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Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

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11–20 of 58 posts

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#11

Good idea and fun name (even if it doesn't tell me anything about the product). I don't see your path to a billion dollar market like YC usually expects to see though, do you have a plan there?

Thanks!

One thing I've found while working in the ML space is that it seems like ML researchers have to deal with a lot of systems cruft. I think that in the limit, ML researchers basically only care having about a few things set up well:

- secrets and environment management

- making sure their dependencies are installed

- efficient access to their data

- quick access to their code

- using expensive compute efficiently

But to get all this set up for their research they need to wade through a ton of documentation about git, bash, docker containers, mountpoints, availability zones, cluster management and other low-level systems topics.

I think there's space for something like Replit or Vercel for ML researchers, and Moonglow is a (very early!) attempt at creating something like it.

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#12
post #8

It's inevitable that access to the actual GPU compute winds up as an API layer vs captive behind proprietary systems and interfaces as the market matures This is brilliant and "obvious" in a good way along those lines, congrats on the launch!

Thanks! When I was doing ML research, every moment that my GPU setup was top of mind was a point of frustration, so hopefully we're moving the dial a bit towards making compute an abstraction you don't have to worry about.

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#13
post #10

Congrats on launching. How does it compare to Google colab?

Thanks!

The big difference is that Google Colab runs in your web browser, whereas Moonglow lets you connect to compute in the VSCode/Cursor notebook interface. We've found a lot of people really like the code-completion in VSCode/Cursor and want to be able to access it while writing notebook code.

Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google. For instance, even Colab Pro doesn't offer H100s, whereas you can get that pretty easily on Runpod.

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#14
post #13
post #10

Congrats on launching. How does it compare to Google colab?

Thanks! The big difference is that Google Colab runs in your web browser, whereas Moonglow lets you connect to compute in the VSCode/Cursor notebook interface. We've found a lot of people really like the code-completion in VSCode/Cursor and want to be able to access it while writing notebook code. Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google. For instance, even Colab Pro doesn't offer H100s, whereas you…

> Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google.

That is no longer true - you can use remote kernels on your own compute via colab: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html

There is also the same feature in CoCalc, including using the official colab Docker image: https://doc.cocalc.com/compute_server.html#onprem

Cocalc also supports 1 click use of vscode.

(The above might not work with runpod, since their execution environment is locked down. However it works with other clouds like Lambda, Hyperstack, etc.)

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! The big difference is that Google Colab runs in your web browser, whereas Moonglow lets you connect to compute in the VSCode/Cursor notebook interface. We've found a lot of people really like the code-completion in VSCode/Cursor and want to be able to access it while writing notebook code. Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google. For instance, even Colab Pro doesn't offer H100s, whereas you…

> Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google. That is no longer true - you can use remote kernels on your own compute via colab: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html There is also the same feature in CoCalc, including using the official colab Docker image: https://doc.cocalc.com/compute_server.html#onprem Cocalc also supports 1 click use of vscode. (The above might not work with…

Ah, yeah, I misspoke, sorry. I was aware of that feature, but everyone I've talked to said it's so annoying to use they basically never use it, so I didn't think it was worth mentioning.

The big reason it's annoying is because (I believe) Colab still only lets you connect to runtimes running on your computer - which is why at the end at the end of that article they suggest using SSH port forwarding if you want to connect to a remote cluster. I know at least one company has written a hacky wrapper that researchers can use to connect to their own cluster through Colab, but it's not ideal.

I think Moonglow's target audience is slightly different than Colab's though because of the tight VSCode/Cursor integration - many people we've talked to said they really value the code-complete, which you can't get in any web frontend!

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#16
post #5

Will this work with zeds repl system that I believe uses Jupyter kernel spec? I really like their Jupyter repl format because it separates the cells with python comments so it’s much easier to deploy your code when you are done versus a notebook.

Good question! I'm not too familiar with Zed, but here's my high-level guess from reading the website: we don't currently integrate with Zed, but we probably could if it supports remote kernels (the docs I found at https://zed.dev/docs/repl weren't specific about it). One nice thing about our VSCode extension is that it's not just a remote kernel - our extension also lets you see what kernels you have and other detai…

My impression is that if it shows up by running the command Jupyter kernelspec list then it will work in zed out of the box. Does it show up on this list?

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#17
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! I'm not too familiar with Zed, but here's my high-level guess from reading the website: we don't currently integrate with Zed, but we probably could if it supports remote kernels (the docs I found at https://zed.dev/docs/repl weren't specific about it). One nice thing about our VSCode extension is that it's not just a remote kernel - our extension also lets you see what kernels you have and other detai…

My impression is that if it shows up by running the command Jupyter kernelspec list then it will work in zed out of the box. Does it show up on this list?

I don't think so, if that jupyter command just runs against your local servers. We register the moonglow remote servers with VSCode through the extension, and my guess is we'd need to do something similar with Zed.

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Colab only lets you connect to compute provided by Google. That is no longer true - you can use remote kernels on your own compute via colab: https://research.google.com/colaboratory/local-runtimes.html There is also the same feature in CoCalc, including using the official colab Docker image: https://doc.cocalc.com/compute_server.html#onprem Cocalc also supports 1 click use of vscode. (The above might not work with…

Ah, yeah, I misspoke, sorry. I was aware of that feature, but everyone I've talked to said it's so annoying to use they basically never use it, so I didn't think it was worth mentioning. The big reason it's annoying is because (I believe) Colab still only lets you connect to runtimes running on your computer - which is why at the end at the end of that article they suggest using SSH port forwarding if you want to con…

> I think Moonglow's target audience is slightly different than Colab's though because of the tight VSCode/Cursor integration - many people we've talked to said they really value the code-complete, which you can't get in any web frontend!

At the risk of repeating the famous Dropbox comment

I like the idea and that the ease of usage is your selling point. But I don't know if that is actually a reasonable reason. People who are entrenched that much in VSCode ecosystem wouldn't find it a problem to deploy dockerized Nvidia GPU container and connect to their own compute instance via remote/tunnel plugins on VSCode which one can argue does make more sense.

Congratulations on the launch and good luck with the product.

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#19
We can literally transpile and run everything client side these days. You can run a recompiled quake 3 inside your browser. Why is a hosted notebook anything other than a static html+js+css site that runs behind a cdn (effectively free to host)?

I suspect that’s a matter of time right?

Re: Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks

#20

We can literally transpile and run everything client side these days. You can run a recompiled quake 3 inside your browser. Why is a hosted notebook anything other than a static html+js+css site that runs behind a cdn (effectively free to host)? I suspect that’s a matter of time right?

In fact a quick google: https://github.com/jtpio/jupyterlite

Yay I really can have serverless notebooks! Not just an easy to manage server environment but literally a static html file that can be passed around and runs the full notebook environment. It’s weird it was ever done any other way.

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