Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#341

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:38 PM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #333

mschuster91 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On a related note, I have gnucash set up to autocreate a ton of transactions 90 days in advance. Rent, salary, typical bills, student loan repayment, etc. Why do you need to do the transactions? In Germany, I can simply create a recurring transaction for rent and loan repayment, and utility/phone bills are directly debited from my bank account.

You misunderstand. They're already scheduled largely. This is about writing down in the books in January that I'm going to spend in March. GNUCash's summary view has a column 'future minimum' for each account that uses this data; looking at it informs you when you might go negative without corrective action. Or conversely, tells you how much money you can safely shift out of checking.

Ah, that explains it. Nice idea!

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#342

Post by zanedb » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

artpi wrote: post #102

I have set up a battery of scripts on google app engine and Im pretty happy with it. 1. I have a script to automatically buy small amount of BTC every day 2. For the more knowledge-dense books I read, I write summaries of them ( https://piszek.com/books/ ). I have a script that puts a random book review to my pocket for reviewing every week 3. I have an instagram account of lego minifig ( https://www.instagram.com/le…

Do you happen to have any of these available on GitHub? Particularly #7 would be very useful.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#343

Post by _tsz4 » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

kristofferR wrote: post #325

_tsz4 wrote: post #87

Passive learning. Whenever I come across something cool or interesting, I put it into a chrome extension I made called "Harvest". It sends me email reminders of what I've added on a spaced repetition schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days into the future) for optimal retention https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...

Man, this is awesome. Now that Firefox has become so vastly better than Chrome (who would have expected that a year ago?) you should port it to Firefox too.

interesting. ive heard this a lot. will port it

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#344

Post by shostack » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:44 PM UTC

tfolbrecht wrote: post #146

One of the biggest automation arena improvements I've made in my life is creating visual cue reminders and systems for a sort of stateful orderliness. When the laundry basket gets full past the painter tape line, I do a load. I load the dishwasher after dinner, and unload it in the morning regardless of the volume. Got a roomba that runs every other day and cries when it's full of dirt. I have NFC stickers that link…

Can you elaborate on your NFC sticker setup and how automated it is? Do you have to initiate anything manually when starting the tea or laundry for example?

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#345

Post by jasoncartwright » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:44 PM UTC

I was going to a friend's wedding which was outside, I checked multiple weather forecast sites to see if the weather would be good.

Ended up automating it with some PHP scripts then making https://www.metaweather.com

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#346

Post by mathgeek » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:45 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #337

tfolbrecht wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newegg Business, Davinci XYZ jr 1.0 There's DRM on the filament and it's PLA only, but you can buy the key to unlock and rewrite the DRM NFC chip. I use an app on my phone to rewrite the values

Is that a really good printer? I’m seeing bad reviews?

It's a printer you can get for $160. At that price I would expect more bad reviews because of unrealistic expectations.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#347

Post by chaostheory » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:45 PM UTC

Wrote a simple app that emails people automatically asking them if they want to hangout. It reads my calendar and randomly decides whether or not we should hang out. The probability that it'll decide to ask gets higher and higher the longer we don't hangout, which it determines by reading my calendar.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#348

Post by fleitz » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:47 PM UTC

threeaccents wrote: post #242

rrggrr wrote: post #230

1. My former spouse wouldn't answer the home phone when I talked with the kids during the divorce. I wrote an app that texted her and logged the attempt for reporting to the guardian ad litem. 2. She also wouldn't answer the door when during kids pick-up. The same app texted her when I was outside. 3. To disprove her allegations I wasn't involved in the kids school and activities I used Android's Locale app to trigge…

Did you have to prove your system was logging real data?

They accept paper logs as well. Infact many judges just order paper logs

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#349

Post by Kluny » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:47 PM UTC

athenot wrote: post #224

About 10 years ago I was in the market for a used Toyota Camry, so I wrote a script that scraped the used car classified and extracted models within a 4 year range and within price & mileage caps. This got plotted out into 4 overlaid point series, producing graphs that roughly looked like 1/x, roughly 2-300 datapoints total. With that in hand I went to dealer offering the best match, told them which car I wanted and…

Love this idea. I'm going to whip something up for monitoring the market for two or three models of hatchback that I'd like to buy at some point in the next year or so.

Re: Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

#350

Post by ThrustVectoring » Wed, Oct 11, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

mountainofdeath wrote: post #326

1. In university, my cable provider had frequent slowdowns during busy periods to the point of the connection being unusable. I wrote a monitor script that would try to ping google every few minutes during busy periods and log the output if there was any loss. After a month of doing this and presenting the logs to the provider, they fixed it and I was asked to apply for a job. 2. I automated swiping right on Tinder o…

For what it's worth, swiping right on everything is no longer the best strategy for men on Tinder. Your profile's visibility matters the most, since women swipe right on something like 15% of profiles, and swiping right on everything lowers the internal ELO score of your Tinder profile.