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

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

#391

Post by arkades »

chrisseaton wrote: post #380
santaclaus wrote: post #86

In college I wrote a script to register for classes. I'd input the potentially-full classes I'd like to register for, and it would just hammer the registration site repeatedly until someone removed themselves from the class at which point I'd be registered. I'm still amazed IT didn't pull the network connection to my dorm room or have any kind of rate limiting. No 8am sessions for me!

I occasionally hear about students in US colleges having to compete for places in classes like this. How does it happen? Why does the college admit more people than it has class space for? In the UK they don’t enroll more people than they can teach so everyone has a place.

Due to variation in demand for classes, which students don't all take at the same time, there's an imperfect prediction of supply.

Additionally, the competition is usually for desireable time slots, rather than to get into a class at all.

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

#392

Post by noughth »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #210
marvinpinto wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're up for it, you can add your own bank/creditcard company/whatever as a plugin to it - I think the examples there are decent. I could also help if need be!

Haha thanks! The problem is in the US most banks would need screen-scraping; they don't have APIs, so it's a lot more work to do such a thing.

Many US banks support OFX (though they may call it QFX, DirectConnect, or simply advertise Quicken support). The OFX spec is a bit of a pain, but there are a number of open-source libraries to query/parse it. I wrote one in Go: https://github.com/aclindsa/ofxgo

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

#393

Post by rhoursour »

chaostheory wrote: post #347

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.

Would you happen to have this script up on Github? Also, do you usually send events as part of the invitation (i.e. concerts, coffee e.t.c)?

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

#394

Post by Stwerner »

I have one app that connects to my Pinboard account and emails me 10 random bookmarks every morning. I've been using Pinboard for years and it is full of stuff that I marked "to read" or read a long time ago that I forgot to go back to. It is surprising how often some old blog post shows back up and is relevant to a discussion I was having in the last few days.

I have another app that emails me the tweets, blog posts, and HN comments of my favorite bloggers every morning. With the rise of tweetstorms, I felt like I was missing a lot of great stuff, but now I don't have to obsessively check twitter/hn/my favorite blogs all day every day. (I really miss RSS)

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

#395

Post by aj_g »

_tsz4 wrote: post #343
kristofferR wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

interested in this as well. is there any way I can be notified if you do so?

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

#396

Post by snikch »

I've got two automations that were life changers.

1. Whenever I start watching Plex on my TV, my home automation turns off the lounge light that reflects in the TV. 2. If it's after 11pm, the fire is on and we're not playing music on the stereo, it means I've left the fire on - so it gets turned off.

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

#397

Post by edco »

i bought a bit of ethereum and zrx and got bored of manually trying to figure out how much money i've lost/gained so i just created a script which pings the coinmarketcap api and tells me based on my initial investment if i'm in the green or red

it's pretty trivial but saves me heaps of time at work. instead of going to the website i just typed 'eth' into my terminal and i quickly get notified as to how much money i've lost

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

#398

Post by chrisseaton »

arkades wrote: post #391
chrisseaton wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally hear about students in US colleges having to compete for places in classes like this. How does it happen? Why does the college admit more people than it has class space for? In the UK they don’t enroll more people than they can teach so everyone has a place.

Due to variation in demand for classes, which students don't all take at the same time, there's an imperfect prediction of supply. Additionally, the competition is usually for desireable time slots, rather than to get into a class at all.

Ah in the UK each class only runs once a year, and everyone supposed to do that class just all does it together at the same time. If there are electives each elective can take any number of people up to the total number on the course. So no need to compete for places.

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

#399

Post by accidentalrebel »

jpster wrote: post #390
accidentalrebel wrote: post #355

I had some Vape related items to sell. From where I'm from a lot of people buy and sell these kind of items through Facebook groups. I then made an iMacros bot that would automatically search certain Vape related keywords on Facebook, filter by Groups, and then log the different Facebook groups details along with the number of members so I can pick which groups are worth my time to post on. I also wanted to make a sc…

Will the search pick up your terms when they occur in Groups that you’ve not joined yet? Any chance you can share the code on Github?

It's not searching the contents of groups but rather the groups themselves. Using Facebook's search functionality it searches the title or description of the group for my terms. For example:

https://www.facebook.com/search/groups/?q=vape&ref=top_filte...

My iMacros bot visits that URL and it just goes through the results, parsing the data listed on that page.

Here is the code uploaded as a Gist: https://gist.github.com/accidentalrebel/79fda4536f799f4a4873...

It's been awhile since I last touched this so not sure if it is the lastest or if it still works.

Goodluck!

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