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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#141

Post by hammock »

saimiam wrote: post #124

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 w…

For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#142

Post by agopaul »

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

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#143

Post by ethagnawl »

dannysu wrote: post #17

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.

Any chance you'd be willing to share it with us?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#146

Post by kalleth »

nfriedly wrote: post #121
noja wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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…

This confuses me a little -- the UK has the direct debit guarantee which is incredibly ironclad. If I think something is funny, I call the bank and the money is back in my account immediately -- without argument or any reason required.

The DD is then cancelled and the company can argue with me, sure, but I get my money back.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#147

Post by hammock »

rprameshwor wrote: post #63
18nleung wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yosemite?

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.

>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.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#149

Post by rnet85 »

saimiam wrote: post #124

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 w…

How?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#150

Post by hellbanner »

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

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