A few differences. 1. You don’t have to install anything, so running (or forking) someone else’s notebook is as simple as clicking a link. 2. It’s reactive, which means simpler code and better feedback, particularly when building user interfaces or analyzing realtime data. 3. It runs in the browser so you have direct access to powerful graphics (and GPU computation): Canvas, SVG, WebGL. 4. You can quickly import code…

> 3. It runs in the browser so you have direct access to powerful graphics (and GPU computation): Canvas, SVG, WebGL

Jupyter is a web server. Notebooks run in the browser. iPython the kernel can run on the command line in addition to the browser.

> 1. You don’t have to install anything, so running (or forking) someone else’s notebook is as simple as clicking a link

Jupyter lets you clone notebooks with the click of a button.

Also, you can run Javascript from a Notebook cell, and there are Python libraries that interface with the JS visualization libraries, like Plotly.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#37

Post by acosmism »

goatlover wrote: post #31
danso wrote: post #7

Just in case people were wondering, the site seems to have been overwhelmed for the past 10-15 minutes. But there's a YouTube demo of the tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275040 I guess an oversimplified description would be that this is like a Jupyter Notebook specifically for JavaScript. Libraries like D3 are pre-loaded and immediately accessible. Am definitely interested in hearing the details about wha…

There's a reason why you would want to run Python and that's the huge, well supported scientific computing libraries it has.

https://gryd.us supports python

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#38

Post by acosmism »

goatlover wrote: post #35
mbostock wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few differences. 1. You don’t have to install anything, so running (or forking) someone else’s notebook is as simple as clicking a link. 2. It’s reactive, which means simpler code and better feedback, particularly when building user interfaces or analyzing realtime data. 3. It runs in the browser so you have direct access to powerful graphics (and GPU computation): Canvas, SVG, WebGL. 4. You can quickly import code…

> 3. It runs in the browser so you have direct access to powerful graphics (and GPU computation): Canvas, SVG, WebGL Jupyter is a web server. Notebooks run in the browser. iPython the kernel can run on the command line in addition to the browser. > 1. You don’t have to install anything, so running (or forking) someone else’s notebook is as simple as clicking a link Jupyter lets you clone notebooks with the click of a…

same as https://gryd.us

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#39

Post by kakarot »

simonw wrote: post #15
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. I respect people more for not namedropping themselves, but maybe I'm alone in this. (Are you sure it's a good idea to perpetuate the status quo? It's hard to get anyone to pay attention to what you've made unless you're already known. That seems a bit unfair to the next generation, and rather the opposite of oldschool hacker ethos.)

I totally see where you're coming from - name-dropping like that feels really tacky. I'd shy away from that on my own projects. The challenge is helping people understand what something is and why it is valuable as quickly as possible. In this case, the fact that the team behind this are Mike Bostock (d3), Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, CoffeeScript) and Tom MacWright (Mapbox Studio) feels very relevant to getting me exc…

Yeah honestly that raised my interest considerably.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#40

Post by tmcw »

goatlover wrote: post #31
danso wrote: post #7

Just in case people were wondering, the site seems to have been overwhelmed for the past 10-15 minutes. But there's a YouTube demo of the tech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275040 I guess an oversimplified description would be that this is like a Jupyter Notebook specifically for JavaScript. Libraries like D3 are pre-loaded and immediately accessible. Am definitely interested in hearing the details about wha…

There's a reason why you would want to run Python and that's the huge, well supported scientific computing libraries it has.

Absolutely! We all quite like Python, and there's no denying that JavaScript doesn't have the same caliber and range of scientific code (yet!).

I fully expect plenty of people to do some of the data-crunching in Python, Julia, R, and so on, and bring it into Observable to explore and experiment. And I also expect JavaScript's ecosystem to blossom, especially with WebAssembly & WebGL hitting the mainstream.

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