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Show HN: Observable Notebooks

beta.observablehq.com

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81–90 of 136 posts

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#81

Post by waleedka »

web007 wrote: post #33

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.

Not only the language, but have at least one line that says what this is. I can guess that it’s a hosted notebook service, but I can’t tell how it’s different from Jupyter Notebook. Is the difference in the language it uses, or are there other differences?

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#82

Post by MJSplot_author »

I like the idea, I've even written something similar myself, but for me a few things were not clear.

How would I load in data that is stored on my harddrive (not web addressable) without having to run my own server or go through the file selector popup box each time. User JS can't just read the harddisk (a requirement for web security). If I have to run my own server then a major selling point of this is gone.

I work with large tabled data and very often use vectorised functions using numpy or pandas, working on entire columns with a fantastically simple interface. A = B * x, for arrays B, scalars x returning a new array A. Is there something as beautiful available, working around the lack of operator overloading in JS? I've only seen string abuse like p('A') = p('B*x'). Auh.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#83

Post by tty7 »

trevyn wrote: post #80

A+. Feedback: I instantly understood that it was something similar to Jupyter, and my very first mental question was "I hope it's in JS", and this took a surprisingly long few seconds and two page navigations to establish -- I expected the choice of language to be on the splash page. Anyway, very well done, and it's quite clear to me that JS is going to trounce Python for nearly everything long-term. The JS ecosystem…

lol

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#84

Post by trevyn »

peregrine wrote: post #32

So please let me know if this is rude, but how is this funded?

The monetary cost of running this can be very low, since the computationally expensive part runs on the client. So it doesn't really need much "funding" to build and run, just time investment.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#85

Post by sramam »

Strikes me that a markdown syntax with small extensions would serve well as a format for this. This seems to invert the default mode from text to code. Is there a reason for this?

Also, where are the notebook stored? Can I get an offline copy? Wasn't obvious from a quick look.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#87

Post by mkesper »

hk__2 wrote: post #61
maksimum wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't have to remember which ones to update if you changed one, it will update automatically. Although I see how that would enable rapid iteration and make e.g. creating nice visualizations much easier, I don't think it should be mandatory. The user may want to control the state their notebook and variables are in manually.

> The user may want to control the state their notebook and variables are in manually. Can you share an example where you’d want that behavior? Spreadsheet cells don’t ask you when they update themselves.

There's an option for that. It's needed if your spreadsheet is too big / your calculations are too expensive.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#88

Post by Yen »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #14
simonw wrote: post #8

The homepage copy didn't quite capture me... until I realized it was the new thing by D3's Mike Bostock! Maybe worth name-dropping that somewhere on that page? Though I don't know how many people would respond to that other than myself (hopefully lots of people).

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.)

Echoing the other commentor, I think the name-dropping provides two important pieces of info:

1) I can match my previous knowledge of related projects to get an idea of what this project is trying to be, and likely have that be accurate.

2) in an age where any random half-baked idea has a polished marketing page and lofty ambitions, it's a noise filter for "these people have completed projects that have actually been used". If anything, on a page that doesn't name-drop, I'd trust a bare-bones, nocss landing page more.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#89

Post by atarian »

jashkenas wrote: post #78
atarian wrote: post #74

Any plans to make the notebooks embeddable in other sites?

Yes, and single interactive cells as well. A notebook already runs in a sandboxed iframe, and is able to load its dependencies there (libraries, data, values from other notebooks). So we're in quite good shape to be able to do that soon.

Cool! I've been looking for something like this for a while and couldn't have asked for better people to tackle it.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#90

Post by ontouchstart »

jashkenas wrote: post #72
rntz wrote: post #65

This works by executing Javascript code written by the user. Since these notebooks are shareable, and there is also a log-in feature, do any security features need to be put in place to prevent, say, someone linking me to a notebook that sends my login credentials for observablehq.com to a malicious host? That is, is the javascript inside the notebook sandboxed in any way? I don't fully understand how modern web secu…

Yes. We use s with the sandbox attribute ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/if... ) to uh ... sandbox away the running JavaScript. If you inspect them, you'll see that those frames are hosted on observableusercontent.com instead of observablehq.com. It's a similar security model to how raw files on GitHub are served from githubusercontent.com.

I wrote a simple notebook:

https://beta.observablehq.com/@ontouchstart/test

to confirm that the code is running in an iframe from host https://static.observableusercontent.com

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