Thanks for flagging this. Our server was a little overwhelmed from HN (we're a new site and haven't handled this much traffic before). We're implementing more graceful error handling and better caching to avoid this issue in the future.
Hi HN, I'm one of the creators of Realtime, I'm an engineer who has been working as a data journalist for a while now. A colleague and I built this with an aim of making it easy for people to enrich their news consumption with a source that is entirely data driven, to make public discourse more informed and help people better calibrate how the stories they read relate to the empirical reality. We're written up this thinking in a more detailed post [1].
We launched our beta this week and are following the independent publication / substack model. We use an LLM to write the headlines, Vega for the charts, and did a lot of fun data engineering to make all of the storage and analysis of the timeseries performant on the backend. Let us know what you think, I'll be hanging around to answer any questions.
Yes, we're continuing to improve the templates so they are better on mobile. This all came out of a research project so there are many rough edges, but we're making progress!
If anyone wants to get involved on the open source side to help out, we have lots of things to work on. Feel free to comment here or email idyll at mathisonian dot com
So cool to see this on the front page. I'm a CS PhD student at University of Washington, this is one of my research projects. If you're interested in more details you can see the full paper on the project here: https://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/idyll/
I'm happy to answer any questions about this or the space of interactive writing and data visualization generally
We're working on this with https://idyll-lang.org/, it does some of the things you mention already (standard conventions for how to do common tasks, standard set of widgets, handles loading data, extensible plugin system, etc).
But it is a big undertaking and there is still a lot of work to do. If anyone on HN wants to contribute or give feedback you can reach me at mconlen at cs dot washington dot edu.
You might be interested in Idyll [1], a project that I started as part of my research at UW. One of the explicit goals is to make it easier to create explorable explanations.
Hi all, I've been leading the charge to put this together. Its built on Idyll [1], which I'm developing as part of my PdD at the University of Washington. You may have seen some of our articles, they appear on HN from time to time.
https://idyll-lang.org/ is built for this. You'll still have to write code for your custom graphics but it will help you get things up and running quickly.
