23 ms·

Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

• leipert 9y ago
  Sorting my mails with imapfilter. I have a yaml file where I write down which mails go into which folder depending on sender or recipient or another header field. Runs on a raspberry pi every ten minutes between 8 and 8.
  • allendoerfer 9y ago
    What does that do for you? For me, mails have three states: 1. Need action right now. I answer them and archive. 2. Need action later. I open a TODO and archive. If I need them later, I can search for them. 3. Do not need action. These are already archived. I can search through them, if I need anything.
    • leipert 9y ago
      Well it especially helps with work emails and sorts mails from our Confluence and Jira into respective folders. These are around 20~ mails per day. I look at them once or twice per week, grouped by subject. Another thing is newsletters. Every two to four weeks I take the time reading them. Invoices are put away (amazon, ebay, electrictity, etc.). Well I think the biggest win for me is, that mails in my inbox are typically your category 1 and I can react right away. I do not have to spare another thought on category 2 or 3. I can check my mails twice a day and it's enough. Really helps focusing on my other work. Back when I used GMail I had some of those rules as filters, but the big advantage of imapfilter on the Pi is: I can add rules pretty easy with a git commit and add new Inboxes if needed. EDIT: As I mentioned my email filter runs only between 8 and 8, which is really nice, because I do not see any new mails in the evening. This really frees my mind. If the house is burning down, don't write me a mail and give me a call.
• based2 9y ago
  a collegue is doing JIRA exports to Excel / MS Project.
  • rubidium 9y ago
    MS flow may help
• naturalgradient 9y ago
  I take enormous pleasure in automating every part of my research pipelines (comp sci). As in, I like to get my experiment setup (usually distributed and many different components interacting with each other) to a point where one command resets all components, starts them in screen processes on all of the machines with the appropriate timing and setup commands, runs the experiment(s), moves the results between machines, generates intermediate results and exports publication ready plots to the right folder. Upside: once it's ready, iterating on the research part of the experiment is great. No need to focus on anything else any more, just the actual research problem, not a single unnecessary click to start something (even 2 clicks become irritating when you do them hundreds of times). Need another ablation study/explore another parameter/idea? Just change a flag/line/function, kick off once, and have the plots the next day. No fiddling around. Downside: full orchestration takes very long initially, but a bit into my research career I now have tons of utilities for all of this. It also has made me much better at command line and general setup nonsense.
  • Ainsleylopo 9y ago
    I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
  • ibizaman 9y ago
    How much time does a full reset take?
    • naturalgradient 9y ago
      A few minutes - killing processes on one machine, restarting a database on another machine/cluster, reloading a schema, importing data (for some experiments), deploying a new service, loading tensorflow models, warming up benchmark clients. I found that the key of good research pipelines is having a really consistent way of passing around configurations between components. My components arent strictly microservices (a mixture of open source components and handwritten tools) and they interact in all sorts o fprotocols with each other (importing jsons, csv, GRPC, HTTP), but I essentially treat the configuration flags as their API, so there are no implicit configurations that I could forget about. The rest is just naming things well, e.g. descriptive names for experiment result files etc. Initially I thought everyone is doing that, but from talking to PhDs in other domains I noticed that there is a strong bias towards people working in any kind of complex distributed setting having these pipelines. My friends who devise ML models and just test them on datasets on their laptop never had a real need to get a pipeline in place because they never felt the pain points of setting up large distributed experiments.
• sprt 9y ago
  Buying crypto weekly using Kraken's API.
  • kostarelo 9y ago
    How do you decide what to buy?
    • sprt 9y ago
      Hardcoded based on how I think the market will evolve in the long term, currently holding BTC, ETH, XMR, and XRP among a couple others.
      • pyrrhotech 9y ago
        Been a pretty rough week, reminds me why I should never put more than 10% of net worth here
        • dingdongding 9y ago
          Chamath Palihapitiya says you should keep 1% of your net assets in Cryptocurrencies.
        • patrickk 9y ago
          High correlation between the BTC price and others. Lots of chaos in Bitcoin-land (August 1/SegWit drama) means most of the others are now falling, large investors just mass-dump their crypto holdings even though logically the prices shouldn't move in lockstep.
• philip1209 9y ago
  I liked writing an internal command line utility for our Go codebase. It automates common dev commands like deployments (including installing dependencies, migrations, etc), sending test emails (eg to check formatting), and running smoke tests. Pretty minor, but it makes my life a lot easier. I plan on expanding it more for accessing prod and dev APIs.
• canadian_voter 9y ago
  I wrote a bot that automatically comments on HN when certain topics appear. -- This post has been automatically generated and may not reflect the opinion of the poster.
• utanapishtim 9y ago
  If I have to update a file programmatically when I make certain modifications to a codebase I'll write a script that automates the update.
• bakli 9y ago
  I've written a script which helps me copy-paste files from their folders in Material Design image library to my android project. This saves me at least 4 copy paste, and then renaming operations.
• ajarmst 9y ago
  I consult the relevant XKCD to decide: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
  • steven_braham 9y ago
    Jep, love that chart. Recently showed it to a colleague when we were discussing if it's was worth it to automate our domain creating processes.
    • BrandonMarc 9y ago
      Every time I look at that chart, my eyes glaze over and I decide not to automate. The title text when alludes to this. I just ... don't get it. I fear I may be a bear of small brain. As someone else mentioned, there are other valuable considerations the chart ignores, such as likelihood and impact of mistakes.
      • vacri 9y ago
        Automation also gets rid of context-switching, which has a cost of its own. It may only take you half an hour to do -foo-, but to switch into the mental space for it and switch out again are costs that most people don't factor in.
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        OTOH automating is an acquired skill, so I learned to say "screw it". Unless you feel you're trying to spend a month to save 10 minutes total, go ahead and automate it - that's how you get better at automating more stuff faster.
  • natch 9y ago
    I love XKCD but that chart is missing a few important dimensions. - How likely is it that you will make a mistake when performing the task manually, and how easy is it to fix the various mistakes that can be made? - How likely is it that you'll overlook the task when the time comes? (e.g. SSL cert expiration) - What are the costs of mistakes or failure to complete the task? - What skills can you learn while developing the automated solution? - How can techniques developed for the automated solution be reused for other tasks? Of course it's fair to ask questions on the other side of the equation, too, like: if the automated solution goes bad, or is run in the wrong environment, what are the risks?
• zbjornson 9y ago
  All of my thesis project in immunology was automated, which involved several hours of blood processing repeated several thousand times (with some parallelization) by a team of a dozen robots. There are pics, schematics and vids here: http://www.zachbjornson.com/projects/robotics/ http://www.zachbjornson.com/projects/robotics/. I also like to say that the final analysis was automated. It was done entirely in Mathemtica notebooks that talk to a data-processing API, and can be re-ran whenever. The notebooks are getting released along with the journal article for the sake of transparency and reprodibility. (Also, I automated my SSL cert renewal ;))
  • natch 9y ago
    Awesome. You should write a paper on your paper writing / research / automation / publication process, to help advance the way scientific publishing is done.
  • epmaybe 9y ago
    This is awesome. I work in a research lab that does a lot of bench work and imaging under microscopy. I think that automating some of these processes would greatly speed up the research being done!
• jessedhillon 9y ago
  I have a script that downloads bank and credit card transaction data, then applies rules to create a journal in GNU Ledger format.
  • tokenizerrr 9y ago
    Do you use an API? Or just scraping? I've done the same, but stopped using it. Afraid my bank, if they detect it, might not like it.
    • rb808 9y ago
      I want to do this too. Details would be handy. Even if its extracting data from PDF statements or saved HTML pages.
      • kensoh 9y ago
        Basically use a web automation tool to simulate the login process and then grab the data you want, save it to .csv file or something. For saved HTML pages, web automation tools generally can work with them. For saved PDF I'm not sure what is good.
      • tokenizerrr 9y ago
        I used CasperJS to download a specific CSV file, providing the chrome user agent. Then I used a simple NodeJS script to parse this.
    • kensoh 9y ago
      I did the same lol (via scraping), run every midnight to multiple bank accounts, then sync to google spreadsheet. I was writing web automation scripts the hard way for a while, until I made a tool to simplify the process of writing web automation scripts - https://github.com/tebelorg/TagUI https://github.com/tebelorg/TagUI (frankly I am surprised why my banks never banned or send me a letter)
      • dmak 9y ago
• dannysu 9y ago
  A bot for reserving hotel rooms. I wrote a bot to reserve hotel rooms a year in advance for a national park in the US. It was so difficult to book. After couple days of failed attempts to reserve my desired dates, and after staying up late into the night one day, I went ahead and wrote a bot to automate the task of checking for availability and then completing the checkout process once available. And... it worked.
  • mosselman 9y ago
    How does the bot reserve hotel rooms? Through an API or does your bot interact with a website. How do you validate that your code is still able to reserve an hotel room lets say 3 years after writing it; I can imagine that changing systems will break you code. Not trying to be a smart ass, just interested :)
  • 18nleung 9y ago
    Yosemite?
    • rprameshwor 9y ago
      A month before July 4th, i tried booking a camp site in Yosemite and got none. I should have known the camp sites gets completely booked 6-8 months ahead. When i called one of the camp sites, the automated machine replied - press 1 to book for this year press 2 to book for next year.
      • hammock 9y ago
        >A month before July 4th Ha. For a top-ten most visited park in the world? Walk-up permits are your friend. No experience at Yosemite but I got some backcountry permits at Grand Canyon, it helps if it's not peak season, I think people line up at 4am for those. Worst case you are posting up in a random field or Walmart parking lot for the night.
  • ethagnawl 9y ago
    Any chance you'd be willing to share it with us?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• ajarmst 9y ago
  I'm the kind of nerd who greatly prefers writing automation code to doing anything remotely repetitive. (I'm afraid to work out the actual timings because I'm pretty sure that I often spend more time coming up with the automation than just doing the task would take). I've got a script that automatically rips, converts and stitches together audiobooks from the library so that I can play them on my phone. It just beeps periodically to tell me to put the next CD in. I also had a batch job that downloaded Doonesbury cartoons (including some delay logic so I wasn't hammering the server) and built a linked series of html pages by year and month. I've ported it to a couple of other webcomics so that I can binge read. I also write a lot of LaTeX macros, doing things like automatically import and format code from a github gist into lecture notes (something like \includegist{C,<path/to/gist>), or autogenerate pretty PDF'd marks summaries for students from my home-rolled marks. database. Another thing I like is building little toys to demonstrate things for students, like a Mathematica page that calculated the convergence rate and error for the trapezoidal rule (numerical integration) with some pretty diagrams. I once wrote a bunch of lisp code to help with crypto puzzles (the ones that use a substitution code, and you try to figure out the original text). The code did things like identifying letter, digraph and trigraph frequencies, allowed you to test substitutions, etc. As developers, we tend to focus on these big integrated projects. But one of the biggest advantages that people who can code have is the ability to quickly get a general purpose computer to assist with individual tasks. I write an awful lot of code that only gets run a handful of times, yet some of those projects were the most pleasure I've ever had writing code.
  • glaberficken 9y ago
    >(I'm afraid to work out the actual timings because I'm pretty sure that I often spend more time coming up with the automation than just doing the task would take). You can use this calculator to estimate how much time is worth investing in automating a particular task =) https://c.albert-thompson.com/xkcd/ https://c.albert-thompson.com/xkcd/
  • teddyh 9y ago
    > I've ported it to a couple of other webcomics so that I can binge read. Maybe this can save you some trouble: https://www.comic-rocket.com/help/archive-binge/ https://www.comic-rocket.com/help/archive-binge/
• fenesiistvan 9y ago
  Support tickets integrated with service monitoring. Around 3 years ago, we started to get a lot of customers for our VoIP tunneling solution, mostly from UAE. Most of these were unfriendly customers abusing our support, so I started to implement a CRM to track "support points". I spend a half year to develop this solution (with lots of other functionality such as service monitoring) and when I finished, there was no any demand for the VoIP tunneling solution anymore :) This is how I wasted half year instead to focus to solutions relevant for our business. Thanks good, we started to have new customers again since last year and actually my CRM/support point tracking software is very useful now, but I still don't think that it worth’s 6 months’ time investment. Conclusion: focus on your main business and don’t spend too much time with automation and other helper software (or hire somebody to do it if your business is big enough)
• koala_man 9y ago
  Backups.
  • tombrossman 9y ago
    Yes! Everything else in this thread is interesting but without automated backups it's all just temporary. I would add that it's a good idea to automate backups using more than one method as well. For example, use a popular software package but also copy important stuff to an extra drive. A cheap setup with a Raspberry Pi + USB drive plugged in to your router will do just fine.
    • apexalpha 9y ago
      I do this. I have a 24/7 on RPI at my parents' house for blocking ads and tracking. I just added a 2TB USB hard drive and set it up to sync everything at night when the line is idle anyway.
  • kensoh 9y ago
    I was kinda like a backup freak for my PC, but once I got starting using cloud drives like google drive, it kinda takes care of the problems of hard-disk failures (which are definitely bound to happen every couple/few years).
  • spydum 9y ago
    Untested backups are a problem, though.. Now automating Radom file restores and checksumming is a great idea...
• The_Notorious 9y ago
  Find yourself a configuration management server such as Puppet, Chef, CFEngine etc, and learn to automate system deployment and management with it. I use Puppet CE as my main automation tool. Use Python/Shell for tasks that are not well suited for a configuration management server. Usually, this is when procedural code makes more sense than the declarative style of Puppet manifests. Interactive "wizards" (i.e. add domain users accounts to a samba server, and create home directories for them) and database/file backups are my usual uses for these types of scripts. Fabric is a useful tool to use with python. It allows you to send SSH commands that you put into functions to groups of servers in bulk. I also use python for troubleshooting network issues. It has libraries to interact with all manner of network services/protocols, as well as crafting packets and creating raw sockets. Look into PowerShell if you work in a Windows environment. Everything from Microsoft is hooked into PowerShell in their newer versions.
  • tchaffee 9y ago
    I evaluated Puppet, Chef, and Ansible and Ansible was by far the easiest for me to learn. My favorite thing I use it for is my personal laptop setup. I can go from clean Ubuntu install to having all the software I use along with system settings all perfect within an hour, without me being involved.
    • dozzie 9y ago
      It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. You haven't learned anything beside new punctuation and keywords. Ansible is basically a glorified shell script executed semi-interactively through SSH. It doesn't exhibit a new paradigm in server management by any stretch. CFEngine, on the other hand, shows a whole another way to approach managing systems, and thus it's quite hard to learn (akin to learning Prolog or Coq after writing in Java). Puppet stems from that, but then slaps on top of that many weird and possibly unnecessary concepts, without much of an apparent plan or strategy, so it ended up a mess. Chef is a Ruby framework and some tooling around it, so no wonder it's more difficult to deploy than shell scripts through SSH.
• dqv 9y ago
  A PBX that only let's you record voicemail greeting by dialing in and listening to the whole greeting before it can be saved. So... recording their greeting would take a good 15 minutes if they mess up and have to start over. I wrote a simple lua script for freeswitch that dials the line, follows the prompts, and plays the person's greeting to the PBX. Of course, one day, the damn PBX will be replaced by freeswitch.
• hacker_9 9y ago
  My build process.
• wslh 9y ago
  Designing and developing UIs. I want to develop web UIs like you develop UIs with Visual Studio or Xcode. I cannot believe how much efforts we need to build and modify web experiences.
  • herbst 9y ago
    It's funny because I can't believe how much effort some people spend to build guis in graphical editors. Guess it's a preference thing
• venins 9y ago
  I have small Python bot which calls me and my friend when Bitcoin price touch set price.
• shade23 9y ago
  - Downloading a song of youtube, adding meta data via beets and moving to my music lib - Adding tasks to my todolist client from every app I use(including my bookmarking service when I bookmark with specific tags) - Changing terminal colours based on time of the day(lower brightness in the evenings and hence dark colours, too much sunlight in the mornings and hence solarized themes) - Automatically message people who message me based on priority(parents immediately/girlfriend a longer buffer). - Filters on said messages incase a few require my intervention - Phone alerts on specific emails - Waiting for a server which you were working with to recover from a 503(happens often in dev environments) and you are tired of checking every 5 seconds: Ping scripts which message my phone while I go play in the rec area. - Disable my phone charging when it nears 95% (I'm an android dev and hate that my phone is always charging) - Scraping websites for specific information and making my laptop ping when the scenario succeeds(I dont like continuously refreshing a page) I dont think several of these count as automation as opposed to just some script work. But I prefer reducing keystrokes as much as possible for things which are fixed. Relevant to this discussion:Excerpt from the github page >OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that. https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts
  • mediocrejoker 9y ago
    > - Automatically message people who message me based on priority(parents immediately/girlfriend a longer buffer). I'm curious what these automatic messages say. Are you talking about something like an answering machine message? "I'm at home but my phone hasn't moved in 20 minutes so I'm probably in the shower"?
    • nvr219 9y ago
      Imagine if Archer could make elaborate text message pranks. Leave it!
  • ateevchopra 9y ago
• fest 9y ago
  Tracking packages so I could batch my trips to post office. Simple web interface where I have a list of packages I've ordered with the last status update from post service web tracking for.
  • bald 9y ago
    cool, what API are you using for getting the tracking information?
    • fest 9y ago
      Haha, API :) I'm glad my national post office provides that data at all via their website.
• profpandit 9y ago
  This is a great question. The PC has been around for a long time now. For the most part, users/developers have been sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the tool and app gods to rain their blessings. This question begs the need to be proactively involved in the process of designing how you use your PC
  • kensoh 9y ago
    Same sentiments. In the beginning, the user and developer of the PC is the same person. I just feel that there are so much untapped computing power waiting for people to tell the computers to go do intelligent things.
    • profpandit 9y ago
      Right. Early PC apps were developed by developers mostly for the developer community and PCs were used mostly by developers themselves as a cheap replacement for workstations. When they started proliferating in the end-user space and experienced exponential growth in volumes, innovation took a back seat and commercialisation drove the chariot. Now that everyone's become rich, we need to get serious again about making it a lot more useful. Automation would probably be the first area I would address in that endeavor since the capabilities of the PC are now quite robust.
    • sotojuan 9y ago
      We definitely use a lot of computer power - to run Electron apps :-)
      • TeMPOraL 9y ago
        It definitely is an automation of tasks - it automates away you having to be concerned with multiple platforms, at the small cost of wasting computer power of all of your users.
  • mapster 9y ago
    just to think one of the big breakthru ideas on how to use a 64k home computer was recipe indexing.
• patd 9y ago
  Most of my side projects have been about automating the little things that end up taking me a lot of time. At my first job, part of my work (next to junior dev) was to deploy EARs on Websphere. I automated it so that people just had to drop it on a shared folder and I'd just take a look if it failed to install automatically. I wrote a command-line tool to search and download subtitles https://github.com/patrickdessalle/periscope https://github.com/patrickdessalle/periscope I made a browser plugin to compare the price of the European Amazon and a few other websites (it grew to more countries and websites) http://www.shoptimate.com http://www.shoptimate.com And now I'm working on a tool that regularly checks if some of my content is getting adblocked because it's something I periodically do by hand http://www.blockedby.com http://www.blockedby.com In the end, automating things can take more time than actually doing it. But if it's used by others and saves them time as well, it's gratifying.
  • iamwil 9y ago
    What is EARs?
    • jpitz 9y ago
      It is a file format for java applications designed to run on J2EE servers like JBOSS, Websphere, Weblogic, etc. It is a zip file with conventions on certain files and folders in the package. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAR_(file_format) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAR_(file_format)
  • assafmo 9y ago
    Definitely going to try periscope. Thanks!
• rcarmo 9y ago
  - Data pipelines (as seen elsewhere here) - Anything related to infra (I do Azure, so I write Azure templates to deploy everything, even PaaS/FaaS stuff) - Linux provisioning (cloud-init, Ansible, and a Makefile to tailor/deploy my dotfiles on new systems) - Mail filing (I have the usual sets of rules, plus a few extra to bundle together related e-mails on a topic and re-file as needed) - Posting links to my blog (with screenshots) using Workflow on iOS - Sending SMS from my Watch to the local public transport info number to get up-to-the minute bus schedules for some pre-defined locations (also using Workflow) - Deploying my apps on Linux (I wrote a mini Heroku-like PaaS for that - https://github.com/rcarmo/piku https://github.com/rcarmo/piku) - Searching for papers/PDFs on specific topics (built a Python wrapper for arxiv/Google/others that goes and fetches the top 5 matches across them and files them on Dropbox) - Converting conference videos to podcasts (typically youtube-dl and a Python loop with ffmpeg, plus a private RSS feed for Overcast) Every day/week I add something new. (edit: line breaks)
  • Frank2312 9y ago
    Maybe you should automate your line breaks :)
  • forg0t_username 9y ago
    > Searching for papers/PDFs on specific topics (built a Python wrapper for arxiv/Google/others that goes and fetches the top 5 matches across them and files them on Dropbox) Any chance you would post your code? This looks interesting, especially if it integrates sci-hub/libgen
  • bhalperin 9y ago
    > private RSS feed for Overcast I for one would be interested in reading more about how you set this up!
• jf___ 9y ago
  carving up marble with industrial robots https://vimeo.com/94076571 https://vimeo.com/94076571 Cad -> robot code compiler is built on top of pythonocc
  • megraf 9y ago
    Coolest answer here IMO.
  • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Interesting, do you have more information about what you're doing there?
  • anfractuosity 9y ago
    Wow, that's fascinating. On the pulley cutting mechanism, what kind of material is being used to cut the marble? Never seen anything like that before!
  • TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    Very nice. :)
• SirLJ 9y ago
  Stock market trading systems, so I don't have to watch screens, also backups and also constantly improving monitoring for smooth operations
  • kensoh 9y ago
    I used to write trading systems for Amibroker. This one signaled the 2009 march bull market in equities and oil. But it is a swing/longterm trading system. I was a daytrader so it is not really useful for that. https://github.com/tebelorg/Tump/blob/master/trading_z.js https://github.com/tebelorg/Tump/blob/master/trading_z.js
    • SirLJ 9y ago
      Thanks, Looks very interesting, my hobby is to back test different trading systems, so I will take a more deeper look into it next week...
      • kensoh 9y ago
        Have fun! This one is a trend-following system for swing/position trading. It hasn't been backtested to factor new market behavior for the last 6-7 years, so it'll probably do badly now. My failure was not being able to convert that for daytrading timeframe. PS: anyway, sorry for digressing away from the topic of the HN thread lol
    • dmak 9y ago
      Reading into this, and this seems pretty dense. Any suggestions for beginners who are Software Engineers but need more explanation in this domain?
      • kensoh 9y ago
        The trading domain knowledge can be found from various online resources. I used to make a 200+ slide powerpoint on the technical analysis aspect of trading but it is probably irrelevant now as markets had changed much since the introduction of algorithmic and high-frequency trading. I was writing that script for Amibroker platform (https://www.amibroker.com https://www.amibroker.com) but I believe the market leader is probably something like MetaTrader (https://www.metatrader4.com https://www.metatrader4.com). Also, for developers or software engineers familiar with Python, Quantopian might be something you'll enjoy using (https://www.quantopian.com https://www.quantopian.com).
• natch 9y ago
  Many things. Trivial one, recently wrote a script to electronically sign six documents from my divorce and related tax paperwork using ImageMagick. Just to avoid having to do it with Gimp or Preview or some other GUI tool, and then re-do it when there are revisions. Yes there are online tools but I'm working with people who don't use those, nor do I want to upload these documents anywhere I don't have to. Often I'll spend as much time writing an automated solution as it would take to do the task manually, even if I'm only going to run the automated solution once. The work is way more fulfilling, and I can fix mistakes easier, and can learn and develop new techniques.
• abatilo 9y ago
  A little different than what other people are doing, but I have tried to automate my savings. I use Mint to figure out what my budgets for things should be, then I use Qapital to automatically save the money I didn't spend but was budgeted.
• kensoh 9y ago
  I automate as much as possible the tasks involved in coding web automation scripts - https://github.com/tebelorg/TagUI https://github.com/tebelorg/TagUI
• paultopia 9y ago
  Scraping and compilation of various annoying web content formats, with varying levels of efficacy -- e.g. https://github.com/paultopia/scrape-ebook https://github.com/paultopia/scrape-ebook for open source PDF chapters and https://github.com/paultopia/spideyscrape https://github.com/paultopia/spideyscrape for readthedocs-esque formats. iCloud documents edited on iOS -> versioning and shoving in a private github repo -- https://paultopia.github.io/posts-output/backup-to-git/ https://paultopia.github.io/posts-output/backup-to-git/ CV updates via template to HTML, latex, and docx
• vgchh 9y ago
  1. Code formatting - gofmt for Go, Google Java Format for Java 2. Code Style Enforcement - golint, govet for Go, CheckStyle with Google Style for Java
• Toast_ 9y ago
  I'm aggregating flash sales and sending post requests to azure ml using huginn. It's a work in progress, but huginn seems to be working well. Also considering giving nifi a go, but the setup seems a bit over my head. https://github.com/huginn/huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn http://nifi.apache.org http://nifi.apache.org
  • udkl 9y ago
    What are you doing with the data in Azure ML ? What is your experience with Azure ML ? How does it compare to the ML offerings from AWS ?
    • Toast_ 9y ago
      I'm ranking the sales based on their title. Azure makes it dead simple to use your trained model as a web service. I'm not familiar with aws, I just sort of fell into incorporating ml to my project, and since I'm in bizspark, everything that I'm doing is free. Another solution I'm considering is using prediction.io for the webservice. http://predictionio.incubator.apache.org/index.html http://predictionio.incubator.apache.org/index.html
• greggman 9y ago
  In the past I've always automated exporting from Maya, 3DSMax and Photoshop, meaning I don't require artists to export from either. The artist saves the source file in the project, tools build from that to the final format for the app/game. The more typical workflow is that artists export .JPGs or .PNGs manually from Photoshop and somewhere else save their .PSD files. Similarly with 3SDMax or Maya they'd manually export using some plugin. That seems wasteful to me and error prone. Source files get lost. Artists have to maintain multiple versions and do the export manually which seems like a huge waste of time. So, I automate it.
  • maccard 9y ago
    I learned this one the hard way. It makes sense though, submit the source not the output (as we do for source code).
• Huhty 9y ago
  MY team and I run a reddit/HN-like community platform called Snapzu and we automate most (90%) of our social media channels. We have 15 main categories, each with their own Twitter, Medium, WP, Blogger, etc. Here's an example of our science Twitter account: http://twitter.com/@Snapzu_Science http://twitter.com/@Snapzu_Science
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• nurettin 9y ago
  In my city, there are many stadiums which cause traffic congestion during rush hours. I made a scraping bot which tells me if there's going to be traffic on my designated routes the next day. Going to try making it an app and see if it's any useful to others.
  • fma 9y ago
    For sure. I live in Atlanta and basically the stadiums are smack in the middle of high traffic interstates. I believe Waze does already, but even viewing it for the work week would be nice. For example, those who have a few days to work from home can pick the days there are games and major events. Luckily I do not pass by those stadiums on my way to work.
  • juancampa 9y ago
    Relevant for people working/living in SF: http://www.isthereagiantsgametoday.com/ http://www.isthereagiantsgametoday.com/
    • el_benhameen 9y ago
      Haha, I guess my isthereapadreshomegametoday.com wasn't as uniquely clever as I thought.
    • mapster 9y ago
      would like to know if the Sonoma Raceway is having an event for highway 37 too.
• sawmurai 9y ago
  Commit hook that aborts commits if the projects code style is violated by one of the changes/added files
  • avh02 9y ago
    I can't say this often enough: http://pre-commit.com http://pre-commit.com (minor disclaimer I've contributed a hook but not major source)
• sergiotapia 9y ago
  Download media. I have Sonarr+Radarr+Plex. I don't spend much time looking for media. Code reviews. Using something like CodeClimate to automatically check code quality before anyone actually reads the code.
  • jriese 9y ago
    How do you think Radarr compares to Couchpotato? Considering making the switch, since Sonarr has been fantastic.
    • jbmorgado 9y ago
      It shows promise but it's still a bit in its infancy. It lacks (or lacked a couple of months ago when I last tried it) functionality that I deem indispensable, like putting and importing all the movies from the same directory (it wants - or wanted - every movie to be in its own directory). Also, it uses a lot more memory. Which is probably fine for most people, but since my little server only has 1.5 GB RAM, it really makes a difference for me.
• ehudla 9y ago
  Preparing purchase form for university library and letting me know when books I order become available. https://github.com/ehud/Library https://github.com/ehud/Library
  • fatihky 9y ago
    Discalimer: I am working for uptime robot as a freelancer. Hi, if it fits, uptime robot[1] has keyword monitor type. I think you may use this monitor type to track book pages(for ex you use "available" as keyword). It is free for 50 monitors. [1] https://uptimerobot.com https://uptimerobot.com
• MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  In 2003 I had a perl script to query the job boards for keywords , scrap the result and send out an application email with CV attached to it (I took care to send one application to a single email). I think this was a legitimate form of spamming - at that moment the local job market was very bad.
  • andai 9y ago
    Tool-assisted job hunting!
  • fma 9y ago
    Funny. I think Amazon does that on LinkedIn when trying to find applicants :) Except they don't take care to send one email per person.
  • singold 9y ago
    That's cool, did you manage to get a job that way back then?
    • MichaelMoser123 9y ago
      positive. Also I think to have mentioned it at the interview, it seems to have made a good impression on at least one interviewer.
• bearton 9y ago
  I automate legal documents usings Advobot (advobot.co), a messenger based chatbot that walks you through drafting legal documents. It makes drafting legal documents easy and conversational and is much faster than traditional methods. I can also use it from my phone, which makes drafting legal documents on the go much easier. advobot.co/web
• borntyping 9y ago
  Anything I have to do more than once. If I have to do it a second time, I'll probably have to do it a third..
• ghaff 9y ago
  I wrote a little script [1] to automate a lot of the steps associated with publishing a podcast. There's still manual work but this takes care of a lot of the fiddly repetitive detail work that's both time-consuming and error-prone. Especially if I do a batch of podcasts at an event, this is a lifesaver. [1] https://opensource.com/article/17/4/automate-podcast-publishing-python https://opensource.com/article/17/4/automate-podcast-publish...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• dhpe 9y ago
  I need to upload invoices every month from all ~20 SaaS products I subscribe to an accounting software. Most of the invoices can be just redirected from email to another SaaS that will let me download a zip file containing all invoices from a date range. Other software requires me to login to the product, navigate to a page and download a PDF or print an HTML page. I have browser-automated all of these laborious ones as well so everything will be in that zip file. Saves me 30 min monthly and especially saves me from the boring work.
  • agopaul 9y ago
    I've been thinking about automating this myself. Which Saas is it? ("another SaaS that will let me download a zip file containing all invoices from a date range.")
    • dhpe 9y ago
      http://www.omnireceipt.com/ http://www.omnireceipt.com/
• edwilson 9y ago
  i wrote little sync script to my server. it is save my mysql backups to google drive.
• nfriedly 9y ago
  Paying all of my bills. All of them. My bank (Fidelity) can connect to most bigger companies to have the bills automatically sent to them and then they automatically pay it (with an optional upper limit on each biller). For other bills, I got all but one to put me on "budget billing" (same amount each month, so Fidelity just sends them a check for that amount without seeing the bill). For Windstream, which varies by a dollar or two each month, I just send them an amount on the upper end and then let a credit accrue. Both of these require an update maybe once a year or so. Windstream is a bit funny - I don't know why they can't pick a number and stick to it. Also, they apparently raised my "guaranteed price for life" a couple of times and didn't notify me until ~8 months later when they were threatening to disconnect my service for being more than a month behind. (They had turned off paper billing on my account but didn't actually enable e-billing - service still worked so I didn't even think about it. We eventually got it straightened out, but Windstream is ... special.) Beyond that, I made a bot that automatically withdrew Elance earnings to my bank account (that got me banned for a week or so when I posted it to their forum). I made another bot that bought and sold bitcoins and litecoins and such. It was moderately profitable until my exchange (criptsy) got hacked and lost all of my float (worth ~$60 USD at the time.) I connected an Arduino IR blaster to my TV to make it automatically turn on my sound bar (the TV would turn it off, but not on?!) - http://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2015/01/samsung-tv-turn-on-soundbar-with-arduino/ http://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2015/01/samsung-tv-turn-on-... Oh, and of course, code tests and deployment. Nearly every git commit I make gets a ton of tests, and for most projects, each tag gets an automated deployment to to npm or bluemix or wherever.
  • noja 9y ago
    > Paying all of my bills. All of them. What kind of bills? Like grocery bills? or recurring bills? Aren't you using direct debits/standing orders/credit cards for those?
    • nfriedly 9y ago
      Everything that's recurring: mortgage, electricity, insurance, internet, iphone payment plan, etc. My wife handles our groceries and such. We actually have two separate accounts: "mine" gets the paycheck, pays the bills, and transfers money to "hers" twice a month. We also have a third "giving" account that gets a bit of money set aside to give to or buy things for other people. This can be anything from a car repair to just buying someone lunch. Direct debit is fine if you trust the other side not to screw up and charge too much, leak your credentials, etc, but I've seen exactly that happen several times. You're basically giving them to withdraw as much as they want from your bank account.
• olalonde 9y ago
  I recently had to frequently create private git repos for job candidates (containing a coding challenge). I built a simple web app that does it all in one click (as a bonus, my non-technical co-founder can also use it). https://i.imgur.com/HhQP4lX.png https://i.imgur.com/HhQP4lX.png
• ASipos 9y ago
  Downloading fan fiction from fanfiction.net I have written a Python script that builds a HTML out of all chapters of a given fan fiction and then calls Calibre to convert it to MOBI for my Kindle. Unfortunately, my life doesn't have too many automatable aspects... (I am a math researcher.)
• kvz 9y ago
  Since I have a toddler in longing for a house with a garden which starts ar 800k EUR in pleasant neighborhoods in Amsterdam now, which is above my paygrade. So i wrote a script that compares surrounding towns on a number of metrics (4+ rated restaurants per citizen for instance) and let's me know when there are houses for sale with a garden facing south (or north but only if it's sufficently long that we are likely to enjoy some sun (10m+), etc. So far this has not resulted in us buying a house and the hours that went into the project would have probably long paid for a good real estate agent :)
  • erezsh 9y ago
    Interesting! Any chance you might make the script public?
  • georgecarlin 9y ago
    This is rly cool
  • hazelnut 9y ago
    Great idea. Never thought about it but why not to find the perfect place. The time will come and you'll find your space.
  • ObeyTheGuts 9y ago
    Now u ma brother are tru reptilian
  • cerberusss 9y ago
    At the moment, you will not successfully find a house without paying a realtor. They can view entries into the Funda(1) database before they're publicized. Source: acquaintained photographer who exclusively works for realtors. (1) Funda.nl is a real estate website that more or less has a monopoly in The Netherlands.
  • leksak 9y ago
    Is it general purpose enough to be used outside Amsterdam with minor modifications?
• saimiam 9y ago
  My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated. It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on what's important to me.
  • abeinstein 9y ago
    How do you automate these?
    • tmnvix 9y ago
      Habit probably.
    • saimiam 9y ago
      For breakfast, I decided to stop trying different cereals and stick to oatmeal. Been a horse for about 2 years now. Same with lunch - find 5 reasonable choices in the office caf, repeat. For work clothes, I have 5 decent combos which I repeat M-F. Doesn't bother me to repeat. Helps that I'm a dev so I'm always Feynman-ing myself away from unnecessary meetings and face time with business side clients. For commute routes, I watched my phone's gps for a few weeks, tried different routes, seeded new ideas for routes and detours by brute forcing options into the backend and now I can consistently get home within 50 mins of leaving work which includes driving down a few floors of parking at 10-15 mph. I used to take anywhere between 45-90 minutes before. Plus my mpg is usually at a respectable 26-28 mpg for a midsize sedan. Hope this helps.
  • raitom 9y ago
    I never thought about automate those things. That's a cool idea! I can use the yelp api for lunch, some rfid chips for my clothes,...
  • Ant59 9y ago
    It would be very interesting to know how you've gone about automating those things.
• probinso 9y ago
  I automate things that a computer can do
  • robobro 9y ago
    very informative
• arikr 9y ago
  Great thread, thanks OP.
• spinlock 9y ago
  I've automated deployment of my side project. When I merge a pr in github to master it will pull the new build and restart any process that's changed.
• fantispug 9y ago
  I automated my wedding seating cards and plan. I managed invitations as a CSV (who had been invited, who responded yes and no, addresses and dietary requirements). I designed the placecards and seating plan as SVG in inkscape with special text I used as {templating parameters}. I could then produce all my place cards and seating plan from a simple simple script. This was handy when guests changed their RSVP a week out from the wedding when I had little free time and I could make a change instantly. (Although admittedly I spent more time getting the layout right for the seating chart than if I had done it by hand).
• agopaul 9y ago
  I setup crawlers to make specific queries on various website. I used them in the past with: - used car dealer websites - job posting boards (found a job a few years ago with that) - craiglist-like websites - coupon websites (looking for sushi restaurant deals) - etc Also, not sure if that counts, but I have monit+scripts monitoring backups timestamps and DB replication
• patrick_haply 9y ago
  Time logging. I use one piece of software to track my time, then fan those time logs out into the various pieces of software that need to know about them.
  • raoulj 9y ago
    What software do you use to time log in the first place?
• hellbanner 9y ago
  It's really simple; I automate creating builds for the game www.QuantumPilot.me rm -rf ./QuantumPilot* rm -rf ./QuantumPilot* electron-packager ~/ele/electron-quick-start/ QuantumPilot --platform=all --icon=/Users/quantum/Desktop/QuantumPilot.icns open . for some reason, OSX has trouble deleting the Linux folder the first time. I've heard Itch.io has a CLI for this but I haven't tried it yet. https://github.com/itchio/butler https://github.com/itchio/butler
• Axsuul 9y ago
  I automate filtering my RSS feeds, or creating a weekly digest of emails that are not priority (bank statement emails, receipts, etc), crawling certain pages that I need to monitor and creating new RSS feed items on updates, weekly digests of top Reddit posts for specific subreddits, monitoring flight deals that originate from my airport. I find that converting a lot of unimportant emails into RSS feed items has been a huge win for me.
• vira28 9y ago
  I use slack a lot for the communication. I have automated whenever there are significant events happen in our app, I will get notified. Its simple to implement. Configure the webhook. Also, I did things like getting notified whenever there is a commit, pull request or push in your source control.
• noiv 9y ago
  On the long run? All.
• blockchan 9y ago
  Transfering lead data to Salesforce from Intercom and Slack by sending simple messages like "SQL" or "email@example.com to sf" Receiving and sending documents to proofreading I described them in details here: https://www.netguru.co/blog/automating-myself-out-of-the-job-quick-automation-wins https://www.netguru.co/blog/automating-myself-out-of-the-job...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• prawns 9y ago
  Downloading porn and culling the old stuff. Currently automated management of over 100TB and growing!
• amingilani 9y ago
  Oh boy, sigh, I wish I could share something I just automated, it's insane. Like, everyone that sees it tells me it's pure genius. Problem is that it isn't ready to for the public. I'll do a show HN next week, but by GOD it is a brilliant piece of automation and scaling :P Soon (this is more for me than anyone else, i'm literally bursting with pride right now)
• noahdesu 9y ago
  I frequently wipe and install from scratch my Linux desktop and laptops. I've been spending more time recently working on setup scripts that automate as much of this as possible. Things like installing packages, setting up firewall, checking out code projects and installing dependencies. Currently this is mostly a bash script plus my dot-files, but I'm always looking for ways to improve this process.
  • nightmunnas 9y ago
    Ever since I completely tarnished my last linux install last fall I've been trying to adopt habits to fail safe my data and setup (mostly bash and choosing cloud storage for my data). I'd love to see those bash scripts if they are not too sensitive to your integrity/privacy. Here's how far I've come: https://github.com/GustavHenning/usefulBash https://github.com/GustavHenning/usefulBash
  • antoinealb 9y ago
    I personally do this using SaltStack. The biggest gain from Bash scripts are that Salt stack are idempotents, meaning you can apply them several time and Salt will figure out by itself the states that need changes. Chef, puppet or Ansible are also good options I heard.
• gottlos 9y ago
  Shopping list via Oscar, barcode scanner, open food facts Aircon via temp sensors and node-samsung-airconditioner still working on Owntracks/mqtt for useful automations on arrival home lights plus motion sensor, lihht color by time of day (red at late night to save vision)
  • teolemon 9y ago
    @gottlos : Would be curious to see your code/a demo of the stuff you built using Open Food Facts :-)
• swayvil 9y ago
  All conversations. In the case of f2f (face to face) I just let my phone run me like a peripheral.
• anotherevan 9y ago
  I read a lot of articles by saving them to Pocket and reading via my ereader. I wrote a little PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket and hn.algolia.com APIs that helps me to follow up on articles in related forums such as Hacker News and track my reading habits. Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.
• pisomojado_g 9y ago
  Library book renewals. I have an AWS Lambda function that runs daily, scrapes html from my public library (they have no API), and if a book is due within the next day, renews it. If I've reached max renewals, it sends me a notification.
  • Shelnutt2 9y ago
    Do you have this project hosted anywhere?
    • pisomojado_g 9y ago
      https://github.com/pisomojadogrande/fcpl-api https://github.com/pisomojadogrande/fcpl-api. Was a little weekend project, so not at all polished or documented, and only does a single account, but has a template where you could deploy it in your own AWS account. Also, the HTML scraping works only if your library is Fairfax Co., Virginia. But hopefully the pattern will be helpful.
• anotherevan 9y ago
  Wrote a program that tracks Australian movie release dates for movies I'm interested in. Sends a daily email if a release date moves, or there a new movies for me to flag my interest in. Interfaces with themoviedb.org for plot summary, cast and crew info and such. Interfaces with Google Calendar for writing entries for each movie I'm tracking.
  • joshschreuder 9y ago
    Would you be able to share or open source? I would be interested in something like this and have friends that would also.
  • leksak 9y ago
    Yes please share!
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • anotherevan 9y ago
      leksak: It is now available at https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule
      • leksak 9y ago
        Thanks!
  • anotherevan 9y ago
    Okay, seeing as you asked. https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule https://github.com/evmcl/movieschedule Let me know (or put in a pull request) if any of the instructions in the readme file are unclear. Hope you find it useful.
• welder 9y ago
  I automate my time tracking using https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com
• xcubic 9y ago
  In Lausanne, Switzerland, it's very difficult to find an appartement because there are too few appartements for too many people and it mostly follows "First-come, first-served". So I created scrappers for 3 websites + 1 facebook group. It simply looks for apartments with my specifications and notify me when a new one comes up. I can say, I successfully found an apartment. The whole process usually takes at least 3 months, I did it in 1.
  • modarts 9y ago
    Sounds like you've got a business in hand
    • xcubic 9y ago
      I do. I'm planning on going forward with it.
  • darndt 9y ago
    I had the same problem to find an apartment in Zurich and started scraping several websites to automate the process. The tool is at https://www.immomapper.ch https://www.immomapper.ch perhaps you find it useful.
• webscalist 9y ago
  restart all things every night.
  • cpncrunch 9y ago
    What do you need to restart? I tend to leave things running...I used to reboot my servers once a year, but now I'm not sure I'll even bother with that.
    • webscalist 9y ago
      Many apps in this shop have some sort of error handling that puts apps to a weird state. Restart works while developers debug what's going on for months. I tend to propagate errors and let supervisor handle failing apps. But it's the way it is now.
• neya 9y ago
  I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time. For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce items, so I naturally tried out some of the plugins and was shocked at how long it took for me to get a simple task done. I had such a terrible experience that I'd never recommend it to anyone. Wordpress by itself is fine, but when you try to extend it, you face so many hiccups. That's when I realized there's no use blaming the tool. It's because of the differences in philosophies between me and the core Wordpress team. So, I naturally spent another 4 months writing a Rails app for this travel startup and still wasn't satisfied with my time to market. Clearly, there had to be a better, faster way? In essence, I realized every online startup requires these components: 1. Authentication / Authorization 2. CMS - To manage content on the site, including home page, landing pages, blog, etc. 3. Analytics - To help track pageviews, campaigns, etc 4. CRM - To manage a sales pipeline and sell to customers. Also to know very well who your customers really are. So, I went ahead and wrote this mammoth of an application in phoenix (using DDD's architectural patterns), that has all the modules above. Now, everytime I have an idea, I just login into my interface, setup the content and the theme/design and launch a campaign...bam! My idea is now live and I can test it out there on the market. You can think of it like a complete combination of all the startups out there: 1. Mailchimp - I can send unlimited emails, track opens, analyse them. Handled by my marketing module. I can customize the emails too, of course. 2. Unbounce - I can design my own landing pages. Handled by my CMS. 3. Buffer - I can schedule shares from within my interface based on best times by engagement. Handled by my marketing module. 4. Hubspot - My system has a full, hubspot/zoho clone of CRM. Here are some of the key highlights: 1. All my data is collected on BigQuery and I own it instead of sending to third parties. 2. There is no forced limitation on my marketing - For example, if you used mailchimp, you know you're limited to just 2000 recepients. If anything more, it quickly gets expensive. But my system is my own, no limitations whatsoever. 3. I can spend less time developing my idea and more time executing it. 4. I have my own custom business dashboard for each of my idea, that tells me how good/bad it's performing, so that I can turn it off when needed. Probably not the kind of automation you were expecting, but yeah. EDIT: Added more details.
• egypturnash 9y ago
  I am not a programmer, but I've automated a few things in my life. I self publish graphic novels. I have a script that runs on a directory full of page files and outputs a CSV in the format InDesign expects. I wrote it after manually editing a CSV and leaving a page out, and not noticing that until I had an advance copy in my hands and 400 more waiting to be shipped from the printer. That was an expensive learning experience. I like to rotate my monitor portrait mode sometimes, but hate trying to rotate the Wacom tablet's settings as well. So I have a script that does this all in one go. It used to try to keep track of separate desktop backgrounds for landscape and portrait mode, but this stopped working right, so I took that part out. I have a bunch of LIFX bulbs in my apartment. The one near the foyer changes color based on the rain forecast and the current temperature, to give me an idea of how to dress when going out, thanks to a little Python script I keep running on my computer. Someday I'll move it to the Raspberry Pi sitting in a drawer. I recently built a Twitter bot that tweets a random card from the Tarot deck I drew. I've been trying to extend it to talk to Mastodon as well but have been getting "request too large" errors from the API when trying to send the images. Someday I'll spin up a private Mastodon instance and figure out what's going on. Maybe. Until then it sits on a free Heroku account, tweeting a card and an image of its text about once a day. And does building a custom Wordpress theme that lets me post individual pages of my comics, and show them a whole chapter at a time, count as "automation"? It sure has saved me a lot of hassle.
  • TruthSHIFT 9y ago
    I have some news for you. You are a programmer.
    • egypturnash 9y ago
      If doing that stuff over about 4 or 5 years or so makes me a programmer, then I'm also a carpenter, because I've put together a few pieces of furniture over the same span.
      • kiith_naabal 9y ago
        My personal definition is that a programmer is someone who can write a computer program, and a developer is someone who writes computer programs for money. So you're a programmer, but not a developer. In the same way that you might be called a woodworker, but not a carpenter.
• xs 9y ago
  I just figured out how to use ansible and python to script out changing the passwords for all the network gear in the office. It uses a random password generator api https://passwordwolf.com https://passwordwolf.com to fetch a new password, changes it on everything, then sends me the new passwords. I'm changing passwords monthly now but it works so well that I might set it to weekly.
  • gkbrk 9y ago
    Using a password generator API sounds like a terrible idea from the security perspective.
• kogus 9y ago
  I do contract work for a few clients. I always automate the boring tasks of vpn'ning, firing up remote desktop, connecting to database servers, their email system, etc. Automating that is fiddly and tedious, but it's worth it because I can just click a button and get a menu of clients. I choose one, and in about 10 seconds my machine is ready to go on their work.
  • mod 9y ago
    I do this, more or less, with tmux & tmuxinator.
• ecesena 9y ago
  Tweeting. I suck at it. I started with a txt, which became a spreadsheet, which is becoming distrosheet.com. Sooo slooowly that the homepage still has stock cats&dogs images. The most upsetting thing is that I've got more than one person telling me "I like the homepage". My mental reaction was "wtf!?". </rant> Anyway, I still don't tweet much, but I'm getting there.
• foxylad 9y ago
  Easy - anything boring. "Boring" usually means repetitive and not mentally challenging, which to my mind is exactly what computers are for. Even if the task happens infrequently and the script takes longer than the task, automating it is worth the investment: - It prevents having to remember or re-discover how to handle the task next time. - It ensures the task is handled consistently. - It prevents potential manual errors. For example, on the financial side, my company runs bank accounts in five countries, each with different GST/VAT taxes. Over time, I've developed scripts that grab the mid-month exchange rates that our Internal Revenue service requires to be used; crunches downloaded bank transaction data into categories (including tax inclusion or not); and exports it all into a huge Google spreadsheet. This provides global and country balance sheets and profit and loss, and when tax reporting time comes for each country, a tab on the spreadsheet provides all the figures so filling returns is a five minute process. Occasionally the scripts will flag an unrecognised transaction, and rather than manually correcting this in the spreadsheet, I'll add a rule to the script so it is recognised next time. Cumulatively this probably took several tens of hours to code, but it means we don't need to employ an accounts clerk. It takes about fifteen minutes a month to download the bank data (manually - oh how I wish banks had APIs) and run the scripts. Our accountant loves this - the spreadsheet is shared with him, he can check our formulae or add other metrics, and he prepares our annual report an order of magnitude faster than any of his other clients.
• mxxx 9y ago
  I get a weekly newsletter with a bunch of music recommendations in it, which I had been manually adding to a Spotify playlist. So I recently wrote a CLI in Node that takes a URL and a CSS-style query selector (ie, '.album-title'), then scrapes the page, searches for each found instance and adds them all to a spotify playlist. github.com/markreid/scrapify
  • selfish-duck 9y ago
    That's awesome! I'm currently working on a similar thing using Pitchfork best new music, Gorilla vs Bear reviews and Needle Drop best tracks of the week + favorite albums of the month. Very clean code btw o/
    • mxxx 9y ago
      Cheers dude. I use the pitchfork best albums as an example in the readme because it's quite a simple one. Feel free to fork or borrow or contribute!
• imroot 9y ago
  My expense reports and timesheets. The three shittiest parts of my job every week are: - Approving timesheets - Entering in my timesheets - Entering in my expense reports I've written a script that goes in using a phantom.js script, and automates the submission of my timesheet on Friday afternoon at 3:00 +/- 15minutes. It now takes into account travel time, Holidays, and approving time if I have time approvals due. Same holds true for submitting expense reports in Oracle. I upload the receipt to Expensify, and as long as it's tagged properly in Expensify, it'll automatically generate the correct expense report in Oracle for the proper project based on the receipts in Expensify. This saves me, on average, about 6 hours a month.
  • techolic 9y ago
    17 years into the 20th century, and we are still filling timesheets.
    • boulos 9y ago
      21st century ;).
      • techolic 9y ago
        107 years then:D
        • dhruvkar 9y ago
          117 years :P
    • ryandrake 9y ago
      As incredible as it sounds, it seems to be common. 2 out of my last 3 (tech, software) jobs featured mandatory timesheet reporting for salaried employees. One of them even had a fingerprint scanner at each door you were required to use so that you didn't "cheat".
    • flukus 9y ago
      Time sheets are important to businesses for reasons I neither know or care about, the problem is that they're obviously a management responsibility but management always delegates it to every employee. I don't have a clue what is and isn't capitilizable and I don't want to know, I just want to do my work with the minimum paper work possible.
• simula67 9y ago
  Wishing my friends Happy Birthday on Facebook, with Birthday Buddy : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/birthday-buddy/ciljodcgjplloiacmjbngigeihcgdheb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/birthday-buddy/cil...
  • NumberCruncher 9y ago
    If someone would do the same to me I would write a bot to ask him to stop it.
• david90 9y ago
  I automate Stats of the products from Google Analytics using Google spreadsheet. By using appscript, I extract all key metrics such as activation rate/ retention rate from the raw data. Then when I need to report all stats of multiple product, there is another automated script for me to aggregate them. Saved me hours of context switching and copy and pasting.
• surfingdino 9y ago
  Saying "no" to meetings and interruptions. I have a box with a big "NO" written on top of it. Whenever someone comes by to ask me "how are you doing?" I tap the box.
• reddavis 9y ago
  I automated my dehumidifier. I wrote about it here: https://red.to/blog/2016/9/15/automatically-controlling-a-dehumidifier-with-anest https://red.to/blog/2016/9/15/automatically-controlling-a-de... and OS'd the Rails app: https://github.com/reddavis/Nest-Dehumidifier https://github.com/reddavis/Nest-Dehumidifier
• ldp01 9y ago
  Clicking! I wrote a powershell script for Windows which mimicks the autoclick functionality which Ubuntu has in it's accessibility options. I also added double/triple clicking by twitching the mouse a bit. It takes some getting used to but I feel it helps avoid forearm soreness.
• l0b0 9y ago
  Some of my own projects that I've ended up using frequently - you can see what they do from the command structure: mkgithub ~/dev/new-project fgit pull -- ~/*/.git/.. ~/dev/*/.git/.. ~/dev/tilde/.screenlayout/right-tack.sh And some less frequently used tools: mount-image ./*.iso vcard ~/contacts/*.vcf ~/dev/vcard/sort-lines.sh ~/dev/vcard/sorts/Gmail.re ~/contacts/*.vcf img2scad < example.png > example.scad indentect < "$(which indentect)" qr2scad < ~/dev/qr2scad/tests/example.png > example.scad schemaspy2svg ~/db So yeah, automate all the things.
• w3news 9y ago
  I write a browser extension so i dont have to click or type a lot on some websites. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickr/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickr/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickr/kbegiheknicgehkajcakeoadpbbpgbjj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickr/kbegiheknic... Also very usefull as web developer to test some javascript on a website.
• ibotheperfect 9y ago
  I was downloading beatport song by finding them from youtube. Then I decided to automate this. I wrote a code that finds them from youtube and download automatically. Finally I decided to make it a website so that everyone can use. www.beatportube.com
• raleigh_user 9y ago
  I automated pretty much all groceries & goods I use through a combination of Shipt and Amazon Subscribe and Save. Took a few hours one Saturday to compile list of everything I use and estimates on needing more but I genuinely enjoy not having to think about if I need toothpaste or if I have food for dinner
  • kingbirdy 9y ago
    How much of a premium does this run you vs shopping for yourself?
• EnderMB 9y ago
  My most proud "automation" was writing a bot that would play Farmville for me. I was at university, and Farmville was all the rage on Facebook. My girlfriend wanted me to play because it'd mean she'd be able to trade stuff with me or something (I forget why exactly), and I eventually caved in. After ten minutes of playing it, I was bored. I couldn't really judge people that would click plants hundreds of times, several times a day, though, because I played World of Warcraft. It was just a more interesting type of grinding... I figured out that in order to grind through the game most efficiently, I'd need to plant Tomatoes every two hours, so I wrote a bot that would: 1. Spin up a VM. 2. Open the browser to Farmville. 3. Open up an automated clicking application I had written that worked on Flash. 4. Find the outermost vegetable patch. 5. Click in a 20x20 grid (or however big the whole area was). 6. Replant, and close. I didn't tell my girlfriend about the bot, and I'd turn it off when I went to visit her, so she was shocked when she went on my farm to see that I was a higher level than her. I'd jokingly feign ignorance, saying that I was just playing it like her, until one day when I had left the script running and she saw my farm picking itself while I was studying.
  • vinchuco 9y ago
    Fun story: with an extremely slow internet connection (satellite) you could send valid requests to plow fields that allowed the otherwise impossible vertical farming
    • Andrenid 9y ago
      The only time ever my shitty Australian connection is a benefit.
• leoharsha2 9y ago
  I made a bot which tells what should I wear today depending on weather and the clothes that I have. It messages me every day at morning
• whiskers08xmt 9y ago
  Every robotic task tangially related to Auditing. I work with robotic task automation at one of the big 4, and it's really amazing how much trivial work that's being done by humans.
• ekzy 9y ago
  Last year I automated a bit of my dating by sending Tinder messages via their API. It worked, and this is how I met the woman I now live with :D http://jazzytomato.com/hacking-tinder/ http://jazzytomato.com/hacking-tinder/
• dmorin 9y ago
  Sometimes I see a lengthy text article that I tell myself I'll bookmark and read later, but I know I'm never going to read it. I much prefer audiobooks and podcasts. So I automated scraping the text from the article, piping it through text-to-speech, turning it into an MP3, and moving it to my phone so it shows up in my audiobook library. Next step is to make it an RSS feed so I can treat it like a podcast.
• mohsinr 9y ago
  I have small bash script which keeps checking for Internet, if my machine does not have live working internet, it sends a notification with alert (text + sound) "You are offline, you may read some books :)" and then it launches iBooks so I can do some reading when offline. PS. Also when Internet is back, it alerts again so I can resume online Work if I have to.
• asimpson 9y ago
  I love scraping websites, it's a stupid hobby at times, but I dig it (https://github.com/asimpson/nodejs-web-scraper-cookbook https://github.com/asimpson/nodejs-web-scraper-cookbook). A couple successful scraper projects: 1. I automated buying an iPhone 6 when it came out at the time with a scraper + Twilio for SMS notifications. 2. I setup a scraper to alert me when certain blue-ray titles were available to reserve at the library. 3. I found a site that posted full NBA replays the day after a game. I set up a scraper to on their RSS feed for a couple teams and uploaded the videos to S3. I've also automated notifications for when my sump pump gets flipped off. My sump pump is connected to a ground fault outlet which can rarely get flipped. I plugged in a spare raspberry pi to the same outlet and have my synology ping the IP periodically. If the synology can't find the pi it sends me a sms via twilio.
• fabianrios 9y ago
  my mac book pro is in german and the keyboard at the office when I plug it to the dock is in English so I created a script to detect when the mac is dis/connected to the dock and switch the language settings, small but proud of it.
• csabapalfi 9y ago
  BillGuard stopped in the UK and we don't have Mint.com so I decided to write my own personal finance tracker. It's not scalable as I only have scrapers for the banks I use but it was pretty simple to get to a basic setup.