Show HN: Hal9 – Roblox for AI | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hal9 – Roblox for AI

hal9.ai

Played with it a bit. Looks good, although rough around the edges as expected of an alpha.

Lot of times, it gets stuck at 'Pipeline running', specially with dataset and web tables. Ability to fetch remote data via web JSON and XML/RSS will be nice.

Thanks for playing with this, really appreciate it!

Yes, so currently our budget is low and we turn on AWS EC2 workers on demand... so most likely, "Pipeline running" triggers as we wait for about 90s for the EC2 instance to start. We should be able to keep machines on longer as we get our first few customers.

Thanks, we do support fetching data from JSON, is there a difference with "web JSON"? XML/RSS would be nice indeed, created this issue: https://github.com/hal9ai/hal9ai/issues/4

'Pipeline running' delay is a pain, something potential users/customers won't wait around for. Have you looked at using on-demand managed containers (like Google Cloud Run) instead of full EC2s to launch the pipeline? It'll be cheaper, quicker and more scalable too.

Just saw that JSON support already exists, which is great.

Also, it has the potential of being a great platform, but I wouldn't suggest marketing it as a 'Roblox for AI'. How many AI/ML people really use Roblox? Few I suppose. Perhaps something simpler and familiar, like 'GUI for AI' or 'Your ML Lab/Studio/Toolbox'.

Thanks! No, we have not but we will take a look at Google Cloud Run, I agree is quite painful to wait for this.

Great suggestion. Yeah, we don't use "Roblox for AI" in our website, but was hoping the HN community would get the analogy.

Some more feedback:

* Explode module does not work in some cases. It shows no fields above the data preview.

* In between 'Import' and 'Visualize' steps on your website features section, you can think of having a 'Transform' step, which will sit well with ETL and ML folks.

* It'll be nice to auth via GitHub or just simple email (magic links), instead of Google only. GitHub auth will also allow you to support direct repo load and save for user's pipelines with change history.

Thank you! Will work on those in the next day or so.

If you feel like, would love to keep in touch by email (javier at hal9.ai), at the very least, I can give you free access to the proper alpha release.

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

Core feature of Roblox is the ability to play together with zero friction. Everything else is just supporting infrastructure, albeit uniquely impressive.

Is Hal9 social in some way? What exactly is it that users can experience together?

Good point. I don't see many AI apps being experienced together in the same way Roblox games are experienced together. The social aspect for Hal9 would be on developing AI solutions together, building components together, etc; but I agree most users play Roblox socially while only a few build games together.

We considered other analogies like "Unity for AI", but we felt it missed the marketplace component. Another strong contender was "Unity and Steam for AI". At the end, these analogies are going to be imperfect but hopefully they give a quick (yet incomplete) sense of what is being built. In general, we don't use this analogy in our site, but we figured HN would appreciate the analogy.

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