thingsilearned

Great article! This is exactly the use case we created dbt Charts for. If you're thinking of making a system like this, do consider us for your Chartifact format. You can host it locally, in streamlit, or with our provided hosting that adds some nice UI, agents, permissions, Claude connectors, etc. We've also got some Looker and other tool migrators :).

https://dbtcharts.com

Really well put. I hope this article can finally put to bed this very frustrating dismissal.

Many debates about AI are complicated and hard to resolve, but this one isn’t: all of these stories are clearly false. Some evidence:

The AI experts who aren’t affiliated with big companies are just as concerned as the ones who are.

The AI company leaders giving these warnings were giving the exact same warnings before they had AI companies - and in many cases, before they worked in the industry, or before the industry existed.

If these corporate plots were real, they would be incredibly dumb.

We should point blumify also at all HN commenters, and I'd expect this to be an opinion that'd change in the next few years :)

re: interactivity

We already have variables and links (which work with variables)[1]. Variables create interactive menus that update urls, queries and charts. If you have a variable `region` and you set it the url will add a get param ?region=<value>

Each chart also has a basic `link:` property can use to link to the existing or other urls with the variables set. For example

type: bar x: revenue y: region link: '?region={{ region }}'

The result is a big range of flexibility, for example [2] here's an example of Conways Game of Life inside of dbt Charts.

[1] variables example - https://play.dbtcharts.com/?example=variables%2Fall-input-ty.... [2] Conways game of life - https://play.dbtcharts.com/?example=variables%2Fgame-of-life...

Oh to be clear

> dct validate <file.yml>

Or any of the other commands that read the file will quickly fail with any syntax or SQL issues. It’s not just an open schema.

Yup! Big plans for deep semantic layer interaction

Thank you Eoin!

Exactly and that's why dbt Charts is a spec in YAML vs a python library. It ensures that the logic stays in SQL where its easy to test and trace.

Fair hit on "language". I keep forgetting YAML stands for "YAML Ain't Markup Language". What we built is a declarative spec written in YAML, and that's deliberate. Think of it as HTML for boards rather than a programming language. The tradeoff is readability and structure versus flexibility.

That lack of flexibility is actually a feature for one of the bigger problems we're solving: lineage, or knowing where a number came from. If the chart layer can't transform data, the logic stays in SQL, where you can version, test and audit it.

It's also a choice about who this is for. The data community already works in SQL, Jinja and YAML every day, so there's no new language to learn.

I've worked in data for 15 years and I've never heard this argument. I love it :)!

Who knows, with AI this may be the future. Visualizations were created to help us understand data. Florence Nightingale published them "to affect thro' the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears."

Often a formula better represents a situation. But I'm not sure how much impact they'd have in spreading that understanding outside of a formula-minded audience.

So this is a fairly domain specific (dashboards) spec and we intentionally avoid getting too generic.

The raw HTML/SVG or base libraries approach may well win out, but it does make it quite hard or impossible for humans to follow along and verify for instance where the numbers on a chart came from.

I think in a future where AI's doing all that verifying (or we just trust it), the AI might still prefer to use a DSL like ours because the abstraction maintains consistency, lowers maintenance, and saves a lot of tokens.

But the most helpful bits of a structured DSL are for sure still for humans. The structured format ensures things are readable and testable. Ours also enables a generative UI, which for now at least is still a much faster way to make visual edits while working with an AI, vs always through it.

Yup, that's exactly the idea.

Hi HN, I'm Dave the founder of Chartio (YC'10 now Atlassian Analytics), announcing today dbt Charts, an open source YAML dialect and tool for declaring and rendering dashboards.

When making dashboards with claude or other agents, a lot of free-form artifacts are created that makes it hard to audit and scale. dbt Charts is a simple YAML dialect that declares and renders a chart (think markdown but for dashboards). Along with dbt its Apache 2.0 and launched today.

We hope this language + AI help make the BI space more open with dashboards as concise auditable code. Would love any thoughts and feedback.

What's your setup for using voice with the agents and for handling your inbox zero? OpenClaw?

Yeah, my use case would have required a heavy node or playwright import to convert the SVGs to other formats or show them correctly outside of browsers. This keeps it all SVG and it looks and feels good and lighter.

I love SVG! Recently I needed to render markdown in SVG and found no library existed for that yet so I released one:

github: https://github.com/davefowler/markdown-svg playground: https://markdown-svg-production.up.railway.app

I love that the recipe example is still being used as one of the main promising use cases for computers and now AGI. One day hopefully computers will solve that pressing problem...

Yeah, isn't the main user of those tools non-developers? It's not that developers are getting lazy, it's that people who aren't developers also have technical needs (and some chops).

I've used a similar smart outlet on a timer to just shut my wifi off at 9pm. I then put an alarm on my computer to give me a 15 minute wrap-up warning.

I liked one-sec but now prefer https://www.getclearspace.com

I recently released suggestion-mode functionality for prosemirror

https://github.com/davefowler/prosemirror-suggestion-mode

and now I'm building it into my reading and note taking app for a better interaction of AI giving assisted edits, most similar to the Patchwork project from ink and switch https://www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/notebook/07/

companion or replacement?

Did this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like this?

Regulating is very hard at the software level but not hard at the hardware level. The US and allies control all major chip manufacturing. Open AI and others have done work showing that regulating compute should be significantly easier to do than other regulations we've done such as nuclear https://www.cser.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Computing-Power-a...

Stargate = Skynet?

@malcomgreaves I'm not sure you caught the intended target of @cle's comment. I believe he was talking about your comment being the thing he thought may be intentionally ironic, not PG's essay.

One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"

And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.

I try to get around with just an apple watch. The most frustrating part is needing (or worrying I'll need) to take an uber or a lyft (my main modes of transport). They discontinued their watch apps and their api's are very locked down.

I've tried this several times too and still do phone less days quite often thanks to the watch, but my big obstacle has been the lack of Uber/Lyft which I use instead of having a car. They used to have those apps on the watch but unfortunately they don't.

If I could use Uber/Lyft on the watch I would mostly leave my phone on the charger.

Perhaps more importantly than a mental model for thinking about this you might need the right mental state. You're tired and not seeing a path forward. That leads to burnout fast and isn't a great space to make big decisions from.

I'd talk to your co-founder and start by taking some time off. I bet for the past 3 years of grinding on the startup you haven't done a good job with vacations. If you went and fully unplugged for a month (or more) you might be in a place for a better perspective.

You might feel like you can't get away - that you're too essential to some work right now - but in my experience a top role of co-founders is to keep the passion and vision strong. Where you sound like you're at mentally you may be doing more team harm than good and your co-founder may be surprisingly supportive of you taking some time to get rest.

For those of you in the Bay Area there’s a great Kintsugi workshop that’s run out of the SF zen center almost weekly https://stonegoldcrafts.com/

I got into Kintsugi when my toilet needed repair. It’s a rewarding craft https://thingsilearned.com/things/my-kintsugi-toilet/