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Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#291

Post by deanmoriarty »

Probably it doesn’t count yet but I have a substantial spreadsheet (20+ sheets) that tracks all my financial life: net worth over time, expenses, taxable lots positions and loss harvesting opportunities, RSU vesting, investment returns, 1040 tax approximations, ideal portfolio allocations and rebalance thresholds, taxable equivalent yields for municipal bonds, safe withdrawal rates approximations, …

I built that incrementally over 10+ years out of necessity and one day I’d like to convert it to a little SaaS and see if anyone would pay money for it. Probably not but it would be a fun exercise so I could add automatic scraping of bank/financial accounts.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#292

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Tons. Way too many at times. I build a lot of tools to make it easy to consume and produce media/social media offline (these flows usually involve turning things into email or Usenet articles and then transmitting them on a private network) both because it lets me control how/when I consume media and also because it's just plain fun.

Other than that though, I have a system that helps my D&D group (which meets weekly and has for years) choose what to order for dinner. The system keeps track of a number of restaurants in our area (hand annotated) and chooses 5 restaurants from different food genres and excludes the genre of food that was picked the previous week. The restaurant choices are placed in a ranked choice poll which I monitor and close manually to choose dinner. The ranked choice poll has been helpful when a restaurant actually ends up closed so we just step down the list and pick the next in ranking.

Admittedly this is a technical solution to a mostly social problem, but my D&D group has some neurodivergent personalities that are really bad at coming to consensus. Also, the system pretty much runs itself at this point as the restaurants are kept in a sqlite database and the code is so simple that it never really changes.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#293

Post by dTal »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #262

I wrote a scraper for various dating websites that would automatically generate activity on my behalf according to several empirical criteria (very simple stuff, no ML!), so that I could minimize the amount of time spent manually fishing. It worked amazingly well, it got me hundreds (yes, 100+) of dates, incredible dating stories and a lifetime of memories, all in a semi-automated way without me requiring to “swipe r…

  if waist/hip

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#294

Post by kragen »

edpenz wrote: post #160
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

I'm confident that http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bitwords.... produces passwords with precisely the expected entropy, and it's secure under Kerckhoffs's principle, so I don't mind sharing it. For the ones that consist of words, the wordlist I use is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/wordlist, the frequencies of the words that occur 5 times or more in the British National Corpus.

This representation is my favorite:

The 84-bit number 10231239242746186561668573 can be represented as: ...

In 12-bit words of 5 letters or less: hits towel bloke gala blah jimmy barry

Diceware is good too.

A word of warning: be careful playing around with stochastic text generation if you're susceptible to delusions and hallucinations. You'd have to be pretty far gone to think "hits towel bloke gala blah jimmy barry" was a message from God, but of course we all know people who have fallen into that kind of belief, and the strain on credulity gets smaller as the text model gets more sophisticated.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#295

Post by anamexis »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #273
lq0000 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * A replacement front-end for "ffmpeg", see above I have one of these too... It's kind of frightening how hard ffmpeg is to use without some kind of custom frontend. I have probably dozens of bash/python scripts to invoke ffmpeg for different common tasks. - One to extract audio - One to extract all the individual streams from a container - A couple different transcoding scripts - One specifically for gifs - One to…

People always say this but... I'm not sure I agree. I think people confuse "hard" with "powerful". With the exception of cropping I can do all of the above from memory. Maybe I just use ffmpeg a lot.

When it comes to UI, powerful often implies hard.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#296

Post by jerrysievert »

all the time!

I -

* track my environment, ranging from actual physical to all host metrics and logs

* write my own music software (effects, instruments)

* write esoteric systems that end up being used for interesting use cases locally

* beer boards, because I like to know what's on tap at home

* database engines, because why not?

it's just a matter of whatever tickles my fancy, from utilities I need, things that differentiate from other sound I hear, to reinventing the wheel to better understand why it's round.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#297

Post by throwaway81523 »

edpenz wrote: post #160
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

Look at diceware.com for a good way to do that. You can calculate the entropy without "research". I use a simple python script for the purpose, filtering out the words < 7 chars long from /usr/share/dict/words instead of bothering with the official diceware list. Example output: "snored-Hoff-virtue-tab-eroded-Perl's" with estimated 87 bits of entropy. If you write the phrase on a piece of paper and refer to the paper when typing the phrase into a computer, then after a few uses you will remember the phrase without any special memorization effort. At that point you can shred or burn the paper, or possibly record it in an offline encrypted file requiring its own security efforts.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#298

Post by LeoPanthera »

lucb1e wrote: post #269
stirfish wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like cat /usr/share/dict | shuf -n 4 | tr '\n' '-' (inb4 unnecessary use of `cat`)

I posted some advice in a sibling thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31021503 >, that applies here as well: > Please don't use $RANDOM or $((RANDOM)) or standard `shuf` for password generation. These RNGs are not cryptographically secure. Use input from /dev/urandom instead.

You can do this with "shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom".

The same with gshuf.

I use an alias to add this switch by default.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#299

Post by jayroh »

a_chris wrote: post #275

I've built several personal projects to be honest; background jobs, tasks automation, telegram bots to find a house to rent or buy, most of them are kept provate. The two I'm most proud of are a web analytics that, coincidentally, I've made public today after a few weeks of work: https://github.com/a-chris/faenz I developed it for collect data for my personal website and it is working well so far, really happy of it.…

Faenz looks pretty great! Thanks for posting it .

I just jumped head first into a bunch of self-hosted projects so this might fit in just great.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#300

Post by geocrasher »

pul wrote: post #13
geocrasher wrote: post #5

I wrote my own dns lookup tool in bash because most of the online ones are terrible or can't be customized. I made my own IP finder site because most of the online ones are terrible ( https://justyourip.com/ )

Ruurtjan from NsLookup.io here. Would love to hear your feedback, since you probably can name a thing or two to improve :)

I'll email you for sure :)
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