Hacker News: mbostock

New comment by mbostock in "Shantell Sans (2023)"

mbostock — Sun, 31 May 2026 03:24:53 +0000

tldraw uses this font. It’s a great fit for emulating hand-written notes on a whiteboard; feels human.

New comment by mbostock in "How to make a Smith chart"

mbostock — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 21:31:16 +0000

I made an interactive implementation here: https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/smith-chart

Observable Notebooks Data Loaders

mbostock — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 17:04:29 +0000

Article URL: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/data-loaders

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45200642

Points: 79

# Comments: 20

New comment by mbostock in "Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview"

mbostock — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 18:01:53 +0000

Thank you. I don’t want to commit to a public timeline on the web editor yet, but rest assured it is a top priority, and we also value the convenience of a web editor, instant collaboration, and community!

New comment by mbostock in "Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview"

mbostock — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:33:10 +0000

We’re interested in adding a TypeScript cell mode, probably first with type stripping rather than validating types. I was hoping for a pure JavaScript implementation; maybe we’ll try https://github.com/bloomberg/ts-blank-space? I’ve also been looking at https://github.com/val-town/codemirror-ts for the editor, but it’s a lot of machinery.

Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

mbostock — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:44:00 +0000

Article URL: https://observablehq.com/notebook-kit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44724068

Points: 235

# Comments: 57

New comment by mbostock in "Observable Framework 1.9"

mbostock — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 11:44:26 +0000

Thanks for the feedback. We implemented the transform to strip TypeScript annotations (using esbuild)…

https://github.com/observablehq/framework/pull/129

but this approach stalled because it doesn’t implement validation of TypeScript: the TypeScript annotations are simply ignored. I felt this defeats the point of using TypeScript. We probably need to use tsc instead of esbuild to get type checking. Hints welcome!

New comment by mbostock in "Observable Framework 1.9"

mbostock — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 11:41:04 +0000

Currently the only examples are here: https://observablehq.com/framework/jsx

Observable Framework 1.9

mbostock — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 12:53:07 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/observablehq/framework/releases/tag/v1.9.0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40680446

Points: 29

# Comments: 5

New comment by mbostock in "D3 in Depth"

mbostock — Thu, 16 May 2024 16:47:45 +0000

In what way are these free open-source tools “locked-in” to Observable? Observable Plot is a vanilla JavaScript library that is released under the ISC license and can be used with any style of web development (e.g., React, Svelte, whatever). And likewise Observable Framework is released under the ISC license and you’re able to self-host projects anywhere and develop locally?

New comment by mbostock in "A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection"

mbostock — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 16:45:09 +0000

Here’s the D3 implementation (which is just an interrupted azimuthal equidistant projection):

https://observablehq.com/@d3/azimuthal-equidistant-hemispher...

New comment by mbostock in "Interesting ideas in Observable Framework"

mbostock — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:07:46 +0000

Thanks for the feedback. We have a PR open to make it easier to register new interpreters (without needing to fallback to .sh or .exe); it’ll let you specify the interpreter associated with a given file extension (e.g., .kts for Kotlin). https://github.com/observablehq/framework/pull/935

As for inputs-driving-data-loaders, that does go against the grain a bit since Framework favors static data snapshots so that the built site is self-contained and performant. But a technique that works well is to generate Parquet files in data loaders representing the superset of data that you want to interact with, and then using DuckDB/SQL in the client to extract the subset you want to visualize. This tends to perform well, though obviously it’s dependent on the size of the superset you want to interact with.

Observable Framework 1.1

mbostock — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 20:17:38 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/observablehq/framework/releases/tag/v1.1.0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39608691

Points: 20

# Comments: 2

New comment by mbostock in "Interesting ideas in Observable Framework"

mbostock — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 13:45:10 +0000

You can write ```mermaid run=false for that.

New comment by mbostock in "Interesting ideas in Observable Framework"

mbostock — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 06:25:04 +0000

We do support it. (And use it!) Please see: https://observablehq.com/framework/lib/arrow#apache-parquet

New comment by mbostock in "Interesting ideas in Observable Framework"

mbostock — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 06:24:07 +0000

We’re planning to allow changing the default options for blocks (either per-page in front matter or across an entire project using the project config); you could then make `js run=false` the default and `js run` to opt-in to live code as you wish. But we chose to make live code the default since that’s our primary use case.

New comment by mbostock in "How to optimally trap points in high-dimensional spaces inside ellipsoids"

mbostock — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:19:22 +0000

If you find this interesting, you might enjoy my write up of the Matoušek-Sharir-Welzl (MSW) algorithm used by D3’s circle-packing layout.

https://observablehq.com/@d3/d3-packenclose

I still haven’t quite figured out how to make D3’s implementation robust, though. Volodymyr Agafonkin’s robust-predicated would probably help… https://github.com/mourner/robust-predicates

New comment by mbostock in "Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps"

mbostock — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:15:12 +0000

That “More from Observable creators” is just a standard footer we put across the site for signed-out users to showcase community content across Observable. It’s not part of the notebook. You can ignore everything below the “Appendix”.

New comment by mbostock in "Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps"

mbostock — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:12:33 +0000

See Leland Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics. He describes the difference between a chart typology (a fixed set of chart types with a fixed set of configuration options) and a grammar of graphics (a set of orthogonal primitives that can be composed in arbitrary ways).

New comment by mbostock in "Observable 2.0, a static site generator for data apps"

mbostock — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 15:07:25 +0000

If you’re developing the models locally, perhaps Framework’s preview server could work: it watches local files and automatically pushes updates to the browser when files change. This enables reactive updates for data loaders, but also works with static files. So you could visualize the models as they are being generated — meaning as some external process writes local files.

But in general the use case we’re targeting is a shared data app, dashboard, or report. Not something just for you individually, or something ephemeral (that you look at in real-time during training). For example, Framework would work well for sharing a report or dashboard evaluating the performance of the latest models you’ve built with your team.