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Launch HN: Deepnote (YC S19) – A better data science notebook

316 pointsby Equietover 4 years ago
Hello HN,<p>I&#x27;m Jakub and I&#x27;m the founder of Deepnote (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepnote.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deepnote.com&#x2F;</a>). We&#x27;re building a better data science notebook.<p>As an engineer, I spent most of my time working on developer tools, building IDEs, and studying human-computer interaction. I helped build a couple of startups, I built tools for JavaScript development, and worked on Firefox DevTools. But once I started to work with data scientists, all those code editors and IDEs that I knew as a software engineer suddenly stopped being the right tool for the job. Notebooks were.<p>Notebooks as we know them today have many pain points (versioning, reproducibility, collaboration). They don&#x27;t work well with other tools. They don&#x27;t exactly encourage best practices. But none of these are fundamental flaws of the notebook paradigm. They are signs of a new computational medium. Much like spreadsheets in the 1980s.<p>Two years ago, my co-founders and I started to think about a better data science notebook. Deepnote is built on top of the Jupyter ecosystem. We are using the same format, and we intend to remain fully compatible in both directions. But to solve the above problems, we&#x27;ve introduced significant changes.<p>First, we made collaboration a first-class citizen. To allow for this, Deepnote runs in the cloud by default. Every Deepnote notebook is easily shareable (like Google Docs) and easy to understand even by non-technical users.<p>Second, we completely redesigned the interface to encourage best practices, write clean code, define dependencies, and create reproducible notebooks. We also built a really good autocomplete system, and added a variable explorer.<p>Third, we made Deepnote easy to integrate with other services. We didn&#x27;t want to build another data science platform where people work with an iframed notebook. We want to build an amazing notebook that plays well with other services, databases, ML platforms, and the Jupyter ecosystem.<p><i></i>Check out a 2-min demo here:<i></i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;b7e05ecca78047c2a2f687d77be8ecea" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;b7e05ecca78047c2a2f687d77be8ecea</a><p>Building a new computational medium is hard. It takes time. Today, we&#x27;re launching a public beta of Deepnote. Not everything works yet. Some pieces are missing. But we also have a lot in store, including versioning, code reviews, visualizations. We still have a lot to learn too, so I&#x27;d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

33 comments

setgreeover 4 years ago
This looks great, thanks for sharing! I just signed up.<p>My main question is how&#x2F;if DeepNote addresses issues of reproducibility. Is this a priority for your team? You mention it a few times in your post here, but there is not so much in the docs -- I looked it up in and got just to this:<p>&gt; Even though the Custom environment cache is implemented using Docker images, it doesn&#x27;t primarily serve the reproducibility problem. The aim of the feature is to significantly speed up the start time of your projects. In other words, you should consider it to be only a cache at this point.<p>My experience with Notebooks suggests that the main (computational) reproducibility challenges were<p>A) &#x27;hidden state&#x27; information (e.g. cells executed out of order, variables changed and then reverted but not re-run); and<p>B) no clear infrastructure for documenting&#x2F;caching dependencies (I see you have a terminal option, and the web-based access should address some of this, but something like &#x27;conda install environment.yml` doesn&#x27;t seem possible out of the box.)<p>I would understand if these issues are not priorities for you, I don&#x27;t think most data science projects <i>need</i> to be run in the far future and most teams can informally sync their dependencies.<p>If reproducibility is a core priority, do you plan to write something about DN serves that purpose? I&#x27;d be glad to take a close look if you do (I have written&#x2F;worked a fair bit on this in the past).
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marapuruover 4 years ago
Very nice. As a UX person who recently got into data science this is a breath of fresh air compared to the traditional jupyter notebooks. Website looks really fresh and I love the colors and font usage. Video could be slightly shorter to really show me the highlights and maybe show a bit more of the realtime collab (althought the gif below shows it well).<p>One thing that annoyed me a bit is that I could only register with github or google. Why can&#x27;t I just create an account directly with your service?
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abalajiover 4 years ago
I&#x27;m playing around with it right now and right off the bat, I can say that load times are significantly faster than something like mybinder (maybe due to scale or caching?)<p>Overall this seems pretty cool! The realtime editing seems to be killer, google collab is close but not as good from my initial testing. Some of the python package integrations may be able to be replicated with open source tools (e.g. table visualization and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;quantopian&#x2F;qgrid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;quantopian&#x2F;qgrid</a>)<p>My big question comes down to vendor lock in. What&#x27;s the vision here for compatibility with the Jupyter eco-system in the long haul? (e.g. do we see Deepnote features contributed back to Jupyter)
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the21stover 4 years ago
Deepnote team member here. It took a lot of effort to get to where we are right now – Deepnote is one of the most complex products I worked on. If you have any questions, engineering, product or otherwise, ask away!
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amirathiover 4 years ago
&gt; Notebooks as we know them today have many pain points (versioning, reproducibility, collaboration)<p>Absolutely. We&#x27;re solving a small part of this by making notebooks play nicely with GitHub (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewnb.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reviewnb.com</a>). Code reviews &amp; collaboration for Jupyter Notebooks, essentially.<p>Happy to see more products taking a stab at this problem. I&#x27;d be curious to know how you implement version control (git or something else) &amp; what kind of experiences does that translate to for the user. Congrats on the launch!
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dfsegoatover 4 years ago
This looks great!<p>I&#x27;d be curious to see a detailed feature comparison between this and Google Colab &#x2F; Colab pro [1,2]? I think others might find this useful as well.<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;notebooks&#x2F;intro.ipynb#recent=true" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;notebooks&#x2F;intro.ipynb#rece...</a><p>2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;signup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;signup</a>
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WClayFergusonover 4 years ago
Hey Jacob, check out this platform:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quanta.wiki" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quanta.wiki</a><p>A &quot;collaborative notebook&quot; would be one very good way to describe what Quanta is as well. I&#x27;m the developer of it, by the way.
tpetryover 4 years ago
A notebook service without any gpu machines is a kind of very strange decision. Whats your target audience with this service? As any machine learning workload would practically take forever.
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taigi100over 4 years ago
Been using this for 1-2 weeks now. Compared it with pretty much all the other options I found out there. The experience it&#x27;s just so much better.<p>I fully recommend you try it - it&#x27;s awesome.<p>All that&#x27;s left which I want are dark mode mainly and maybe a cheaper alternative to more powerful GPU &#x2F; something along those line. Tho, with the long-running tasks I don&#x27;t really mind.<p>Great job and congrats on launching!
ianbickingover 4 years ago
Watching your video, I see a bit of a start with errors and inspection, but there&#x27;s SO much more you can do there.<p>I no longer know what the best implementations of web-based error handling are, but this 15 year old(!) approach still seems to beat the state of the art in notebooks: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cdent&#x2F;paste&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;paste&#x2F;exceptions&#x2F;errormiddleware.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cdent&#x2F;paste&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;paste&#x2F;exceptions&#x2F;...</a><p>You have a rich interface, showing textual tracebacks is unnecessary!<p>I&#x27;d do inspectable values as well (not just relying on __repr__, but making any top-level object interactively inspectable), but that&#x27;s more involved. But probably worth it!
Reebzover 4 years ago
Congratulations on the launch! Do you see Gradient (paperspace) as a competitor, how do you compare?
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beisnerover 4 years ago
Looks interesting, there are definitely a lot of pain points when using the Jupiter notebooks for more complex explanation. One thing I would love to see you in a Jupiter notebook, which some of the various deep learning experimentation start ups (wandb, etc) have is a local visual sink for time series data. For instance it would be great to be able to dynamically plot (maybe in the left or right margin of the window) loss over time for multiple runs, maybe with some dynamic ability to group graph.<p>I could envision hooking up the outputs of multiple executions of the same (or different) notebooks to these visualizations.<p>You can kinda get something like this with matplotlib or plotly but it has always felt kinda missing something.
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threatofrainover 4 years ago
Deepnote + Racket kernel + docker:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dkvasnickajr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1321901316411711490?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dkvasnickajr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1321901316411711490?...</a>
rsweeney21over 4 years ago
Kind of a random question: why wait so long to do your launch HN? It looks like you&#x27;ve had a working product for quite a while now.<p>When I see a launch HN from over a YC batch over a year ago I assume there was a pivot or they had trouble getting traction. Doesn&#x27;t seem like that happened in your cases and it might not happen in most cases, which is why I&#x27;m asking.<p>Either way, looks like an awesome product. I sent it over to the Data Science team at my company and they were pretty impressed.
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chrisaycockover 4 years ago
The Jupyter hosting space is getting crowed. Even with collaboration and versioning, there&#x27;s Saturn Cloud and CoCalc. How does Deepnote plan on differentiating?
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joeboover 4 years ago
Looks good. We use CoCalc for similar collaboration benefits. There is a self-hosted option which was important to us. CoCalc has been a game changer as we&#x27;ve all moved remote. Once Deepnote adds the self-hosted &#x2F; cloud option (I see it coming soon) we&#x27;ll check it out.
epitetonover 4 years ago
Saw this back when it started vs today, amazing job! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DeepnoteHQ&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315375717526507522&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DeepnoteHQ&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315375717526507522&#x2F;ph...</a>
wokoover 4 years ago
As a Colab user, I have got to admit that I am impressed. I have used your website today to give it a try, and the interface is responsive (and thus somewhat addictive).<p>I use GPU on Colab, so I will stick to Colab for now, but I think I will hop on Deepnote from time to time.
bravuraover 4 years ago
Once you add GPU support, how do you differentiate with respect to paperspace and floydhub?
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kndjcktover 4 years ago
This looks great. We’re very much fed up with collaborating on Jupyter notebooks. Sadly my team can’t use Deepnote yet because all our datastores are behind VPN. Is there a future where we could run Deepnote on our own AWS instances?
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29athrowawayover 4 years ago
Please add corgi mode and kitty mode.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;googlecolab&#x2F;status&#x2F;1189938190452285442" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;googlecolab&#x2F;status&#x2F;11899381904522...</a>
tecoholicover 4 years ago
A refreshing upgrade for someone used to Jupyter Notebooks. I just watched the video. The UI is the first thing that strikes me. I would sign love to use it just for the right side context menu that pops up for every cell.
noisy_boyover 4 years ago
Tangential question: is there any language or domain agnostic notebook solution that is also open source? Something that allows the language to be configured and basically concentrates on notebook side of things?
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zopperover 4 years ago
Loving Deepnote so far. Being able to seamlessly collaborate with others during the pandemic is a lifesaver!<p>It would be great if you had automatic versioning similar to Google Docs, using Git with notebooks is a nightmare.
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fghorowover 4 years ago
I&#x27;ve got my Jupyter computational environment running on a high-end workstation on my LAN. Is there some way to connect your service to my workstation for real-time collab with colleagues?
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jstyover 4 years ago
Quick FYI - clicking the NavBar&#x27;s &quot;pricing&quot; link on the &quot;about&quot; page links to &quot;&#x2F;about#pricing&quot; rather than &quot;&#x2F;#pricing&quot;
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loehnsbergover 4 years ago
This looks very promising! Great work and I’d love to give it a try. While I do use Python, I also use Scala and R kernels. Does or will Deepnote support other kernels?
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franklampardover 4 years ago
I’ve been using it. The collaboration aspect is much better than Colab
desmapover 4 years ago
No GPUs with tensor cores?
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ylemover 4 years ago
Cool! How does this compare with polynote and Gigantum?
lowdanieover 4 years ago
Looks very useful!
prashpover 4 years ago
How does debugging work in Deepnote vs Jupyter?
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jensideanover 4 years ago
Good job!