Launch HN: Papercups (YC S20) Open-Core Intercom Alternative https://ift.tt/30MNIBM

Launch HN: Papercups (YC S20) Open-Core Intercom Alternative Hi HN! Kam and Alex here. We’re founders of Papercups ( https://papercups.io ), a live customer chat app written in Elixir. We offer an open-core self-hosted alternative to Intercom for companies that are security and privacy conscientious. Alex and I met in SF around 6 years ago, and have been hacking on small projects together for the past couple years. Before covid, we would spend many Sunday afternoons in coffee shops building prototypes of whatever our latest and greatest idea was… most of these fizzled out after a few weeks or so For 2020, we wanted to take the idea of “building something people want” a bit more seriously. We started off trying to build SaaS tools for ocean freight logistics companies. That failed, but we learned a ton in the process. After our experience in freight we wanted to work on tools that are a little closer to home and tried a completely new idea: a web app that makes it super easy to manage and deploy simple cron jobs and other recurring/scheduled tasks. One thing we learned from the feedback on this product was how difficult it can be to set up and schedule email campaigns. This definitely resonated with us since we've both had this pain professionally. While working at Stripe, one particularly painful project Alex worked on was setting up email campaigns to notify their customers of new regulations. I had a similar experience at Pivotal where I worked on a project to email users about security updates. So we started tackling this particular pain point: setting up and managing email campaigns. A few companies already do this pretty well. Intercom is one, but it can be prohibitively expensive. And for companies that have concerns about sending their customer data to 3rd party services, these products aren’t an option. At this point we figured, why not be more ambitious? Instead of just building an email campaign tool, let’s build an open core alternative to Intercom! So here we are. We’re starting off with chat but we plan on expanding into email campaigns and push notifications. We chose chat to start off with because we wanted something that we could use immediately. And for a lot of our previous projects, we had set up chat on our sites to engage with customers. We’ve launched this repo under MIT license so any developer can use the tool. The goal is to not charge individual developers. Features like chat, canned responses, private notes, and auto assignments will stay free and open source. Right now we plan on making money by providing things like a hosted version and support contracts. We eventually plan on making a licensed version where we charge for features that large companies care about like Active Directory support, Okta integration, and compliance exports. Finally we decided to build Papercups on top of Elixir/Phoenix because it seemed like the best tool for a job that requires a lot of “realtime” functionality and first class support for websockets/channels. It’s been great so far! The frontend uses React/TypeScript. We may explore using LiveView in the future, but we wanted to start off with a frontend stack that we were familiar with. You can check out our repo at https://ift.tt/2EX58mM we have a ton of features in mind would love your feedback and any feature requests! P.S. This is our first time working in Elixir so would love any feedback there too! August 12, 2020 at 10:02PM

Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool https://ift.tt/2XRZvwG

Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool https://kinopio.club August 12, 2020 at 08:25PM

Show HN: dstack – an open-source tool to build data applications easily https://ift.tt/2XRaUgs

Show HN: dstack – an open-source tool to build data applications easily Dear HN, I am Riwaj, the cofounder of dstack.ai (https://ift.tt/3amrgmi). A few months ago, we built an online service that allows users to publish data visualizations from Python or R. The idea was to build a tool that did not require additional programming or front-end development for publishing data visualizations. Such a code can be invoked from either Jupyter notebook, RMarkdown, Python, or R scripts. Once the data is pushed, it can be accessed via a browser. Open-sourcing dstack: During our customer discovery phase, we realized that dstack.ai should integrate a lot more open source data science frameworks than we integrated ourselves. For example, as a user, I want to push a matplotlib plot, a Tensorflow model, a plotly chart, a pandas dataframe, and I expect the presentation layer to fully-support it. Supporting all types of artifacts and providing all the tools to work with them solely seems to be a very challenging task. With this, we open-sourced the framework. Now you can build dstack locally, and run it on your servers, or in a cloud of your choice if that’s needed. More details on the project, how to use it, and the source code of the server can be found at the https://ift.tt/3fTKQqW repo. The client packages for Python and R are available at the https://ift.tt/33RCkXb and https://ift.tt/31YPmzN correspondingly. What’s next: User callbacks- so that application shows not just pre-calculated visualizations but also can fetch data from a store and process it in real-time. ML models- so that data scientists can publish a stack which binds together a pre-calculated ML model and user parameters Use cases- Support specific use cases that help data scientists to build data science models into data applications as fast as possible. We would be happy to get your feedback on the open-source framework and also get your opinion on what kind of use cases can be built on top of the framework? Thank you. August 12, 2020 at 06:44PM

Show HN: Orchest – Data Science Pipelines https://ift.tt/3fPh5HO

Show HN: Orchest – Data Science Pipelines Hello Hacker News! We are Rick & Yannick from Orchest (https://www.orchest.io - https://ift.tt/2XRxxBc). We're building a visual pipeline tool for data scientists. The tool can be considered to be high-code because you write your own Python/R notebooks and scripts, but we manage the underlying infrastructure to make it 'just work™'. You can think of it as a simplified version of Kubeflow. We created Orchest to free data scientists from the tedious engineering related tasks of their job. Similar to how companies like Netflix, Uber and Booking.com support their data scientists with internal tooling and frameworks to increase productivity. When we worked as data scientists ourselves we noticed how heavily we had to depend on our software engineering skills to perform all kinds of tasks. From configuring cloud instances for distributed training, to optimizing the networking and storage for processing large amounts of data. We believe data scientists should be able to focus on the data and the domain specific challenges. Today we are just at the very beginning of making better tooling available for data science and are launching our GitHub project that will give enhanced pipelining abilities to data scientists using the PyData/R stack, with deep integration of Jupyter Notebooks. Currently Orchest supports: 1) visually and interactively editing a pipeline that is represented using a simple JSON schema; 2) running remote container based kernels through the Jupyter Enterprise Gateway integration; 3) scheduling experiments by launching parameterized pipelines on top of our Celery task scheduler; 4) configuring local and remote data sources to separate code versioning from the data passing through your pipelines. We are here to learn and get feedback from the community. As youngsters we don't have all the answers and are always looking to improve. August 12, 2020 at 05:54PM

Show HN: The cheapest investment platforms in the UK https://ift.tt/3fNcJkn

Show HN: The cheapest investment platforms in the UK https://ift.tt/33Yi8To August 12, 2020 at 02:18PM

Show HN: SOTA semantic segmentation with MobileNetV3, in 3 lines of PyTorch code https://ift.tt/2DRxBd8

Show HN: SOTA semantic segmentation with MobileNetV3, in 3 lines of PyTorch code https://ift.tt/31MuCLe August 12, 2020 at 06:03AM

Show HN: NeuralCam Live – Using ML to Turn iPhones into Smart Webcams https://ift.tt/31Iw3dM

Show HN: NeuralCam Live – Using ML to Turn iPhones into Smart Webcams https://ift.tt/3ajkddY August 12, 2020 at 01:55PM