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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

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Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#211

Post by dhruvkar »

beatthatflight wrote: post #208
dhruvkar wrote: post #21

>>my goodness, it'd be slow and potentially flaky all via the web UI for those sites Generally, I've had better luck using undocumented APIs for this kind of stuff. I was a heavy user of Selenium to automate many a task (I work in wholesale construction goods, tons of automations needed everywhere). But then discovered that using internal APIs (which surprisingly don't change much) is far easier than trying to except…

(Facepalm) I read your post. Paused. Opened up debugger on the site I'm currently selenium-ising. reloaded. boom. there it is. The request, and beautiful json response. So...so..so much simpler. Thank you, my evening is sorted ;)

Haha.. love it, I'm so glad it helped.

I had the same experience a couple years ago after spending months selenium-ing our ERP software.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#212

Post by shostack »

arafsheikh wrote: post #199
shostack wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you use Google Data Studio for it instead?

Thanks for the suggestion. Looks promising. Although it's not as polished as Tableau.

No, but has private dashboards for free and it is hooked into your Google account for easy import from Sheets and such.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#213

Post by gcarvalho »

Nannooskeeska wrote: post #198
johnflan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It surprises me how many people don't use a clipboard manager. I use PasteBot on the Mac.

I've had Ditto [0] on my PC for almost a year now, and I could probably count on two hands the number of times it's come in handy for me. Can you explain what is so great about having a clipboard manager? I feel like I'm missing something, and if it would become truly useful to me by using it a different way I'd like to learn. [0] https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/

It depends on your workflow. I sometimes find myself alt-tabbing multiple times to copy stuff over. Othertimes I accidentally overwrite my clipboard and lose some text that I was writing. Being able to recover it from the history is nice.

I use Pasteapp on macOS and FastKeys on Windows, which comes with other useful stuff, such as a shortcut for controlling volume by using the mouse scroll wheel on the right edge of the screen, macros, and a text-expander. The ones I use the most are:

ddate = 2020-02-18 ttime = 03:40:26 nnow = 2020-02-18 03:40:28 @@ = my email

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#215

Post by sobani »

soverance wrote: post #204
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too. That’a why they also provide an API. They are required by law to do so ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive ) > I don't think there's any bank in North America that requires 2FA to login to your online banking. This…

Bank of America only added 2FA as an opt-in option starting in 2017. It is most definitely not required... Law or not. I'm pretty certain it's the same way with every other major US bank.

@Aaargh20318 could've mentioned that he linked to the EU laws about banking.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#216

Post by sobani »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #187
derefr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A banking "statement" usually refers to a PDF you can download; the electronic version of the thing they'd previously send you by mail. The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too. > Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ? Yes, this is common in the US (a…

> The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too. That’a why they also provide an API. They are required by law to do so ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive ) > I don't think there's any bank in North America that requires 2FA to login to your online banking. This…

> > I don't think there's any bank in North America that requires 2FA to login to your online banking.

> This is required by the same law.

FYI: no bank has to follow EU laws in North America.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#217

Post by [deleted] »

iKlsR wrote: post #18

I have a slack workspace that has several bots, some listen for specific keywords and or phrases around the web and post to the relevant channels. Other bots remind me if I'm slacking off (maybe stayed a little too long on youtube), remind me of appointments, to drink water, if a stock price falls and some more. Also have filtered rss feeds for business and finance news etc. All of these bots also have custom identit…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#218

Post by kazga »

RHSeeger wrote: post #165
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #121

I use YNAB ( https://youneedabudget.com/ ), which requires inputting every one of your transactions by hand or importing them from your bank. The downside of the import is it takes a few days for the transaction to show up and you need to give YNAB your bank username/password, which I'm not comfortable with. I wrote this https://github.com/buzzlawless/ynab-live-import to import credit card transactions instantly with…

> you need to give YNAB your bank username/password I am constantly amazed by the people that are willing to do this for various value-added finance sites; people that I would normally consider sane. Unless your bank provides (and you used) a read-only account authentication, if something goes wrong and your money disappears from the bank, the bank is going to tell you to take a hike. I can't imagine taking this kind…

For me, the username/password gives you read-only access and any kind of transaction requires 2FA.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#219

Post by nikoksr »

Greatly simplified, accelerated and automated the creation of project directories.

I have always been annoyed by creating directories for new projects. Always the same procedure. Always the same commands. Always the same source files. So I wrote a small shell function which created C++ and Python projects for me. But after a few months I started to learn golang. And there I was again. Creating directories and files myself. But at this point the function could hardly be extended.

So I started to transform my shell function into a powerful and expandable go application. Learning go by starting a new project and solving a personal problem at the same time? Perfect!

Now a few months have passed and proji has become much more powerful and diverse. The templates it uses, which are called classes, are not bound to languages or anything like that, you can create a class for really everything. No matter how complex the class is, proji creates the project in seconds. Class configurations can be imported and exported, making it easy to share them with other users.

With the latest version of proji there is a new feature that takes proji to the next level. Proji can copy the structures of repositories on Github and Gitlab and import them as a class which you can use locally to create your own projects.

Additional features: Classes support shell scripts, template files to minimize the boilerplate code you have to write, ...

[ 1 ]: https://github.com/nikoksr/proji

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#220

Post by dylburger »

unixhero wrote: post #44
pravins wrote: post #43

Have you tried https://pipedream.com ? You can run Node.js (with any npm package) on webhook/http requests, emails and schedules for free. It also manages auth (including oauth token generation and refresh) for popular apps like Google Sheets, Discord, Slack and Airtable -- just use the auths object to reference tokens and keys in code.

Looks very promising! However the pricing is opaque. What will this cost me, if my business becomes successful and hit their free tier rate limits? https://docs.pipedream.com/pricing/

Hi, I'm a co-founder and engineer at Pipedream.

Paid tiers are coming soon, and if you hit our daily compute limit before that, we're happy to raise your limit to make sure your workflows run without issue.

Let me know if you have any other questions! Feel free to reach out to me directly at dylan [at] pipedream [dot] com.

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