[HN Gopher] Show HN: Briefer - multiplayer notebooks with schedu...
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Show HN: Briefer - multiplayer notebooks with schedules, SQL, and
built-in LLMs
Hi HN! We're Lucas and Lucas from Briefer and we're building better
notebooks. Our notebooks are kind of a mix between Notion and
Jupyter with extra features, like the ability to schedule
notebooks, turn them into dashboards and apps, and write SQL
queries whose results turn into data frames automatically. We're
building better notebooks because we think they're a great idea
poorly executed - for three reasons. The first problem with
notebooks is that they're difficult to share. Non-technical people
don't want to download docker containers and install Python
libraries to see what the data team is doing. Then, the data team
takes screenshots of their work and pastes them somewhere else. The
issue with this approach is that the data gets stale, and the
output is not interactive, so it's difficult to get feedback and
iterate. The second problem with notebooks is that they get too
messy too quickly. One morning you have 10 blocks, and by the end
of the day you have 192, but only six of them are meant to be seen
by other people and the rest is just you jiu-jitsuing with the
data. Consequently, even if non-technical people could see your
work, they'd have a hard time figuring out what's happening. The
third problem with notebooks is that it takes too much work to do
simple things like when you want to query a database. In that case,
you need to have the database credentials in your machine, and you
have to write a bunch of wrapper code. Calling APIs, plotting
simple graphs, and adding interactive components is equally as
annoying. We're solving the sharing problem by bringing notebooks
to the cloud (so you can schedule them) and using CRDTs to manage
their state. Whenever you edit a Briefer notebook, we reconcile
that using Yjs, and then propagate it to everyone else who's
editing that notebook. Regarding compute instances, each workspace
gets its own, and we provision them on demand. By the way, we
manage the execution state of your blocks using Yjs too, which
makes it much more stable and responsive across all clients. When
you click "run", for example, we don't immediately send a request
to run the block. Instead, we change the block's state to
"execution-requested". Then, the observers in the back-end react to
the change and update the block's state with the results. In other
words, the front end and the server communicate with each other
through the notebook's state. One side updates the state, and the
other reacts. To solve the "messiness" issue, we've invested a lot
of time in designing clean notebooks and allowing you to organize
blocks in ways that make them more presentable. In Briefer, you can
group multiple blocks into tabs and decide which blocks appear in
the published version of your notebook. That way, you can hide all
that data wrangling and focus on results. We also know that a
vertical format is not always the best way to display results, so
you can use your notebook's outputs to build dashboards too. Last
but not least, we're reducing friction in simple tasks like
plotting graphs and querying databases. In Briefer, you can plot
graphs using a click-through interface, and if you need to plot
something more intricate like a Sankey chart there's also a built-
in AI assistant that you can prompt to generate code. When it comes
to queries, we turn their results into dataframes automatically,
and you can use SQL to query uploaded files too (we use DuckDB for
that). We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank
you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and
questions in the comments.
Author : lucasfcosta
Score : 55 points
Date : 2024-07-23 13:30 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (briefer.cloud)
(TXT) w3m dump (briefer.cloud)
| suchintan wrote:
| I've been using briefer for the past few weeks and have a few
| questions:
|
| 1. Do you intend Briefer to be a jupyter replacement or a
| metabase replacement?
|
| 2. Do you have any plans to open source briefer?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Hey Suchintan! Great to see you here - we're happy that you've
| been using Briefer!
|
| Regarding your questions:
|
| 1. Briefer is definitely a Jupyter replacement and it _can_ be
| a Metabase replacement. Most of our users with BI use cases
| start using Briefer for more advanced types of dashboards and
| analyses, and they eventually end up slowly replacing their
| traditional BI with Briefer.
|
| 2. That's indeed something that's crossed our minds before.
| We're not open-sourcing it right now though.
| trevoragilbert wrote:
| This looks very interesting. Congrats on the launch! I'm curious
| how you see it developing compared to an existing tool like Hex?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Hey Trevor, that's a great question!
|
| On a surface level, we're doing a lot of work on UX. We intend
| the UI to be more presentable and easier to navigate through so
| that technical users find it easier to use while non-technical
| users find it more approachable and can more easily find what
| they're looking for.
|
| In terms of capabilities:
|
| 1. We want to merge all data-related features in one place,
| including BI. That's why you can create and publish dashboards
| too. It's also why we've been putting a lot of effort into
| making the no-code visualizations flexible and powerful.
|
| 2. You'll eventually be able to connect your own computer to
| Briefer. That way, you can use your AWS/Azure/GCP credits and
| your own GPUs if you have already paid for them.
|
| 3. There will be a way for you to manage notebooks and
| dashboards as code if you want to. We love the idea of
| versioning your notebooks, internal data apps, and dashboards,
| but we think current tools can't do it well.
|
| There's also a huge change coming up in about 2 months. It'll
| make it really clear how we're different from Hex, but
| unfortunately I can't talk about that yet!
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Hope this isn't too OT but I'm very
| distracted by the 90s Mac finder chrome on your example GIFs.
| Consider cleaning things up (visually and semantically) by
| removing them!
| mosen wrote:
| I like it.
| iknownthing wrote:
| for some reason I absolutely love the name
| jedgardyson wrote:
| will give this a try for our analytics, looks v smooth
| nxobject wrote:
| Don't undersell yourselves - you might also be able to sell this
| as an online collaborative "next step" for non-technical orgs who
| build LOB trackers in Excel! (If I had a penny for every time
| someone here says "I wish we could have Microsoft Access but more
| convenient"...)
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| It's funny you say that - we had users who simply wanted to run
| queries and didn't have direct access to a database, so they
| just asked someone from the technical team to connect their DB
| to Briefer and then they started querying from there because
| it's more convenient.
|
| After a while they realized there were a bunch of other cool
| features and started engaging with those too.
| hkdobrev wrote:
| On pricing page for annual pricing, there's a dot in the free
| plan "Free." There's no dot anywhere on the plans including on
| the monthly "Free" plan. What does the dot give you if you "pay"
| annually on the free plan? :D
|
| https://briefer.cloud/pricing/
| hkdobrev wrote:
| Also, the "Get started" button on the free plan goes to book a
| call instead of signing up.
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Thanks for reporting these issues! I just fixed them.
| drittich wrote:
| Will there be the ability to call an API and parse the JSON
| (e.g., to flatten) to use as a data source?
| obilgic wrote:
| With built-in AI, we shouldn't be writing SQL queries directly
| right?
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