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Why We're Building Observable

observablehq.com

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Re: Why We're Building Observable

#61

Post by breck »

tracyhenry wrote: post #42
breck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the feedback! 1. In the original comment there is a link to a demo created by Kyrix: http://wildfire.kyrixdemo.live/ Are you looking for a different type of demo? 2. Honest answer: we are very understaffed academics who also need to write papers and theses. We want to convert to TS, that is just one item on the wish list. 3. We want everyone to be able to spin up a Kyrix app on their laptop using 3 CLI com…

1. Ah! Sorry I missed that and went to the GitHub. Might be helpful to also add that link to the "website" field of the GitHub?

2. I get it. I never had the "pleasure" of being an academic, but got the chance to be a software engineer working alongside grad students for a couple of years and it felt like I imagine what taking a tour of a sweatshop factory floor would be like. (a huge exaggeration, but I saw a lot of low pay and lots of time on pdfs and not enough on code)

3. Yeah, I get it, but maybe allowing everyone to run it on their own VM would be better (and providing a one click "click here to get your own droplet on digital ocean running kyrix" sort of thing). I've found that Docker suffers from the XKCD problem (10 different environments to support—what if there was just 1....11 different environments to support!). I've almost never had a pleasant experience using Docker (and anything that requires downloading a 1GB+ image I don't consider pleasant). But again, I'm probably just being a grump and the other grads I worked with all seems to like it. Another idea is could use do this with SQLite? Have a more slimmed down version that didn't require Docker + those dependencies

Thanks for the answers! Very cool stuff and it's a very interesting problem.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#62

Post by tracyhenry »

breck wrote: post #61
tracyhenry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! 1. In the original comment there is a link to a demo created by Kyrix: http://wildfire.kyrixdemo.live/ Are you looking for a different type of demo? 2. Honest answer: we are very understaffed academics who also need to write papers and theses. We want to convert to TS, that is just one item on the wish list. 3. We want everyone to be able to spin up a Kyrix app on their laptop using 3 CLI com…

1. Ah! Sorry I missed that and went to the GitHub. Might be helpful to also add that link to the "website" field of the GitHub? 2. I get it. I never had the "pleasure" of being an academic, but got the chance to be a software engineer working alongside grad students for a couple of years and it felt like I imagine what taking a tour of a sweatshop factory floor would be like. (a huge exaggeration, but I saw a lot of…

Again, thanks for the feedback. Your comments are great food for thought!

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#63

Post by tracyhenry »

silentsea90 wrote: post #57
tracyhenry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tableau offers templated visualizations. You generally do not need to program to create stuff. Observable is a notebook environment where you can write JS (mostly) to create and tweak highly customized visualizations. It's similar to Jupyter on a very high level (they all have reactive cells for example), but for JS and visualizations.

That makes sense! Thank you! Some more questions: 1) Assuming the bulk of folks use jupyter notebooks for analysis, why not integrate with jupyter or use d3.js in jupyter directly? I assume there would be a learning curve for data manipulation on js where analysts/scientists would prefer python 2) Assuming that this isn't even meant for the jupyter audience, who is it meant for within a company?

I mean this is my question as well: how are they making money? As of right now Observable seems like a mix of use cases like Medium-like explanation articles, vis debugging/authoring and interactive journalism that don't seem to generate much money (ofc I can be wrong).

I totally agree with you that the DS community is much much larger than the vis community. With the new funding round I think they should start doing something with DS.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#64

Post by carls »

mistidoi wrote: post #54
xipho wrote: post #45

Observable is fantastic, but as others have hinted at, IMO, I think it's trying to lock you in. I want the raw JS, in one click, so that I can build out a visualization locally, just hacking on HTML/JS. Steps to doing this are highly obfuscated when they could be a single button. Overall you can see its evolution from prior sites- someone spent a huge amount of time demonstrating cool visualizations, then tried to ma…

I kind of thought that too, but somewhere around the start of the pandemic, I was able to quickly develop an interactive dataviz on Observable ( https://observablehq.com/@mistidoi/coronavirus-tests-positiv... ) and drop it into a blog post trivially ( https://relevant.healthcare/blog/2020-04-02-covid-state-visu... ). Beyond the work on the viz itself, it took something like 15 minutes to get it into the blog post, an…

Can you share how you were able to embed the notebook into your blog post?

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#65

Post by xipho »

RobinL wrote: post #50
xipho wrote: post #45

Observable is fantastic, but as others have hinted at, IMO, I think it's trying to lock you in. I want the raw JS, in one click, so that I can build out a visualization locally, just hacking on HTML/JS. Steps to doing this are highly obfuscated when they could be a single button. Overall you can see its evolution from prior sites- someone spent a huge amount of time demonstrating cool visualizations, then tried to ma…

I don't think that's entirely fair. For instance, I host content on my personal website [0] that is written in using Observable, and in fact the site provides guides to allow anyone to export content[1] and embed elsewhere online. My content can be entirely under my control if I save my libraries out of the Observable API as a tarball[2]. I genuinely think the differences between Observable and 'pure' javascript are…

Thanks for the links, I completely concur with the goodness of everything you've raised.

To clarify where I'm coming from, my use-case is (fully) offline. I want to mock the visualization in the service then get the raw, static JS offline to be used as a template. I'll write a Ruby wrapper around the data I'm exploring and gradually parameterize the template as I better understand it, and what my data looks like in it. I don't want to dance with details of the JS, I want to dance with details of the data and parameters, so get me out of requiring online hooks ASAP. I know this is possible because prior versions of Observable let you do exactly what I want, but now I get some super friendly/not friendly interfaces that obfuscates what I'm familiar with.

As a separate issue not fully related- Ultimately my goal is a static visualization for scientific publications or presentations (I can export SVG from Observable, so my prior arguments doesn't hold here). Science has a very long shelf-life, in my field we routinely reference papers and their figures 200+ years old. While I absolutely love the idea of "living publications" I also fear life that depends on other's services. If the big people can't play nice (coughing in your direction Google services gone dark, I can think of various examples that have screwed over scientists), then you can see my caution in adopting Observable's all-in-dynamic approach.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#66

Post by golemiprague »

I might be deficient in some way but I just feel a bit dumbstruck with a lot of the visualisations and I can't make sense of them. Would rather just read a table with simple numbers. Except from very simple graphs everything else looks to me like a cognitive overload which I can't decipher.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#67

Post by kowlo »

j-pb wrote: post #59
kowlo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, it's not the same literate programming environment like I said. Are we misunderstanding each other?

"You can't self-host with Observable." You can self host observble, but you can't self host observablehq. Literate programming just means the combination of code and documentation/visualisation. Observablehq provides a nice inline code editor, but that's incidental to what observable is. Git can also be used with a GUI but that GUI is not essential to what git is. Simularly observable notebooks can just as well be cr…

I can see the ambiguity in what you've quoted, but it's clarified in the sentence that immediately follows it. It was referring to the "literate programming environment".

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#68

Post by Jugurtha »

protoduction wrote: post #55
xipho wrote: post #45

Observable is fantastic, but as others have hinted at, IMO, I think it's trying to lock you in. I want the raw JS, in one click, so that I can build out a visualization locally, just hacking on HTML/JS. Steps to doing this are highly obfuscated when they could be a single button. Overall you can see its evolution from prior sites- someone spent a huge amount of time demonstrating cool visualizations, then tried to ma…

I agree that Observable is fantastic, but also wish it was more open. I'm building something similar called Starboard Notebook[0] that has a different set of trade-offs. It ends up being something in between Jupyter and Observable: * One of the goals is to build Jupyter how it would have been if it was designed for the web (only). * It's open source [1], plays nice with git (the format is plaintext), and supports loc…

Playing with this a bit. It appears I can't use `pip` with `pyodide` and have to use `micropip` with:

  micropip.install('torch')
Which fails with a message:

  Couldn't find a pure Python 3 wheel for 'torch'
Would you agree that this is a substitute for "pencil and paper" to express ideas around data?

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#69

Post by petulla »

domoritz wrote: post #27
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.

Take a look at https://www.streamlit.io/ .

hey Dominik

Yes I'm a fan; just would like to be able to write JS to visualize.

Re: Why We're Building Observable

#70

Post by mssundaram »

count wrote: post #46
breck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Generally Docker lets you say 'here, this works', rather than 'follow these 800 steps to get your environment in the right shape'.

And now your env is in this weird state that doesn't work for the previous or next tool you try.
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