Kobra – visual programming language for machine learning | Hacker News Reader

Kobra – visual programming language for machine learning

kobra.dev

235 pointsamrrs30 comments

Kobra is awesome! They're part of the Replit Venture program (https://blog.replit.com/ventures). The company is started by 16 year old hackers. There is a cool demo of the product here: https://kobra.dev/demo

l know one of the founders, Benjamin, who has been a many-time CodeDay participant. He spends a lot of time helping the newer coders understand how to turn their ideas into code on our Discord, and is always friendly and obviously passionate about helping others learn to code. I'm super happy something like this exists to help him work on the next generation of coding education software.

Replit Ventures itself seems like a neat endeavor to support cool projects like Kobra, especially since the barrier for entry seems to be low. I wish it succeeds and helps create successful startups on the way.

I would like to add Replit Ventures under the incubator section of my curated list of startup tools - https://startuptoolchain.com/ . Which URL should I be pointing to? Is that blog page current home for Replit Ventures as the application page is closed?

Yeah point to the blog for now. If we have a landing page we’ll make the blog redirect to it. Thank you!

> https://blog.replit.com/ventures

> [...] Replit Ventures will give a grant of $2000 each [...]

It's not a substantial amount money but a nice token of appreciation nontheless. I guess the real value comes in the form of networking, exposure and mentoring.

Considering they're open to the world, $2000 for a side project is a good motivator and of course network is the real value for any incubator.

I think https://www.perceptilabs.com/ is a little better.

But I hope the future is more like DreamCoder: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381

Really cool! I see a resemblance to scratch. https://scratch.mit.edu/

Definitely looks inspired by scratch. I think its going to fill the same niche as scratch as well!

looks built on google's blockly: https://developers.google.com/blockly/

Great job! Looks like there’s a layout issue on mobile for your homepage. The content is squished to the left side of the screen in portrait mode. Switching to landscape mode fixes it.

Thanks for letting us know, we'll take a look at it!!

Same on my iPhone SE 2

> "Welcome to Kobra Studio... CONTINUE WITHOUT AN ACCOUNT"

Nice. I'm guessing the Kobra.dev folks are HN regulars!

IMHO, this only makes sense as part of a bigger non-code data software such as SPSS or Tableau.

I don't see non-programmers picking this up from scratch, but if they're already doing data work, this is much better than current SPSS scripting, etc., (I actually only used SPSS scripting, so I can't testify about other tools)

This sounds interesting! I'm generally not a fan of visual programming, but working on models is very visual and I could very well see this being a viable alternative to notebooks/jupyter.

Also, I haven't poked around much but it's very obvious the blocks map to a standard python-numpy-pandas stack, so it could be easy to integrate Kobra with git/other code/rest of the tech stack.

If you'd like to try it out, feel free to email me at pranavnt@outlook.com and I'd love to help you get started!!

Have you tried Orange? I found out about it as it was one of the anacounda launcher icons.

It's all visual (you connect circles) and it's a great workbench to test ideas and datasets.

Personally i am very excited about: https://enso.org/ which is running on https://www.graalvm.org/. Code is interchangably dual represented visually and textually so you can use what fits best.

Enso looks amazing! Thank you for sharing!

Can Cobra export the script in text form (and import them, of course)? That would make the language much more powerful and useful because people can then start exchange ideas and cross-validate other people’s works. It also makes the code easily reproducible.

A lot of overlap with Knime and Rapidminer. Why approach it with visual programming vs the direct execution graph approach like they do?

We're focusing more on education than building an AutoML tool, and we think visual programming helps the user understand more of what's going on behind the scenes.

Curious how this is different from the original, now defunct version of Azure Machine Learning Studio.

I haven't used that before, with Kobra we're focusing more on building a tool to teach ML as opposed to being an AutoML tool (which that appears to be).

Original wasn't AutoML, it was somewhat similar to what Kobra looks like.

https://gilberttanner.com/blog/code-free-data-science-with-m...

Is that some python wrapper exposed through anyblock or something, that they call a new language?

Go Kobra!!

sold. I want to invest.

I'm on kobra team you can email me at mugaboverite@gmail.com so we can talk

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