[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hupreter - Create apps by describing them i...
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Show HN: Hupreter - Create apps by describing them in English
Hi HN! Fernando here. A few months ago [1], I shared Hupreter
(https://hupreter.com) with you all and now I am finally opening it
up so that everyone can try it for free. The goal is to let users
create apps and process data effortlessly, by just describing what
the computer should do, in spoken English. We have made a lot of
progress since the first post, and even though it is far from
perfect, I really want to see how people use it and get feedback.
In terms of creating apps, it supports persisting data (you can
store/retrieve values), if statements, while loops, etc. For data
processing, we currently support uploading tables, calculating the
median/variance/etc., plotting, and more. And we will be improving
all of those in the coming days. For example, you can tell
Hupreter: Given the table nba_players, calculate the average value
in the column "points". More examples are available here:
https://hupreter.blog/ Thanks for your time! Let me know what you
think, either in the comments below or via fersarr AT gmail
Fernando [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945567
Author : fersarr
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-05-13 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
| gus_massa wrote:
| How does this compare with Wolfram Alpha? It looks like this
| project understand more sentences in English, but I guess the
| data that is preloaded is smaller.
| fersarr wrote:
| In terms of creating apps, the difference is that you can use
| typical programming blocks like if statements, while loops, DBs
| (persist a value), etc. For example: if three is prime, print
| "yes"
| andiareso wrote:
| I don't really know if I understand this. How is this not a
| programming language with a longer and more complex syntax
| structure? It would seem to be just as confusing to non-technical
| people as teaching them a language like Python.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I can imagine this will end up creating more problems than it
| solves, for example depending on where you're from you might
| use various colloquialisms in speech which no AI will ever
| really get.
|
| For example if I said something like hey I want all the NBA
| players but they got to be like a little bit taller than 6 ft
| 2. What's a little bit, once you get into any edge cases, or
| even have to clarify what you mean, you might as well just
| program it out.
| fersarr wrote:
| yeah, if you are a programmer and it doesn't work quickly,
| you would just code it yourself. But if you are not...
| offtop5 wrote:
| If you're not, you're going to endlessly frustrate yourself
| when this doesn't do exactly what you need it to.
|
| I guess I'd be more interested if the tool generated python
| code or something, and then I can manually edit it, or one
| of my friends could send it to me so I can edit it. Don't
| get me wrong if this idea worked in practice I'd be all
| over it, but I don't think it will.
| fersarr wrote:
| Hupreter generates python code, which you can see. Right
| now you cannot edit it, but we plan to allow that in the
| future.
| johnisgood wrote:
| You would have more success with Lojban instead of a natural
| language, IMO, I think natural languages are limited by nature.
| valgaze wrote:
| This is really interesting! The upload-a-table functionality is
| really neat
|
| > On the more UI side, there's a guy named Sharif Shameem who
| released a somewhat-similar tool (during the early "holy cow!"
| days of GPT3's release) to build functioning UI's from natural
| language input:
| https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1284095222939451393
|
| > Jordan Singer made a Figma plugin too:
| https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1284511080715362304
|
| Slides 23/24 shows some basic examples of how this could work:
| https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1m2pZfclAziqWrEJdebuf...
|
| I don't know if people want it or how well this all would work in
| a non-toy scenario, but the notion of "conversationally" building
| an application-- even if just the scaffolding-- is really
| compelling for some reason
| fersarr wrote:
| Really cool examples and thanks for sharing those slides, super
| interesting. Both the react app and the figma demo are super
| impressive. Like you said, I think that we will see a lot more
| of conversational tasks with machines in general in the future.
| ddlsmurf wrote:
| As a developer this technology scares me not - for I have seen
| client specs and heard what they think they want.
| fersarr wrote:
| haha yea that is always tricky. To know what you want is
| something else :)
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| I think eventually the role of 'developer' will be replaced by
| someone who takes business requirements and filters them for
| what's actually possible and desirable, then uses some sort of
| no-code software platform to turn them into instructions that a
| computer can use, then tunes those instructions based on
| testing and feedback until they effectively match the business
| requirements.
|
| Oh wait...
| guenthert wrote:
| But isn't that where the profession ultimately heads towards?
| Less manual, more or less inspired coding, instead more
| dialogue with clients and translating their wishes into a
| specification which can be turned into code with ever more
| sophisticated tools?
| windmark wrote:
| Definitely. Understanding the problem space and formulating
| the requirements is often overlooked when people claim "AI
| will take over programming".
|
| Although off the shelf products will be able to do more and
| more tasks, I believe the demand for complicated solutions
| constantly will stay ahead of these.
|
| This is exactly what we're seeing with Automation threatening
| the easy jobs, but as a whole, more specialized people are
| needed for the cases when that isn't enough.
| amelius wrote:
| So, client iterates.
| ddlsmurf wrote:
| found the agile monkey
| Detrus wrote:
| Maybe works in 10% of cases.
|
| I remember seeing a natural language to SQL engine which worked
| in 50% of cases so the expectation was higher.
| https://blog.einstein.ai/talk-to-your-data-one-model-any-dat...
| dennisy wrote:
| Is this built off the OpenAI API?
| fersarr wrote:
| Hey Dennis. No it is not. We use offline open source models to
| create dependency trees and tags and our semantic engine takes
| off from there. After that the semantic structure gets
| transformed into code.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Cool project, will I get syntax errors if I use "show me" or
| "display" instead of "print". What if I actually want the
| computer to print on a piece of paper? "Print on the printer"?
|
| It reminds me of HyperTalk some, but this seems to be designed to
| deal with the gray areas of language is that right?
| fersarr wrote:
| Yea, exactly. It can handle different ways of saying something,
| like your example. Additionally it understands coreferences
| like he/she/it/the/etc (not perfectly though). But it gets
| better with time :)
| [deleted]
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