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

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

#181

Post by rwiggum »

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 think you're wrong (yay!) about plaid's pricing.

My startup uses them, and we are very low volume, and we pay $1.50 for an auth and $0.30 / month for each active account we pull transactions from. Getting balance costs $0.10 / call though.

We signed up probably about 6 months ago.

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

#182

Post by dang »

tsss wrote: post #128
todd3834 wrote: post #2

I live in a condo complex with a dog and no lawn. We learned after getting our dog that this place doesn’t want dogs going to the bathroom on any of the common area (makes sense but annoying to dog owners). We used to get a small patch of grass delivered every week but it was a hassle to swap each time. Also it was disgusting by the end of the week. Then I discovered porch potty. Got the version that is hooked up wit…

This has to be the most pointless and wasteful thing I read about all week.

This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

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

#183

Post by fulafel »

xyst wrote: post #43
rsync wrote: post #8

I use cron to send myself birthday reminder emails: 0 0 9 11 * /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: Nov 9 is Marks birthday" me@mydomain.com Or just annual reminders or warnings I want to heed: 0 0 1 8 * /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: MAKE christmas St. Francis reservations NOW for good pricing..." me@mydomain.com Sometimes, instead of /usr/bin/mail, I use 'smsme' which is a small script that interfaces with twilio: /usr/local/b…

What’s wrong with reminder apps that are default with all smart phones?

Phone apps and phones themselves are temporary, not suitable for this timescale of things.

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

#184

Post by gorgoiler »

michaelfavia wrote: post #127
gorgoiler wrote: post #55

I have a folder on my mail server called “Dead”. If I move an email to that folder then all subsequent emails to the same address as the first one go into “Dead/Match”. It’s driven by procmail and a script. When used with one-off email addresses you get a behavior that’s like unsubscribing, but without having to trust any “unsubscribe” links or processes, and also without having to edit any config files (it’s all dri…

Until you book again at that hotel chain or third party agent like Priceline and never receive another email again right? I like the premise but the details seem like they would cause more trouble than the solution solves.

This would be true, but in practice I sign up with a brand new email address each time.

I am certainly missing out on loyalty / reward points, but I don’t travel often enough for it to matter.

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

#186

Post by bomberstudios »

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…

> Recently formed an agency with a few other automation devs who do similar stuff if you want to check it out: https://weautomatestuff.com

Would love to hear more about the business side of this, because this sounds like the ideal side project for natural born tinkerers!

It may be too soon in the project's lifetime for any insights, but if there's any wisdom nugget you can share it would be really nice :)

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

#187

Post by EarthlyFireFly »

Beware of the indulging in ease, avoiding labor and exertion, becoming habitually idle, lazy, inactive, as, an indolent man!

The use of manual labor is one which never grows obsolete. Manual labor is the study of the external world. Labor is God’s education. No separation from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself. (Emerson)

The simplicity of life, language, and habits empowers people, but luxurious lifestyle, pretentious language and effeminate habits lead to weakness and death. (John Ruskin)

It’s not by meeting your idle desires that freedom can be achieved, but, on the contrary, by freeing yourself from the desires. (Epictetus)

People are constantly looking for new entertainments and pleasures, hoping that way to quiet their worries and reach happiness. But this way they can't get satisfaction, because a man looking for his own pleasure is never satisfied: having received what he wanted, he is not settling down, but right away feels the new desires, which are not yet satisfied. (Tolstoy)

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

#188

Post by abhikb2005 »

Indian here who travels abroad (but within Asia) for work, and we need to submit a lot of documents along with a visa application (invitation letter from a colleague in the host country; NOC from the employer; tax returns etc.) for a business/work visa. The applications are the same, the data is (almost) the same, apart from the dates. So my friend built a small tool to automate the entire process. All we do now is

1. select the country that we are visiting from a dropdown 2. enter the dates that we will be arriving on and departing at 3. provide an itinerary is possible and click a button that says "magic"

And automatically all the necessary documents are emailed to the respective stakeholders (read HR and travel desk) in a snap. Otherwise, it is usually a 2-3 day process. Ask the travel desk for documents, email overseas colleague, email HR, collect all, print, write, scan, email, get them reviewed, edit/correct/modify/facepalm and finally submit.

We are now making a web app of it and putting it online.

P.S.: I realize that I might be a bit of an oddball here because it is possible that a USA passport doesn't require such mundane stuff.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

geocrasher wrote: post #13

My typing. In my work I tend to type a lot of the same things over and over again. So I automate that with AutoHotKey. Ctrl+Tab becomes RightAlt. Two words become entire paragraphs. Even simple things like "You're welcome" are just 'ywyw' or 'tyvm' becomes "Thank you very much". I know it sounds silly, but while trying to avoid RSI's, the less typing the better. I also use autohotkey to help me remember to Linux comm…

[deleted]
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