Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Observable Notebooks

beta.observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 136 posts

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#101

Post by mbostock »

dunham wrote: post #100
mbostock wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re still writing more documentation, but there’s a bit more detail here (and I’ll be posting more soon): https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/introduction-to-code To summarize, the body of a cell is typically either an expression or a block statement, akin to the body of an arrow function. If a cell starts with name = …, then it has a name and can be referenced by other cells. So, the name = part is specific to…

I got a little tripped up because I tried to assign a literal object to a name. e.g. name = { foo: 1 } doesn't work. I ended up doing: name = { return { foo: 1} } but after your explanation, I guessed that this would also work: name = ({ foo: 1})

Yep!

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#102

Post by jacobolus »

jashkenas wrote: post #96

Before this post fades from the front page, I just wanted to take a moment to link to some of the things folks have been publishing this morning: Nick Strayer shows how t-SNE is similar (equivalent?) to a force-directed graph layout: https://beta.observablehq.com/@nstrayer/physics-based-t-sne Jim Bumgardner published a tutorial that starts with drawing circles with canvas, then fibonacci spirals, then colorful sunflo…

Inre your first link, things can get a bit awkward if someone uses javascript features that aren’t supported in your browser. The error message is not especially non-expert-reader-friendly: https://i.imgur.com/Hw9NDPA.png

Any plans to add some kind of transpilation or ...?

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#103

Post by jacobolus »

waleedka wrote: post #81
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?

See https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/five-minute-introduc... and the links therein, e.g. the video they made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEmDwflQ3xE

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#104

Post by nstrayer »

jacobolus wrote: post #102
jashkenas wrote: post #96

Before this post fades from the front page, I just wanted to take a moment to link to some of the things folks have been publishing this morning: Nick Strayer shows how t-SNE is similar (equivalent?) to a force-directed graph layout: https://beta.observablehq.com/@nstrayer/physics-based-t-sne Jim Bumgardner published a tutorial that starts with drawing circles with canvas, then fibonacci spirals, then colorful sunflo…

Inre your first link, things can get a bit awkward if someone uses javascript features that aren’t supported in your browser. The error message is not especially non-expert-reader-friendly: https://i.imgur.com/Hw9NDPA.png Any plans to add some kind of transpilation or ...?

Oh no! That's my bad. I always default to using the spread operators because it's so nice and I live in nice new browsers.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#106

Post by krebby »

claytonjy wrote: post #95
krebby wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm specifically referring to the use case of creating explorable apps. Most data scientists I know would love a way of, say, building a map with a few input controls that alter the data or presentation (colors, layers, filtering, aggregation). I'm currently working on a JS-powered geospatial exploration app that is meant to be run either standalone or embedded into a Jupyter notebook. We often run into questions aro…

Have you looked at shiny (R) or dash (python)? I found it pretty easy to building a map with a few input controls that alter the data or presentation (colors, layers, filtering, aggregation) with R + shiny + leaflet

Yes, but neither shiny nor python (folium, etc) give us the level of customization or control via an actual JS bridge that this appears to.

That said, I tried to create a demo application and it seems like the require / exports / global situation isn't 100% yet. Any tips from the team on what to do here?

https://beta.observablehq.com/@akre54/deck-gl-test

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#107

Post by eoinmurray92 »

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 are a few ways to open Jupyter notebooks in the cloud pretty easily:

https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/

https://cloud.google.com/datalab/

https://gryd.us/

https://kyso.io (disclaimer - I'm a founder)

Do you want it to be so easy that you jump into the notebook immediately upon logging in, the hard part is that javascript will run in your browser - but python or R need a kernel running somewhere?

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#108

Post by zeptomu »

krebby wrote: post #75
joshuamorton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Right now the html / presentation story for Jupyter notebooks is awful. How so? Ive found it pretty straightforward to convert matplotlib plots to gif/mp4 for presentation (note: this can be done automatically within the notebook), and plotly is pretty good for truly interactive stuff.

I'm specifically referring to the use case of creating explorable apps. Most data scientists I know would love a way of, say, building a map with a few input controls that alter the data or presentation (colors, layers, filtering, aggregation). I'm currently working on a JS-powered geospatial exploration app that is meant to be run either standalone or embedded into a Jupyter notebook. We often run into questions aro…

Some years ago I tried (and admittedly failed) to do something similar (a Jupyter notebook as an app) when trying to build a domain specific application for water resource management - we ended up building a "classic" web application via Leaflet and Python at the backend.

The idea is intriguing, however it is non trivial to pass information from JS to Python and vice versa. You can do that, but it messes with Jupyter's event system and breaks the usual notebook workflow. Maybe this has changed for the better, but at that time this stuff (IPython widgets I think) was heavily in flux.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#109

Post by octref »

The app itself is well done, but the editing experience is quite lacking...It's 2018 and people don't want to write html/css/js as if writing txt files. https://codesandbox.io can be a good inspiration to learn from. I believe its popularity is a result of using Monaco[0] and supporting Language Servers[1].

I would advise looking into editing/language support early. Auto completion (for DOM API, D3 API, etc) and error checking can be very helpful to the user.

Still, congratulations to the launch (the app looks beautiful and UX is pretty solid)! When I was reading @mbostock's medium post[2] a few months ago I knew something like this will popup.

Anyway, back to building my own thing which focuses on the editing side of playgrounds, which I think is what most online ones (Codepen / JSFiddle) lack.

[0]: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor

[1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol

[2]: https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to-code-2b1d2876a3...

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#110

Post by KyleOS »

aw3c2 wrote: post #28
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 are many online services for hosted Jupyter Notebooks. mybinder, Google, Intel, Microsoft etc etc

There's also Anaconda, Dominodatalab, R-Brain, Kyso (currently in the Techstars NYC '18 program) - disclaimer, I'm part of this project.
Post reply on HN