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Show HN: Observable Notebooks

beta.observablehq.com

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Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#71

Post by krebby »

jashkenas wrote: post #5
rrherr wrote: post #4

Their new screencast is awesome too! "Observable: An Earthquake Globe in Ten Minutes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEmDwflQ3xE

And good place to drop few links, if you'd like to cut to the chase. The finished notebook from the screencast (which you can fork): https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/earthquakes And a fancier version that spins, reuses the canvas element instead of re-rendering it from scratch, projects the quakes as circles on the surface of the sphere, and offers a bunch of other options to configure (like if you'd like to…

small bug: the earthquake notebook points to `http://www.example.com` instead of the youtube screencast.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#72

Post by jashkenas »

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.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#73

Post by jashkenas »

krebby wrote: post #71
jashkenas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And good place to drop few links, if you'd like to cut to the chase. The finished notebook from the screencast (which you can fork): https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/earthquakes And a fancier version that spins, reuses the canvas element instead of re-rendering it from scratch, projects the quakes as circles on the surface of the sphere, and offers a bunch of other options to configure (like if you'd like to…

small bug: the earthquake notebook points to ` http://www.example.com` instead of the youtube screencast.

Right, we didn't have the URL yet last night. Thanks! Fixed.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#75

Post by krebby »

joshuamorton wrote: post #55
krebby wrote: post #53

To me the killer app for this is to empower data scientists to create useful, ad-hoc visualization apps for their results. Right now the html / presentation story for Jupyter notebooks is awful. Mike, Jeremy, and Tom, this looks awesome. I'm looking forward to put it through the paces.

>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 around how much the embeddable app should be scriptable or how much user control to allow. This would seemingly solve many of our needs.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#77

Post by iamwil »

mbostock wrote: post #23
polalavik wrote: post #19

How is this different than Ipython/Jupyter notebooks? Whys everyone freaking out about this.

A few differences. 1. You don’t have to install anything, so running (or forking) someone else’s notebook is as simple as clicking a link. 2. It’s reactive, which means simpler code and better feedback, particularly when building user interfaces or analyzing realtime data. 3. It runs in the browser so you have direct access to powerful graphics (and GPU computation): Canvas, SVG, WebGL. 4. You can quickly import code…

Were there objections by collaborators or in your own mind, of whether enough people would abandon Jupyter Notebooks to use Observable?

Or was it just not an issue, because you figured 1) not having to installing anything and 2) reactive would be enough to win converts?

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#78

Post by jashkenas »

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.

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#79

Post by avip »

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…

So it's "databricks for JS" ?

Re: Show HN: Observable Notebooks

#80

Post by trevyn »

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 is just an unstoppable freight train.

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