Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#171

Post by beernutz » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #46

I use automatic bill pay and some scripts to fix video player settings, that's about it for full automation. A lot of things are semi-automated, as in I have a script / specialized software to handle them, but I still run them by hand. I have a paperweight suitable for holding down the enter key which comes in handy sometimes. I use the repeating events feature in Google Calendar a lot, that seems to mystify people w…

Just in case you might not be aware (this has caught me out):

Google Calendar repeating events has no way to set up a "repeat every x" (day,week,month,etc..) forever. It will stop after something like 1 year with no warning.

I use it for an important daily email reminder, and did not notice it had stopped until a day or two after.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#172

Post by skiman10 » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #86

zakn wrote: post #78

Shopping for groceries. I made a website which lets my wife and I pick recipes and any "one off" items we need for the week. The code figures out which ingredients it should buy (preferring organic / sale items) and then calls the "APIs" of our local grocery store's website to make the purchase. We then just have to pick up the pre-packed groceries on our way home from work. It costs $5 for the packing service, but i…

I've been thinking about doing the same thing, but I want to automate it in such as a way that it knows what food is still unused in the house. Haven't found a solution for that yet, but maybe with smart fridges and/or image recognition we're not far off. Unless the hn crowd knows an existing solution.

You could try scanning the UPC codes and saving those in a database. I guess then you would have to scan them again to remove them which could be tedious. Maybe that idea will spark some inspiration though.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#173

Post by jeromescuggs » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

geocrasher wrote: post #163

jeromescuggs wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you using it for remotely accessing linux boxes? mintty+wsl-bridge aka wsltty has really come a long way in a short time, and i'm beginning to use it even for remote work alongside using it for wsl. call me shallow but it really boils down to it looking far, far better when staring at a vim buffer for hours... i absolutely love mobaxterm, but there's alot of cases where it seems like overkill for my purposes. tha…

Yup, logging into web servers at work. I haven't messed with WSL much except for having a local Linux environment for local work. I have a home server for anything more serious than that such as hard drive recoveries and the like. I discovered Mobaxterm some years back and have stuck with it. It really is nice. While it may be overkill, I've had to do things like open up RDP on multiple boxes and wow... it Just Works…

mobaxterm helped me get serious about security when i ran the ssh server once and used the easy menu options to view who was knocking on my doors, and... man. people think the robocallers are persistent...

i did a little screenshot ( https://i.imgur.com/HndJDqg.png ) to demonstrate how far WSL has come - though i must admit i am using the paid ($10) 'pengwin/wlinux' distro that was built specifically for WSL, basically debian with some tweaks and a config menu not unlike the 'raspi-config' menu on an RPi. i would say that it has absolutely been worth it though. it will be some time before being able to install something from a debian repository, and then open it from my windows start menu, ceases to just leave me in awe.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#174

Post by lettergram » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

n4r9 wrote: post #98

lettergram wrote: post #9

1. I wrote a cron job to auto commit my code to their repos if I haven’t edited a file in 12 hours. 2. I started a while business getting news emails on more niche topics (works better than other services IMO): https://lettergram.net/ 3. Automated emails sent to customers thanking them for feedback. 4. Important emails are texted to me (as determined by my classifier)

How does 1 cope with branches? Also, do you never e.g. leave a piece of code commented out for a couple of days whilst fixing a related bug in a different file?

It’s what ever active branch I’m on. I do a branch per feature / issue, then merge to master. Not really a problem.

I also have all critical stuff setup to auto deploy after tests.

I’m a one man shop, everything has to be automated or I don’t have enough time lol

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#175

Post by ydnaclementine » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

I use tmuxinator to auto open my terminals and start my services in separate panes in tmux

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#176

Post by drdeadringer » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

Simple stuff so far.

* I have my browser automatically launch on boot-up [linux]. Saves me a click each time, xkcd's "is it worth the time" be darned in this specific instance for me.

* I have scripts that webscrape stock//etf//mutual_fund stock prices for personal financial tracking reasons. I just want the numbers, not all the hassle of getting the information for each stock//etf//mutial_fund for each financial house every single time.

* I have a mutable script to download a large swath of a podcast's episode archive so I don't have to "click and save" hundreds of individual episodes. Modify, execute, go take a shower or make lunch, come back and modify the metadata so it works on my .mp3 player.

... stuff like this. Nothing major, but "automating the pain away" type of thing.

Note: this is ignoring the "fun programming" I do for myself as per question.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#177

Post by dgudkov » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

simon1573 wrote: post #117

dgudkov wrote: post #93

Very mundane tasks but it saves me some time: * Automatically clean Windows desktop from garbage and temporary files that are older than 15 minutes * Download and parse Ngnix web-logs every day, extract notable events * Send myself email notifications about certain currency rates hitting certain thresholds * Backup certain folders on schedule * Pull data submitted by others from Google Sheets, export it into a databa…

> Download and parse Ngnix web-logs every day, extract notable events Would you mind expanding on this? Sounds interesting

Nothing extra-ordinary to be honest. The application has built-in tools for fetching weblogs over SFTP and creating business rules for parsing different types of events in the logs - e.g. downloading the installer, reading tutorial, etc. The events are then aggregated and inserted into a database that contains various historical metrics that allow me to get an idea about user engagement and trends. Visually designing the logic provides the advantage of flexibility - I can quickly experiment and fine tune the parsing algorithms and metrics without coding, as well as do ad hoc calculations in order to answer spontaneous questions.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#178

Post by jmcqk6 » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

shostack wrote: post #169

jmcqk6 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need to scrape Mint when it's just using Plaid?

My understanding from Plaid's somewhat confusing docs is that the Free tier gives transaction and balance data from cash accounts, but I need it from all of my asset accounts, which you seem to need to be on the $500/mo plan for. Since this is just for personal use, I can't really justify that. All I care about is monthly account balances and month ending amounts for historic months for ALL accounts (cash, assets, de…

I wish I could help, but it sounds like I misread in the other direction! I have not actually tried it out, it's on my list of todos. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#179

Post by rovr138 » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

simon1573 wrote: post #117

dgudkov wrote: post #93

Very mundane tasks but it saves me some time: * Automatically clean Windows desktop from garbage and temporary files that are older than 15 minutes * Download and parse Ngnix web-logs every day, extract notable events * Send myself email notifications about certain currency rates hitting certain thresholds * Backup certain folders on schedule * Pull data submitted by others from Google Sheets, export it into a databa…

> Download and parse Ngnix web-logs every day, extract notable events Would you mind expanding on this? Sounds interesting

You could check logreducer.

There’s another tool, but I can’t think of the name right now.

Re: Ask HN: What do you automate in your life and work?

#180

Post by erikhayton » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 12:36 AM UTC

dmak wrote: post #113

erikhayton wrote: post #49

I automate most things I do more than a dozen times. Marketing for my wife's uncle was a pain, so we automated CL and FB posts to fire from Quickbooks Inventory on a schedule. I'm full-time remote, so I have a spreadsheet that tracks my expenses from a google form, does currency conversions for my location and forex analysis to tell me the best day to pull money from an ATM, tells me how much I have to spend on food…

I would love to hear more about your trading scripts and your TA assessment. Which API do you use?

I write custom scripts for strategies, pulling data from places like Alpaca, IB, CCXT; charting using bokeh, plotly, mpl and other repos; zipline for backtesting... It really depends on the need; and the speed.