theveloped

Amazing work! I have been selling a product using a WhatsApp chatbot for some time now. iMessage would be a great addition to this so I will definitely get back to you once I find some more time to work on the project. Great work in getting this setup!

Amazing work on HFD! There is a lot happening in the space of mass-customization where I feel this fits right in!

We have a platform for automated sheet metal production and quoting. At the moment we only take completed 2D/3D technical drawings as an input although there is definitely a market for ordering parametric products too.

If you ever want to discuss the possibilities for HFD in the sheet metal industry let me know!

Hi everyone, I have removed the 2.99 payment from my postcard chatbot while the quarantines or my wallet last. Send a postcard to a friend or family member who is helping to fight the pandemic or who need some extra love in general!

After getting the question for a converter for AI, EPS and PDF files to SVG I have built a tiny demo using Inkscape and Ghostscript.

It seems however that although there is a ton of references online for the various conversions many of them are very outdated. I'm wondering if anyone used similar conversions in a production environment in the past and what approaches yielded the best results for them.

(if anyone wants to play around with the current implementation I'll leave an instance running here: https://inkscape-xiaaw3oz6q-ew.a.run.app)

Great job on releasing the project!

Had a similar iOS app years ago that would make chat groups with everyone in a 1km radius [1]. In the end our largest hurdle was getting enough users together per location.

1: http://www.zonemessenger.com/

There is a privacy statement on the bottom of the page that covers this. Let me know if you feel this is not thorough enough or not prominent enough.

WhatsApp has recently announced their plans for their API after a very long beta program (open to enterprise companies only). They will not be working directly with customers but have chosen 20+ partners through which their API will be available (e.g. Twilio).

At the time of building this project this was not yet available. And automating WhatsApp was somewhat of a hassle.

That’s spot on. We send the postcards from the UK so for the UK and Europe mainland we can manage 2-6 days even.

It’s definitely important! The addresses are stored for generating the postcard designs and shipping them to the recipient only.

The card is however printed by a third-party with whom we thus have to share the address details for shipping. From there on the is no additional privacy concernes compared to sending a postcard by hand.

None that I know of but it should be fairly easy in telegram. It perfect for chatbots! Integration with WhatsApp was the hardest part really. I know there used to be a version for Facebook messenger[1] though.

1: https://postcard.im/

Awesome seeing this here! I hope this will get you the traction you need to keep it up and running! Happy New Year by the way!

I made a WhatsApp chatbot[1] a while back that helps you customize and send postcards from within WhatsApp.

1: https://melonpost.com

Very interesting service! Could not reach your number from the Netherlands although I expect that is intentional.

Some feedback that did wonders for our service (melonpost.com) is to make the call to action different for desktop and mobile users:

- Your current link to the phone number only works on mobile so only show it here

- An option for desktop users is a "text me" button with an input field for the number to send a text to

Glad you like it!

I completely agree chatbots can be slow at collecting information. In the case of Melon Post we look at rivaling the speed of a web form at least with orders to a previously used address. At this point, the benefit of being available from your message box and focus on simplicity will hopefully attract it's own little group of loyal customers!

In most cases various error messages for a certain position in the conversation are available. These messages are aimed at nudging the user back into one of the predefined conversational flows or to have them repeat their answer in a different format.

Something the bot still has trouble with is if the user sends a second reply before the answer of the bot is received.

Author here! One of my side projects nearing completion. Terms/Privacy statements are underway so please bear with me for now.

Looking for some advice on getting the dialog as fluid as possible (I'm using dialogflow on the back). Especially address parsing seems like a tricky field so any feedback on this would be most appreciated!

The WhatsApp REST interface will be open-source once fully tested (heavily based on: https://github.com/Rhymen/go-whatsapp).

Looks like a great app you built! And love the idea of simply using a color overlay to visualize the difference.

You might want to also look at the verification of contracts as a target market. Often the addition of digital signatures or scanned pages will avoid md5 checksums to check for any tampering. Bacause you approach is visual it might be a great way to validate a contract has not been altered.

It’s a field in engineering where optimization is used to optimize a engineering design for a certain purpose (e.g. a beam for stiffness).

Topology optimization is the broader field that allows topological changes to the design (e.g. the addition or removal of nodes). These optimization’s often have a solution that first have to be interpreted by an engineer to turn it into a manufacturable design.

A shape optimization performs optimization only of certain variables of a predefined design. The splines as described here seems to fit well for describing for instance sheet metal parts or cross-sections of beams.

This will be amazing for shape optimization. As it seems one can describe various shapes with very little control points and parameters. Furthermore the relation between the control points and the final spline is very well behaved and thus great for use in an optimization. Great work!

As described I'm fairly new to odoo myself. Although I believe it has been going for over 10 years and is currently at version 11. So as far as opensource solutions go, this seems like a solid choice.

Also, I believe the cooperation that maintains the project also offers a paid enterprise version that offers mainly a more complete accounting module and handles the migration to any future versions.

Have a look at Odoo. It is an open source ERP and CRM platform that can be completely tailored to your needs, with either freely available apps or by developing your own.

We are currently working with a company in the sheet metal business that uses it and I'm extremely impressed with it.

We develop a small SaaS solution to let sheet metal manufacturers accept custom orders online. If you are indeed interested in setting up a kind of physical token store for these I would love to help out and link this up to an actual manufacturing plant!

To hook in on the rest of the debate. It might not be the best measure to qualitatively or even quantitatively compare developer contributions. But a physical token as memento would definitely be an awesome way to be thanked for contributing to a project instead of the old buy-me-a-coffee-button.

Looks amazing great work on finishing a great looking project! I made a similar application for iOS (www.zonemessenger.com) a while back with the same intent of getting people in contact within a 1km radius (have since updated the radius to match local demand).

And although I still think it could be a very valuable type of platform it is extremely hard to build the right community with enough critical mass. Best of luck! And if you ever want exchange experiences I'd be happy to help.

SmartPart.IO | Full-stack Engineer, Computation Geometry Scientist| Nijmegen, NL | Full-time, Part-time, Intern | Remote or Onsite based in the Netherlands

SmartPart is a young company building a SaaS platform that spins up real-life factories. We allow companies in the sheet metal industry to automate the entire process from quotations up to the moment that the customer's data gets sent to the laser/water/plasma cutter. We are looking for great engineers to help us built both a scalable SaaS platform and capture century old manufacturing knowledge using state of the art computational geometry algorithms.

Stack: C++, Python, SQL, OpenCascade, Django, Docker, AngularJS

Send us an email to tobias@smartpart.io (please mention you found us through HN).

This is absolutely amazing! Just wish I had seen it a year ago or so. You have no idea how many hours I've spent drawing in tikz while writing my thesis.. Best of luck!

For now only still images are supported.

These will be checked for availability and if so a reference to them is added in the .tex file. On building the PDF using LaTeX the referenced images will be included.

Haha guess you found the end to end-to-end encryption ;)

Most definetely! As written in the post there is a "new" (don't know how new) feature that let's you export a single chat conversation. Within the chat you can select export chat under options.

Author here:

Would love to hear the HN thoughts on the project and I'll check in now and then to answer any questions!

code: https://github.com/theveloped/WhatsBook

Any thoughts on the idea of a knowledge dependent content wall (or a CAPTCHA based on a certain domain knowledge)? I feel that a crowdsourced database of questions for various domains could serve some interesting purposes. One idea comes to mind is for instance to limit comment right to people that understand the subject or such. Curious to see if the HN community has any idea's or thoughts on the matter.