We do not support running notebooks locally right now, but offline access is coming soon.
With regards to running code on high-end GPUs: currently, we manually allocate GPUs to our customers when they need that. Still, we do want to eventually allow people to connect to their cloud providers to spin-up compute instances there.
We do a lot of things to keep the credentials safe that go beyond just putting everything behind a VPN and setting pods' SECCOMP profiles. That obviously includes encrypting credentials and putting in place tight access controls both to the credentials themselves and the encryption keys.
Also, even though we're not SOC2 compliant (yet) we do run pen tests.
I must have missed that feature. I don't see it under Data Source or Integrations. Can you point me to it? Use case is mostly call an API and show one or more property values from the JSON object that comes back, or use it as a tabular data source.
Edit: Maybe I'm misunderstanding the UI and this is something you would do directly through Python?
That’s correct - it’s something you should do in Python.
To pull data from the API you can use the requests package which is already within your Python environment.
If you have sensitive API keys you can add them to your environment variables list and then read them with Python too so they’re not apparent in the code.
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.
In these cases it’s usually an operations-related team who is able to write queries just fine, but they don’t want to use a terminal with PSQL or have creds spread around in their own machines.
The AI also helps folks do queries without having to explore the schema for a while.
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.
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!
Capital moves faster than meat space. To defend the human (affordable housing), you have to regulate. The whole "just build more, I want my AirBnB" argument boggles the mind considering the physical system constraints in play. Easier to just ban AirBnB.
It would make sense to increase density around existing rail infrastructure. Barcelona has 7700 km2 of space, that's a lot. They have only 750 persons per km2 on average. Especially the outskirts of the province have really bad density. For example, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada has only 660 inhabitants per km^2 and it is only 3 km from the railway station, 80 min from the Sants station. That density is worse than Phoenix, Arizona, which has 1198/km2. So there is lots of available space.
> Note that these numbers are of the Province of Barcelona. I don't know why you'd restrain yourself to the city proper.
The article, submission and discussions are about Barcelona city, not some far off town like Sant Joan de Vilatorrada (population: ~10k). No one who lives there would say they live in Barcelona, at most they'd say Manresa as that's the closest city.
But yes, if you're willing to live in the Catalan country-side, then of course Barcelona doesn't suffer from the density for you, but it's not a solution for us who live in Barcelona city.
Barcelona city proper is in a kind of geographical bowl. Look at it on a terrain map, you can see why the city is dense. It's one of the reasons I really like Barcelona, the forced density of the geography increases the amount and quality of services (especially food!) available.
Sant Joan de Vilatorrada is nowhere near Barcelona city, it's 15 hours walk away.
That being said, in the US you can and should absolutely should build more, and basically get rid of most zoning regulations. You'd have a hard time finding anything as touristic and dense as Barcelona in the US.
I argue AirBnB should be banned anywhere building cannot be done at a rate which ensures affordable housing can exist for locals. Whether that is due to construction labor shortages, density, zoning, whatever, it does not matter. AirBnB can exist where there is surplus housing capacity, but should be banned anywhere else.
Locals get votes, tourists and AirBnB do not. The harm of not being able to afford housing is far worse than harm incurred by not being able to book a vacation rental you prefer.
Hotels go through an approval process to be built, and are regulated (where as AirBnB exists to skirt lodging regulation). Hotels are not competing against residential housing, but AirBnB is.
Outside of downtown areas in the biggest cities in the US, it is very unlikely that a hotel is built in an area that people would want to build residential housing.
Normally hotels are built near either business or tourist areas. Very few people want their residences in the suburban office park areas. Tourist areas tend to be older areas that have strong restrictions on new development--hotels there have to go through long permitting processes.
Well look at a map of Barcelona. Hotels are in the middle of residential areas throughout the city. Not sure what the permitting process has to do with any of this. Hotels take up land. Land that could be used for residential housing. Permitting can be changed by law (same as banning AirBnbs).
No one is suggesting getting rid of industrial zoning. "getting rid of zoning" for the vast majority of people saying it means removing density restrictions and mixed use (business + residential) restrictions.
I lived a few miles away from the Texas City plant, growing up. A good, stiff, wind, and a penchant for rhinoviruses can solve a lot of chemical-plant-related issues.
Except there don’t appear to be anywhere near enough airbnbs to put a dent in the rent increase. I’m not saying it won’t do anything; I’m just saying it won’t do much. If you want to lower rents, you’re going to need to find a place to build, and if you can’t find any place, then prices will continue to go up and who will you find to scape goat then?
It doesn’t have to do much, it just has to show some net benefit considering the cost to ban is low. Locals receive the consumer excess through reduced housing costs that would’ve otherwise been real estate investor and AirBnB short term rental profits.
The problem is that residents leave entire areas of the city since they become empty. Foot traffic drops, local shops close - a non ending cycle of death.
In Melbourne/Victoria, Australia, from 2025 they’re applying a government levy on vacation rentals and using it to fund new public and affordable housing projects [1].
They’ve also added a land tax on second homes to disincentivize hoarding of property (though this has had some perverse effects, notably, reducing long-term rental stock and moving into the owner-occupier segment).
It’s too early to evaluate outcomes, but this general approach seems more sensible than an outright ban. Tax the activity to reduce it somewhat whilst generating state revenue to fund programs to mitigate the negative effects.
Good idea: I was wondering if the AirBnB license prices in Barcelona could be made more expensive to fund social housing projects from it (no idea how much they are right now in €/year/m²).
You need to compare against the alternative, not just look at whether or not prices reduce YoY.
Objectively, this policy should be good for what it purports to do: reduce housing prices for permanent residents. This policy actually impacts both supply, forcing these 10k units to either languish unproductive or return to market as rental units or for sale, and demand, reducing sales demand for conversion to short term rentals.
Now, will this actually make a huge difference? Probably not. It’s only 10k units at most that return to the market in a city of 1.6M that likely has a lot of demand.
> I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply
Demand for tourist housing is probably a bit more elastic than for residential housing, so it'll probably help a bit, but in general, I agree that growing the pie is better than bitter fights over how to cut the pie up.
Elasticity of demand is the elephant in the room for build-more-housing advocates. Let's say NYC's mayor rubbed a genie's lamp and wished to double the city's housing supply overnight. Yes, rental and real estate prices would crash through the floor due to the glut of supply. But then millions of people would move to the city and buy up all that supply.
This would rapidly double the population of the city which would cause tons of businesses to move there to hire everyone and then commercial real estate would skyrocket. At the end of the day, the city would be twice as large and more overcrowded than ever. Sure, they'd be more efficient in terms of infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, transit) but rents would skyrocket to capture that extra efficiency for landlords.
The elephant in the room for people who are against building enough housing is that they're all convinced that everyone would move to their particular locale.
I have heard that "everyone" would move to
* San Francisco
* Bend, Oregon
* Boulder, Colorado
* Seattle
* Austin, Texas
* New York City
* Santa Barbara, California
* Hawaii
* Montana
* and on and on and on
You know what? No, not everyone is going to move to New York or Bend or San Francisco. Building more housing keeps rents in check. And if some more people get to live in a place they want to be, that is a good thing.
If you could get all cities to build more housing simultaneously then you’d be in great shape. The question is: how do you do that? Most of the biggest problems facing humanity are coordination problems. The answer to all these problems can’t be “everyone should just do X.”
In reality, your best hope is to get one city to build a lot of housing. Then everyone moves there and we’re all unhappy.
This, by the way, is the reason homelessness is so bad in San Francisco despite their government spending enormous amounts of money fighting homelessness. All the other cities in the US sent all their homeless people to SF!
It's going to happen in fits and starts and not all at once everywhere. But there's also something of a ratchet effect as places copy what's working in other places. And no one reforming because they're all waiting would be catastrophic.
And really, not everyone is going to move somewhere. You could not pay me enough to live in NYC or San Francisco. People who love NYC would probably be bored in my small city.
Burdensome parking mandates are being eliminated or reduced across the country, as one example.
It would work, but it also requires curbing the extra demand that is generated by foreigners moving into the city and scooping up the housing from the locals.
> I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand?
Spain is not the US. Neither Spain nor any other Mediterranean country has large surface area that could accommodate housing demand at such high levels - there is already scarce land that you can build on across the Mediterranean as there are limited shorelines and deltas that were created by rivers etc, and the rest is immediately mountainous or hilly landscape that is very difficult to build on.
These countries could easily cope with their local demand, but allowing foreigners to buy housing caused a large influx of foreigners exacerbating the demand for housing and crowding out these places way beyond their capacity. The investment funds that scoop up housing to profit worsen the situation.
Maybe the US could handle such a demand with its gigantic surface area - solely Texas is larger than ENTIRE Western Europe, mind that. Or Russia. Or China. But other countries in the world, especially the Mediterranean ones, don't have the space to even start comparing with those.
The only solution is to limit the demand to the carrying capacity of each locale, province and country.
I'm far from an expert but I'd think it would drive tourism prices up due to less supply of STR housing (which could harm a local economy, although a behemoth like Barcelona probably isn't super concerned here)
Prices may not go down on rents, but if it means that more folks who actually _want to live in the city_ can, I see that as a positive. I can see in NY the case where decrease in housing leads to folks being priced out and moving elsewhere (NJ, etc.)
People who own a home, and don't have plans to move, would benefit from housing prices falling everywhere: property taxes go down, and other prices correlated with housing go down.
Two categories where people don't want pricing to go down:
If you have plans to move and prices aren't falling everywhere, the proceeds of a sale aren't enough to buy elsewhere.
And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling.
That depends on the region. In many places they're based on property value, and in many of those places if your property value goes down you can apply to have your home re-assessed and get taxed according to the new value. (Conversely, if your property values go up your property taxes may go up accordingly, which can in some cases take people's homes from affordable to not affordable.)
The cost/student doesn't go down just because local housing prices go down--which is where a lot of local taxes go to--and, in fact, the cost/student often goes up if you increase the population density.
> And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling.
So like what 99% of homes? If you rent you don't own it, if you own a condo you don't own it, if you own a house outright you are probably close to 1%.
Most of Barcelona is rent/condos. There is not a ton of 250m2 mansions in downtown Barcelona.
> people who are in the biggest house they are likely to own and expect to downsize
That's covered by the case of "property values go down everywhere"; you only have a problem if your property value goes down but the value of property you want to buy doesn't.
No, if you have a $1m house and you're intending to downsize to a $500k house, and they both lose half their value, that's $250k less in your pocket for retirement.
Too bad prop 13 means prices would have to drop significantly before any longterm CA homeowner would see any drop. And the valuation dropping that much wiping out so much of their "on paper" wealth would be very unpopular.
Would it reduce the number of tourists? Not likely, they'd just pay more to hotels (and thus have less money to spend on other things - vacation budget is usually limited, but it's distribution between various types of expense is not predetermined). Would it make Barcelona a less popular destination for non-natives? Not likely, unless it objectively becomes worse place for natives too.
NYC, Barcelona and any major city that hasn't gone the way of SF and Portland, have the same problem - a lot of people like to be there, either temporarily or permanently, but the number of accommodations, both temporary and permanent, is not infinitely scalable and runs out pretty fast, especially if the city managers aren't actively working on fixing that problem by increasing the supply - which they often don't.
Increasing the supply is hard and leads to a tangle of its own challenges. Blaming somebody else - especially somebody that doesn't even vote in the local elections - is much easier, and by the time it turns out it doesn't help - which will be some 10 years ago from now - the managers could fail upwards, retire or think about some other scapegoat to blame.
Why would rent go down? There's a lot of factors at work. Since the default is rent spiraling upwards, a decrease in that rate would be a success by any standards.
My take is that real estate sold to foreigners is the best kind of export. You sell the good to the foreign investor, but the good stays in place. From time to time that investor visits and drops money in the local economy. Most of the time the guy is not there, but pays taxes. Pays taxes but does not consume government services.
This completely neglects the opportunity cost of the real estate being used for something else (like housing citizens) instead. Housing is also not fungible - so if you "export" your most desirable real-estate you can't just make more of it.
Take NYC for example. My guess is that at least half of the housing stock in NYC is "pre-war". The "war" in that expression is World War 2. No washer-driers, no elevators, but a good number of mice and rats.
You could absolutely take these buildings down and build back something better. And that better could have more apartment units.
I live in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in NYC and in the world. All buildings are new (post 2000). If you replace the rest of the city with such buildings, you can certainly have enough housing for 30 million people.
But the foreign investors don't buy to come and live here. You can just build, sell, and not deal with the crowding.
And that could result in lower construction costs too. Why are new apartments so expensive? Because we don't know how to build anymore. We don't know because we don't build.
Absolutely baffling that you could come to the conclusion that houses being kept empty for the benefit of speculators while citizens sleep on the street is somehow the best outcome
Less housing for tourists, prices of remaining hotels goes up, less people visit, tourism economy takes a hit, existing residents not tied to tourism benefit.
Having seen what excess tourism can do - yeah, sounds right. But the tourism economy is very likely much more elastic than the non-tourist businesses that have already left town. Reversing the damage may take a long time or may never happen.
its not as simple , it's a catch-22, if you build a lot of housing the city will lose its appeal , either because of traffic/walkability, because of sprawl, or because of the people it attracts (high housing prices act as a sort of filter to attract more ambitious/adventurous residents).
At its current size the city seems to have hit a sweet spot of desirability which caused prices to skyrocket, and it brings a lot of tourist money to the same residents who are protesting.
I think we need to shift from simplistic housing availability calculations to more broadly considering the motivations of people
It certainly works, depending on what your goals are. Locals may appreciate fewer apartments in their building/neighborhood occupied by a rotating assortment of tourists, for example.
We do not support running notebooks locally right now, but offline access is coming soon.
With regards to running code on high-end GPUs: currently, we manually allocate GPUs to our customers when they need that. Still, we do want to eventually allow people to connect to their cloud providers to spin-up compute instances there.