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

Why We're Building Observable

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#31

Post by breck »

carls wrote: post #9

I'm a big fan of Observable, having used it to prototype and learn a number of different visualizations. Note that you don't just have to use D3, but can use other visualization libraries as well (i.e. Vega-Lite, Highcharts). I also want to shout out Mike Bostock, one of the company founders (and creator of D3). I emailed him randomly to ask for some help with a d3 package and he replied the next morning. Busy creato…

He responded to me too, almost a decade ago when I was first getting into the field and looking for mentors. He had some great tips too (basically which was to not do what I was doing privately emailing devs asking for mentorship and instead get involved with the public open communities on via GitHub, Stackoverflow, sharing demos, etc). Obvious advice in hindsight, but took me a while to internalize that.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#32

Post by j-pb »

kowlo wrote: post #30

You can't self-host with Observable. For many, that means it's not a feasible replacement or improvement over an existing literate programming environment. It is a bit silly to downvote this for not being true, when it is factual.

Not true.

The Observable runtime is open source, and trivial to integrate into your existing react/whatever webapp.

There is also a vscode plugin that allows for live editing and rendering. It doesn't give you the ObservableHQ interface, but tbh I like working with files more. It also allows me to git everything.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GordonSm...

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#33

Post by kowlo »

j-pb wrote: post #32
kowlo wrote: post #30

You can't self-host with Observable. For many, that means it's not a feasible replacement or improvement over an existing literate programming environment. It is a bit silly to downvote this for not being true, when it is factual.

Not true. The Observable runtime is open source, and trivial to integrate into your existing react/whatever webapp. There is also a vscode plugin that allows for live editing and rendering. It doesn't give you the ObservableHQ interface, but tbh I like working with files more. It also allows me to git everything. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GordonSm...

It is true.

You can't self-host the same way you can self-host the Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab environment.

Or has that changed? Can I work on something offline without communicating with their servers?

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#34

Post by carls »

SamBam wrote: post #29

I'm a little confused about what the announcement is. Are they moving out of beta?

It's a bit buried, but if you click through the link about how today is a big day for Observable, you'll notice it links to an article announcing that they raised their Series A today: $10.5M from Sequoia and Acrew.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#35

Post by ParadiseEclipse »

j-pb wrote: post #32
kowlo wrote: post #30

You can't self-host with Observable. For many, that means it's not a feasible replacement or improvement over an existing literate programming environment. It is a bit silly to downvote this for not being true, when it is factual.

Not true. The Observable runtime is open source, and trivial to integrate into your existing react/whatever webapp. There is also a vscode plugin that allows for live editing and rendering. It doesn't give you the ObservableHQ interface, but tbh I like working with files more. It also allows me to git everything. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GordonSm...

It sounds like you confirmed that it can't be self-hosted - are you sure about it not being true?

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#36

Post by ParadiseEclipse »

carls wrote: post #34
SamBam wrote: post #29

I'm a little confused about what the announcement is. Are they moving out of beta?

It's a bit buried, but if you click through the link about how today is a big day for Observable, you'll notice it links to an article announcing that they raised their Series A today: $10.5M from Sequoia and Acrew.

I wonder why it's buried... the comments on this thread don't seem to be on a single topic, so it looks like most people have struggled to find the point too

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#37

Post by anentropic »

Skimming the docs... the tutorials are really nicely done but it's hard to find a clear description of what exactly is possible.

Can you install libraries (from npm?)

Can you build and share custom components, not just notebooks?

Can you connect to a web server?

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#38

Post by breck »

tracyhenry wrote: post #26
billconan wrote: post #5

An issue of visualization on the web I don’t know how to solve is how to load large data.

We are building a data vis tool ( https://github.com/tracyhenry/kyrix ) to solve this exact problem many web vis tools have. The idea is not surprising: using database indexes and a backend to send the frontend necessary data to render on demand . DB and the backend are containerized so the installation, data loading and authoring are all one command. For creators, we offer D3 and JSON-based declarative primitives th…

I saw you mention Falcon and NanoCubes so had to check our kyrix. I think this is a really important space. I used to assume Palantir had solved this but now that they're public it seems to be more of a smoke and mirrors startup.

3 questions:

1. Why isn't there a demo I can just click and visit?

2. Why not TypeScript? (I think this would be a worthy short term and long term investment —for this project and beyond— to make the upgrade)

3. Why Docker? (This one I'm probably wrong about and am just a curmudgeonly old gray beard). Every time I see Docker I say "nope". I get it's use for massive clusters, but for running on one machine I dislike it (at that point I'd prefer just to run an image on a cloud VM).

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#39

Post by chatmasta »

breck wrote: post #15
chatmasta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Observable supports direct DB connections [0], but these only work in private notebooks at the moment. At Splitgraph [1] we're building a "data delivery network" (DDN, like a CDN but for databases) that looks like a big Postgres database. It works really well with the Observable Postgres client in private notebooks -- you configure it like you would for any Postgres connection. For public notebooks, you can use our H…

I've been watching splitgraph for a while. Very interesting what you are doing!

Thanks! That means a lot :) Much more to come.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#40

Post by ilaksh »

petulla wrote: post #7

My gripe with Observable is I can't fit into a Python-based workflow. I.e., a machine learning or gpu-training worfklow. It is a nice place to create explainers, though. I almost think of it as being like a Medium alternative.

Can you run arbitrary libraries like Tensorflow.js?
Post reply on HN