[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hal9 - Roblox for AI
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       Show HN: Hal9 - Roblox for AI
        
       Author : javierluraschi
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2021-05-30 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hal9.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hal9.ai)
        
       | javierluraschi wrote:
       | We believe everyone should be able to use and profit from AI, so
       | we spent this year building Hal9, which aspires to become "Roblox
       | for AI".
       | 
       | * What is Hal9?
       | 
       | Roblox is many things: A game development environment with a
       | visual editor that makes it easy to get started but unconstrained
       | to advanced users that want to code. Roblox is also a library of
       | assets, and a marketplace for games.
       | 
       | We are taking a similar approach, we are building a visual editor
       | to assemble anything from simple data analysis by importing data
       | and visualizing it with charts, to data forecasting with
       | regressions, to complex workflows to do web-scraping and run deep
       | learning models like LSTMs.
       | 
       | However, visual editors are constrained and at some point they
       | just don't work, so every block is backed by open source code
       | which you can modify to your hearts' contempt using our code
       | editor.
       | 
       | In addition, you can also add new blocks and share them with
       | others in a library of assets. We are currently using GitHub as a
       | library of open source scripts.
       | 
       | Finally, we have aspirations to help contributors profit from
       | their work by sharing profits with them.
       | 
       | * How are we building this?
       | 
       | We are building everything with web technologies, let me explain
       | why.
       | 
       | First, the whole purpose of this is to make AI more accessible.
       | Technologies like Electron allow us to easily deploy to multiple
       | platforms and avoid having users troubleshoot system
       | dependencies. To put it simply, web technologies allow users to
       | get started with no additional setup.
       | 
       | However, we also see the ecosystem of web technologies converging
       | with Data Science and AI. For instance, the tensorflow.js [1]
       | project allows users to run TensorFlow in the client and
       | optionally train models in GPUs in NodeJS. We currently provide
       | NodeJS infrastructure to run server-side code and hopefully GPUs
       | as well soon.
       | 
       | Another great example is webassembly, which can allow us to run
       | Python with PyIodide [2]; same for SQL with sql.js [3], etc. We
       | are also very excited for WebGPU [4], an initiative to bring
       | proper GPU support to web technologies, which should make it so
       | much easier to use proper GPUs locally.
       | 
       | Momentum is growing around Data Science with libraries like
       | tidy.js [5], danfo.js [6], and ml5.js [7]. Currently this
       | ecosystem is a bit fragmented but we believe they will eventually
       | come together.
       | 
       | Finally, web technologies like CSS and D3.js are arguably the
       | best platform for visualizations. We are big fans of the new
       | ObservableHQ Plot [8] library which we are already using in Hal9.
       | 
       | * Call to action
       | 
       | Head to https://hal9.ai and try it out.
       | 
       | You will need your desktop to interact with the embedded app at
       | the top of our site. The app is diabled on mobile but the site
       | should give you a good idea of how it works.
       | 
       | We are looking for feedback, users and contributors.
       | 
       | If you find this useful, you can download Hal9 for Windows, Mac,
       | or use the Web version and our cloud service for $19.99/month.We
       | are planning to use this revenue to become self-sustained and
       | share profits with our community of developers.
       | 
       | As a developer, you can download and use the development versions
       | to contribute to the open source repo of scripts in
       | https://github.com/hal9ai/hal9ai
       | 
       | * Resources
       | 
       | - Site : https://hal9.ai - Github : https://github.com/hal9ai -
       | Twitter : https://twitter.com/hal9ai - Discord :
       | https://discord.gg/dKYgga84 - YouTube:
       | https://www.youtube.com/user/jluraschi
       | 
       | * References
       | 
       | [1] https://www.tensorflow.org/js [2]
       | https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide [3] https://github.com/sql-
       | js/sql.js/ [4] https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/WD-webgpu-20210518/ [5]
       | https://pbeshai.github.io/tidy/ [6] https://danfo.jsdata.org/ [7]
       | https://ml5js.org/ [8]
       | https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-30 23:02 UTC)