[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 : 241 points
Date : 2024-07-23 13:30 UTC (1 days 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?
| pmdfgy wrote:
| Nice explanation and execution. Looks super Pro ! Congrrats !
|
| One question : how do you manage database credentials ? That's a
| question I've had a lot working on my project so I'm pretty sure
| customers will have the same for you.
|
| Especially given the latest Snowflake security issues.
| fmeyer wrote:
| Great work Lucas;
|
| You're going in the right direction! for the near future, I
| suggest you to add a cli, connectors, simple symbolic calculation
| on notebooks (take some inspiration from calca
| http://calca.io/examples), offline support and fully encrypted
| namespaces.
|
| That will put you miles away from everyone else in the field :)
|
| You're probably busy with the launch, but you can contact me if
| you wanna discuss the list above,
|
| Abracos
| nacs wrote:
| The Python/code block support looks interesting.
|
| But Jupyter notebooks can run anywhere including local. Do you
| support that (via a local install or by relaying a connection to
| local python install)?
|
| Or would all Python code have to run on your cloud servers (and
| thus not have access to things like high-end GPUs and such)?
| mlajtos wrote:
| Can you tell me how it compares to Deepnote.com please?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Thanks for asking!
|
| The products are similar in the sense that both are cloud-based
| notebooks, but we have different approaches to building them.
|
| I answered a question about Hex below, and the general outline
| applies here. To summarize:
|
| 1. We want to go beyond just notebooks. We want to centralize
| all data tasks in Briefer, including traditional BI so we're
| building specific features for that, like dashboarding and
| everything that comes with it.
|
| 2. We'll enable people to use their own compute for the
| notebooks.
|
| 3. We want to allow people to manage notebooks, dashboards, and
| apps "as code" so they can version it whenever necessary.
|
| We unfortunately didn't finish items 2 and 3 yet because we've
| only started working on Briefer six months ago, but we're fast
| and we'll get there soon.
|
| Also, we're working on something new that will make the
| distinction clearer, but I can't talk about that yet.
| mrlinx wrote:
| For 2, is there something done already?
| Equiet wrote:
| Hey there, CEO of Deepnote here. It looks like we are
| thinking about this very similarly, as all 3 points are
| something that we are already doing or will be shipping in
| the coming weeks. Either way, good luck with Briefer and
| happy to chat about our learnings building all of these
| things.
| Lord_Zero wrote:
| Cool product! How have sales been?
|
| How do you do your AI? Is it just a local model?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| At this stage, we're putting a lot of effort into "selling" the
| (free) community tier because (1) that leads to great feedback
| and (2) the vast majority of paying customers come from the
| free tier anyway.
|
| We want the free tier to be so good it becomes the new notebook
| standard - and then we'll only charge for features that
| companies need, like Slack integrations or a large number of
| seats.
|
| Regarding AI, we currently go with GPT-4o by default, but you
| can change it on the settings panel. Currently, we have only
| enabled GPT-4o and Mistral though, but we want to add more -
| it's just not our priority right now because the OpenAI model
| is just incredibly good.
| RussellDussel wrote:
| This looks like it could be a really useful tool for us building
| internal query catalogues and dashboards.
|
| Does the dashboard feature support any dynamic field selectors
| (similar to "variables" in Grafana)?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Thanks for the comment!
|
| That's possible. For it to work you'd have to create a
| "dropdown block" and select the "dynamic" option in its
| settings. Then, you will be able to select a dataframe and the
| column from that dataframe you want to use as dropdown options.
|
| By the way, every query automatically becomes a dataframe so
| you can use either a query result's column or a raw Python
| dataframe.
|
| As a side note, I'm putting together detailed product
| documentation this week too and I'll make sure to include it
| there.
| entropie wrote:
| This looks really cool.
|
| Just minor bug; on /auth/signup the zebra background pattern is
| not on the entire page on my vertical display (1080x1920). You
| might want to fix this before release.
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Thanks for reporting this issue. I'll look into that right now.
| nlh wrote:
| Looks amazing - congrats on the launch!
|
| Would you consider Briefer to be a competitor to
| https://count.co/ ?
|
| (Certainly, if you do, your pricing is a helluva lot more
| appealing...)
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Thanks for the positive feedback.
|
| It's not as much of a direct competitor because Count's
| approach seems more like "Miro for Data" while ours is more
| like "Notion for Data".
|
| Still, I do think people could end up comparing both our tool
| and theirs when evaluating a few types use cases.
| ckluis wrote:
| If that is the case, have you considered adding tables or a
| sql-engine directly to the product.
|
| For some replace LoB use cases just storing the data directly
| and letting users query it would be an advantage.
| memset wrote:
| Awesome!
|
| Question: I am in charge of financials for our condo building.
| The other people in charge are older than me and only know excel.
| How do you suggest I think about wanting to use better tools to
| present analysis while also making sure that everyone else can
| understand the work and modify?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Hey Jay, thanks for the question!
|
| In Briefer you can hide the blocks you don't want others to
| see, like the ones in which you're just manipulating data.
| Instead, you can show only the results so that your analysis is
| really easy to understand.
|
| You can also display your analyses as dashboards or build small
| data apps with inputs and dropdowns for them to use.
|
| Still, I wouldn't recommend completely non-technical users to
| _create_ content within Briefer - only to read it and interact
| with the apps /dashboards there.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| I teach a lot of Python and data science (pandas, Polars, scikit
| learn, XGBoost...) in Jupyter.
|
| (I also teach a bunch of software engineering best practices to
| folks who claim they don't want to be "software engineers".)
|
| My experience is that with training, many of these issues go
| away. Just saw this again firsthand at a client last week.
|
| My current take is that many focus on making the code newbie
| friendly. I think they should level up and start writing code for
| a professional audience, using software techniques that a
| professional would use. Newbies won't like this code.
|
| I get a lot of flak on social when I post this from naysayers,
| but the overwhelming response from my students and those who have
| read my books indicates there might be something to this.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Btw, when I click the Amazon link in your bio it goes here:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/hapi-js-Action-Matt-Harrison-ebook/dp...
|
| And it's some random kindle book about some JavaScript library
| I never heard of.
|
| But I'm pretty sure you are the Matt Harrison I follow on
| twitter:
|
| https://x.com/__mharrison__
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| I strongly agree with your comment. I'm a software engineer and
| I was surprised to find out about the practices of some data
| teams.
|
| I do believe we should bring software best practices to the
| data world, not only regarding code design but regarding
| infrastructure and tooling too (like versioning everything).
|
| Still, I get where they're coming from. A software engineer
| would also be frustrated if they had to learn everything a data
| scientist knows (probably even more).
|
| I think the tooling itself can solve this issue by encouraging
| best practices though.
| apwheele wrote:
| I have a question I ask people I interview now for data science
| jobs -- can you run a python hello world from the command line?
| A non-trivial number of people who say they have multiple years
| of data science + python experience do not know how to do this!
|
| People need to know how to write functions to write
| professional software, not just put a soup together of notebook
| cells.
|
| Disagree with Matt even that they won't like this code -- it is
| just learning basic stuff like file structure and python
| environments, see how I approach it in the first two chapters
| running stuff from REPL here https://crimede-
| coder.com/blogposts/2023/EarlyReleasePython.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| The people I train can certainly use the command line to run
| Python, create virtual environments, and install packages.
| (But many of them have never used it previously.)
| pil0u wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch, the product looks very appealing.
|
| Would you consider an option for self-hosting?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| I really appreciate the positive feedback, I'm glad you like
| the launch.
|
| Regarding self-hosting: Yes, we have discussed that with other
| potential customers.
|
| If you're interested in a self-hosted offering, please reach
| out to me at lucas.costa [at] briefer [dot] cloud and I'll help
| you out there and walk you through what that would look like.
| mrbirddev wrote:
| From my own startup & corporate experience,
|
| 1. product managers will try to make things dead easy, by setting
| up simple excel formulas & charts. Taking screenshots etc
|
| 2. data engineers will do more technical but opensourced
| solutions like superset & dbt
|
| 3. corporates usually tends to build the end UI themselves. I
| remember sth that (maybe?) Pinterest opensourced.
|
| I deeply understand how hard it is to build a notebook like this.
| And there are indeed some problems lying in the collaboration and
| UX.
|
| It's just so hard to propose those features, given the problem is
| usually the data itself and a highly competitive market. Popsql
| does not thrive as I remembered.
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| The data itself is indeed a problem. More than that, I'd add
| that the very definition of what's being measured or calculated
| is an even bigger problem (i.e. what's an _active_ user?)
|
| Still, I think that we can get to a place where everyone uses
| the same tool to collaborate on data matters, like a "Retool
| for data/BI". At a high-level, that's the direction we're
| going, and we're starting with notebooks and dashboards.
| hisownfoot wrote:
| Same as Deepnote?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Thanks for asking. I answered that question below.
|
| You can see the response here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055495
| apwell23 wrote:
| > The first problem with notebooks is that they're difficult to
| share.
|
| I share github links to my notebooks with my PMs
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Is your PM technical?
| apwell23 wrote:
| some of them are. But I have markdown and graphs in my
| notebook that they read.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| I think he specifically mentions non technical folks.
| apwell23 wrote:
| yeah github renders markdown, graphs and data tables in
| notebooks which non technical PMs read.
| agoose77 wrote:
| See also https://notebooksharing.space/
| oknoa wrote:
| dark mode?
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| That's a feature request we get every now and then. It's coming
| soon!
|
| I haven't yet had time to implement it because I was working on
| the core pieces of functionality, but as a dark mode user I
| want to get to that soon.
| oknoa wrote:
| that's great. enjoying the ux so far.
| cess11 wrote:
| Will you be offering a Schrems II compatible alternative?
|
| I'll stick to Livebook for the most part but know some companies
| that might be interested.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| Having built workflows myself like this, using a patchwork DAG of
| notebooks and cron jobs and state saving, I'm really glad someone
| is tackling the problem holistically!
| jcgr wrote:
| Parabens!! Go Briefer
| oknoa wrote:
| enjoying it! but can't figure out how to share dashboards
| (publicly)?
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