[HN Gopher] Streamlit's $35M Series B
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Streamlit's $35M Series B
Author : TCR19
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-04-07 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.streamlit.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.streamlit.io)
| martingoodson wrote:
| Can somebody explain the advantage of Streamlit over sharing a
| Jupiter notebook with interactive widgets? Are data scientists
| sharing models and data a relevant use case?
| randyzwitch wrote:
| The main advantage is that not everyone knows Python, and those
| who do don't necessarily use Jupyter. Once you deploy a
| Streamlit app, it's the same in-browser interactive experience
| people are already used to.
| aoos wrote:
| Congrats! Been on my to-do to try Streamlit. What are companies
| mainly using it for?
| IanCal wrote:
| I'm using it for internal debug tools. Lookup data from various
| APIs, databases, show status info for servers, that kind of
| thing. Often easier to create one and run it locally than write
| scripts and keep rerunning them with different bits of data.
| aoos wrote:
| Oh that's interesting. Hadn't thought about that direction,
| but would be super useful for us internally
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Congrats as well!
|
| We've been loving it for making internal point-and-click tools
| + external project starters (ex: tutorials, solution
| engineering, ..).
|
| Today, if you and your users are coding-heavy for data flows
| (dataset -> pydata wrangling/ml/... -> ui), jupyter notebooks
| are #1, and if you're in bigco, maybe say databricks notebooks
| as #2. However, most operational users really want an
| interactive point-and-click dashboard UI. Tableau and friends
| don't make as much sense in the pydata world, mostly for
| simpler SQL-only flows, and the existing python dashboarding
| tools (voila, panels, plotly, ...) have been too much work,
| esp. when sharing.
|
| I've been liking Streamlit as it's pretty opinionated +
| prestyled (less work!), simple interaction model (accessible!),
| etc. It clearly can be better, but is already so much more
| accessible than our experiences with other tools here.
|
| As some examples:
|
| * We've been building https://github.com/graphistry/graph-app-
| kit for people building mini graph apps (one-click self-hosted
| launch via docker + st dashboard + graphistry viz + optional
| graph db connectors + optional graph compute tools).
|
| * We're releasing 2-3 more integration + tutorial sets this
| month, where they're both notebook modes + dashboard modes.
|
| * We just ran a hackathon for the same w/ the TigerGraph team:
| https://tigergraph-web-app-hack.devpost.com/
|
| * projectdomino.org uses it internal for anti-misinfo dashboard
| tools. Our devs/data sci/some advanced osint researchers are
| fine w/ nb's, but everyone else needs dashboard UIs.
|
| I'm excited to see what 2021 + 2022 bring here, and esp. if
| they can keep increasing accessibility all the way to no-code!
| aoos wrote:
| These are great, thanks. The Graph App Kit is pretty much the
| direction I was thinking
| tylerjrichards wrote:
| I use it internally to show interactive results and explain
| stats concepts to PMs/Eng, so for example I was trying to
| explain exactly how increased sample sizes change the
| confidence intervals around a binomial proportion as the
| proportion changes from .5 -> 1, and then relate that to how
| much it costs for the business, etc. So I made a Streamlit app
| in a few minutes, and let them interact with it.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| We are using it for data health dashboards for all our big data
| projects,hence we are able to observe discrepancies, missing
| data, etc.
| mmq wrote:
| Streamlit is such a nice product. When iterating on an ML product
| and trying to give other users a quick and an easy way to
| interact with a model, Streamlit should be one of the first
| option to think of.
|
| Integrating with Streamlit[1] was also very simple, in our case,
| we only had to expose how we serve Tensorboards and Notebooks on
| our platform, and we created a couple of tutorials[2] to show how
| to host an app. Several of our users started using it after that
| as the default way for sharing interactive and customizable
| dashboards on their Kubernetes clusters.
|
| [1] https://polyaxon.com/integrations/streamlit/
|
| [2] https://polyaxon.com/docs/intro/quick-start/deploying-ml-
| app...
| dbecker wrote:
| Streamlit is awesome.
|
| It's nicer than sending someone static results, and it isn't much
| more effort.
|
| And vastly better than sending a notebook to someone unless you
| expect them to modify the notebook a lot.
|
| And learning time to make Streamlit useful for a small internal
| apps is probably ~15 minutes for most people.
| IanCal wrote:
| I can't emphasise enough what you put here:
|
| > And learning time to make Streamlit useful for a small
| internal apps is probably ~15 minutes for most people.
|
| For the types of things streamlit works for, it's minutes to
| learn and can be just minutes to write a useful app.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Yes. We use it for our own. We started however with a concept
| of AppBook[0] for the very "academic type" who couldn't even
| write a Streamlit app. We'd automatically take a notebook and
| parametrize it (no metadata or the user tagging cells), then
| present a form with the parameters. We'd then run it and track
| the experiment, and log the model.
|
| Now, however, as some of our internal users are comfortable
| with writing Streamlit, we're directly deploying apps from the
| notebook. It's useful to show results to clients without the
| user having to set up a VM, upload stuff, Docker,
| authentication, resources, etc.
|
| It's not really the 15 minutes it takes one individual to
| learn. It's the SSH into something, send a link, shut down the
| VM or recycle it for next proto, remember the IP, etc...
|
| - [0]: https://iko.ai/docs/appbook/
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Congrats Streamlit!
| mrkramer wrote:
| I don't get this product how is it any different than replit.com
| or they are competitors? Anyway good idea.
| brianzelip wrote:
| Here's an informing podcast episode with one of the Streamlit
| authors, https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/260/from-basic-
| script-to....
| aparsons wrote:
| From a lot of bittersweet experiences, I tend to be very wary of
| "drastically simple" API products. We often say APIs are forever
| - so it is so critical to build the right abstraction. When I saw
| the demo on their page, yes it's magically (their words) simple,
| but it also smells strongly of an API that can start leaking as
| complexity rises.
|
| Dave Cutler of NT fame used to say leaky abstractions are often
| worse than no abstractions, and early on, it's often better to go
| with a lower-level API (for example, what Tensorflow did) because
| you can add a higher level one later (eg Keras) based on usage
| and reasonable defaults.
|
| Heavy reliance on strings with logical meaning? Another strong
| smell.
|
| Streamlit looks very accessible - which is amazing in this space,
| and I hope they do well - but my prediction is people will be
| importing "streamlit.v2" within two years.
| randyzwitch wrote:
| You could argue that we've had the low-level API since
| JavaScript was added to the browser
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| It's realistic. ST isn't about building huge projects. It's
| basically an interactive plot tool which is easier to use and
| more flexible than existing python solutions. 99% of streamlit
| code is useless in a month, and that's fine.
| IanCal wrote:
| It's also great for internal debug tools, where I want to
| give people an easy "put some data here and get back relevant
| info from various different systems / logs".
| everling wrote:
| Been using Streamlit at work for over a year. It's great for
| quickly building internal apps where latency or styling is not a
| concern (though it is a lot prettier than notebooks).
| maest wrote:
| Can you expand on what you mean by "latency" is not a concern?
| As in, the UI is very laggy?
| randyzwitch wrote:
| We just released themeing in the past few weeks, so there's
| definitely more options than there used to be! We'd love to get
| any additional feedback about the types of customizations you'd
| like to see.
| tylerjrichards wrote:
| I've been using Streamlit for the past year and am consistently
| shocked with how quickly the team ships what the community asks
| for (everything from secrets, to themes, to making developing on
| top of Streamlit easier with components, etc). Good for them!
| dougb5 wrote:
| Cynical about frameworks but huge fan of this one. I find myself
| using Streamlit not just to communicate data analyses with other
| people, but also to explore the data myself, and even for
| projects I never intend to publish. Being able to produce an
| interactive visualization quickly and entirely from Python makes
| _so_ much difference to my research productivity. I just hope the
| VC cash doesn 't complicate things.
| byefruit wrote:
| Looks interesting but has anyone managed to find pricing
| anywhere?
| nof1 wrote:
| Streamlit for Teams is in private beta, so prices are still
| negotiated case by case. When it is open to everyone in a few
| months, the prices will be on the website. And the goal is to
| make it so that it's affordable for even very small companies.
| sebringj wrote:
| Out of curiosity I saw what this product was about. It appears to
| be like a chatroom in the sense that its live but with an API or
| live application refresh where the programmer can write lines of
| code that immediately show app results. This is pretty cool but I
| don't know if its a real product other than live coding
| interviews or the most intense pressure cooker of your manager
| having you do the TPS reports right now. If coupled with GPT3,
| however, it might be perfect, as you could just speak what you
| want and then it can output python that then updates this.
| IanCal wrote:
| I think you're missing quite what it is.
|
| You can write very short amounts of python code and get a nice
| interactive webapp. It's aimed at, but not exclusively for,
| exploring data and results. Live reload/etc make development
| extremely fast.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| I suspected this comment was written by gpt3. Kinda surprised
| you're human....
| sebringj wrote:
| Probably at GPT6 because I would have to be convinced I was
| real with all the simulation qualia on top of that. Pretty
| convincing so far.
| cschmid wrote:
| Streamlit is used by data science/ML people to turn models into
| (usually internal) MVPs.
|
| Let's say you implemented your model in python, and want to
| show it off:
|
| With streamlit, you can simply take your python script, turn
| the variables you want to change and the plot/dataframes you
| want to output into streamlit objects. That takes about 5-10
| minutes, and then you can already serve your application. It's
| almost like it's no extra work.
| sebringj wrote:
| That makes sense. "MVP" use cases make perfect sense. But I
| suppose you could also make dynamic python that another app
| created just like HTML is the target response for many web
| apps. New possibilities. I will check this out more.
| randyzwitch wrote:
| > It appears to be like a chatroom in the sense that its live
| but with an API or live application refresh where the
| programmer can write lines of code that immediately show app
| results. This is pretty cool but I don't know if its a real
| product other than live coding interviews or the most intense
| pressure cooker of your manager having you do the TPS reports
| right now
|
| If that's what you're taking away, we need to improve our
| marketing copy!
|
| The point of Streamlit is to have a nimble way to create
| applications, where auto-refresh/hot-reload is part of the
| developer experience. But the goal of the overall project is to
| make interactive data apps available to the broad public, not
| just people who have front-end experience or a front-end
| developer working on their team.
| sebringj wrote:
| Right, good points. This does remind me of how Flutter dev
| experience is just by yourself except this is published as a
| product. It's slick cool and at the edge of what's possible.
| jeffo_rulez wrote:
| is it strange to anyone else how similar the logos for
| https://streamlit.io/ and https://getstream.io/ are?
| tvst wrote:
| There's actually a funny story here, and one day we'll tell it
| in more detail.
|
| TDLR: it's a coincidence / slightly obvious given our names. We
| discovered the similarity on the day we launched our logo, and
| it almost made us change our logo and/or company name XD
|
| We have since met the getstream.io folks and had a good laugh
| about it together.
| ignoramous wrote:
| See also: https://getdockup.com/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19314173
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