Ask HN: Do you have personal bots? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#21

Post by creatornator » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

SenHeng wrote: post #14

yen223 wrote: post #13

I've got a bank account that offers bonus interest if I use the debit card five times within a month. I don't like to use debit cards, so I built a bot that automatically makes five $1 charges to that debit card.

Is the bonus interest worth $5/mth?

I don't think it would have to be worth $5/mo--if the debit card is charged to an account you own, you aren't losing anything by making that transaction, and you only gain the interest

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#22

Post by ethanpil » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:12 AM UTC

passivepinetree wrote: post #2

I only run a small one for kicks: it updates my github page with a dummy commit each day. They got rid of streaks, but I still leave it running out of some misplaced sense of sentimentality. A few years ago, a friend and I built one that would scan twitter for tweets in the vein of “like to win $ITEM” or “RT to win $ITEM.” Our bot would automatically perform the requested action, and then text me (via twilio) for eac…

What about your prize bot violated Twitter policy?

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#23

Post by ars » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:32 AM UTC

I have a bot that downloads and saves statistics from a game I play, and then plays a couple of the boring mechanical parts of the game.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#24

Post by ars » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 4:33 AM UTC

hkhanna wrote: post #17

I have a bot that polls my Airtable list of birthdays and if it is someone's birthday, it sends me a push notification via IFTTT at 7am that morning so I can call or text them first thing in the morning. https://github.com/hkhanna/birthday_notify

Wouldn't it be easier to just make a yearly repeating calendar entry with a reminder?

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#25

Post by seanwilson » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 5:04 AM UTC

I wrote a Chrome extension that checks websites for best practices:

https://www.checkbot.io/

It acts like a search bot does and gives SEO advice.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#26

Post by Hnrobert42 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 5:22 AM UTC

nunez wrote: post #18

Yes; several! I have a Ruby bot running in Lambda that forwards emails in my Gmail inbox that are tagged with a specific label to Expensify automatically. This saves me a LOT of time, especially since Expensify doesn't have this feature yet. I'm writing another small API on Lambda with Ruby that returns flight info from FlightAware in JSON format so I can use it with Tasker to do things like send travel updates on Wh…

Not a bot, but... you could have TripIt update your Google calendar. Then link Slack to the calendar. It will update your status when in a meeting. Not sure about other statuses.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#27

Post by winrid » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 6:21 AM UTC

Yes!! Bots are so fun to make and just have run. Like forever running rube Goldberg's machines :)

For over a year I had a Pi with a camera in a window at my Parents' house that took a photo every 15mins and uploaded to a server of mine. Then I had a mechanism to play back as a video. It was nice to watch the seasons go by while on the other side of the continent. They weren't very good at keeping it plugged in though.... Backend was in Play2/Scala since it was hip at the time and client in Python.

I worked on software for devices mounted on powerlines and had to build that functionality. That inspired me to have my own.

Have a Screeps bot in the top 20. About 40k lines of JS...

Working on a bot that can quickly connect you to a real person at https://watch.ly

Definitely want to build more. Following this thread for ideas. :)

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#28

Post by bobbean » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 6:22 AM UTC

SenHeng wrote: post #14

yen223 wrote: post #13

I've got a bank account that offers bonus interest if I use the debit card five times within a month. I don't like to use debit cards, so I built a bot that automatically makes five $1 charges to that debit card.

Is the bonus interest worth $5/mth?

Money can be exchanged for goods and services. Even if you don't use a bot, you could just buy like, 5 things you need.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#29

Post by jingw222 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 7:43 AM UTC

I built a Reddit daily digest bot. It grabs top posts from each of a pool of subreddits that I'm interested in and send them via email on a daily basis. It's a open source [side project](https://github.com/jingw222/redditdailybot).

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#30

Post by alltakendamned » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 7:47 AM UTC

A few, doing things like submitting every article/link I add to my Pocket list to archive.org to combat long-term link rot and scraping fund information to help me doing data analysis supporting my investment strategy.