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

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

#411

Post by PaulMest » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

Here are a few that have been pretty useful to me and my friends:

1) Local events finder. A few friends of mine and I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles last year and didn't know many people. Even though there is a vibrant event scene down here with hundreds of events every day, we always seemed to find out about the cool ones after they had passed. I wrote a Facebook scraper that would find all of the local businesses and events for each of the businesses. It puts it in a Postgres database and then does some simple sorting based on different signals (e.g. how many likes for the page, how many people RSVPing yes, maybe, no for the event) and spits out a spreadsheet. This has been great to discover events and a huge time saver for planning dates.

2) Photo organizer. I use Dropbox's iOS app to backup photos from my phone to Dropbox. However, it just puts them into one big folder. I wrote a simple Python script to parse the filenames of the photos/videos and put them into a nested folder structure by year/month.

3) Long flight movie digest. I had a few long flights that weren't going to have wifi, so I built a web scraper to pull the movie list from the flight ahead of time and then cross reference it with Rotten Tomatoes so I could get a stack ranking of the movies by Tomatometer rating.

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

#412

Post by weaksauce » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:11 AM UTC

riku_iki wrote: post #271

aoeuasdf1 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be able to use https://opentimestamps.org/ to provide evidence over time (i.e. proving it wasn't fabricated all at once). Still, that doesn't prove that the individual points weren't fabricated at the time.

Another question is if this will be admissible in the court.

I am not a lawyer but it would seem if you attest to the fact that it is reliable data it would be admissible. Lying under oath and fabricating evidence is still against the law.

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

#413

Post by mrhappyunhappy » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

colemannugent wrote: post #56

icodemuch wrote: post #8

Not sure if this counts because I didn't actually code anything: but using gmail filters to automate my personal email flow has had a huge effect on my day.

I'd say it counts. My favorite filter is anything containing "unsubscribe" goes to a "Mailers" folder never to be seen. I don't understand how people can deal with having unread emails in their inbox all the time.

I set up a bunch of these types of filters. Now my inbox is squeaky clean and everything is auto organized.

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

#414

Post by spurcell93 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:17 AM UTC

Kinrany wrote: post #406

_tsz4 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, i will be sure to ping you guys here

me too, thanks

me 3

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

#415

Post by mrhappyunhappy » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:17 AM UTC

cefthurston wrote: post #208

Working on a script to automatically compile the best threads from HN each day and email. Might also send to pocket so I can read on my commute. Will go by thread count and screen out keywords in header to avoid topics I'm not interested in. I find the most valuable thing in HN are the conversations in comments (sometimes also the least valuable thing, too).

I’ve been using hckr news for this and only look over the top 10% of most popular articles.

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

#416

Post by gnaritas » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

vollmond wrote: post #120

mrguyorama wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "shuffle any image in this folder" background option in windows is incredibly cool and underutilized

I have a few dozen images in my folder... never thought of using it as a data feed like this. Awesome.

Using a folder as a queue is pretty common in the Linux world, moving files between them as well to make a pipeline.

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

#417

Post by Mister_Snuggles » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:19 AM UTC

vollmond wrote: post #376

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Hue Bridge can do #1 on its own, but I don't think it's exposed with the stock app. You can set up a sunrise/sunset trigger based on your geographical location - I use this to turn my outside lights on and off.

I'll have to dig into that. Is it one of the Labs plugins? I certainly don't mind cutting out extra services where I can.

I did it manually, using the debug web page[0] on the bridge to set up the "light sensor"[1], which is really a calculation of sunrise and sunset based on your location.

It takes a few hoops to get the bridge to generate a username and craft the appropriate JSON to set everything up, but Philips has really good documentation on this.

[0] https://developers.meethue.com/documentation/getting-started

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26782957/how-to-use-suns...

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

#418

Post by somethingsimple » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:21 AM UTC

shostack wrote: post #366

somethingsimple wrote: post #98

I used Nightmare ( https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare ) to automate logging into my 401(k) provider's website and fetching my current balance (no public tickers for the funds). It uploads that number somewhere and then I fetch that somewhere in a Google Sheets spreadsheet where I keep track of my portfolio.

Have you had many issues with them changing things that break this connectivity? I use Mint and they seem to have endless issues with that despite having obviously close business relationships.

Not really, but I haven't updated the package version in a while.

What is Mint (I assume you're not referring to the Linux distro)?

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

#419

Post by yorwba » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:26 AM UTC

_tsz4 wrote: post #231

vollmond wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting. What are some of the things you have used this for? One of the examples is a quotation, which makes lots of sense. What else could it be useful for? Formulas, maybe?

I'm trying to expand my Chinese vocab, so I usually do something like " translation" eg. 拓展 expand

For that I use Anki with the Chinese Support plugin, which is honestly pretty great. It does not only have characters and translation, but also pronunciation both as Pinyin (I think other romanizations can be configured) and audio (which plays on review, great for training your ear and checking your pronunciation), as well as measure words and characters in the opposite set (simplified vs traditional). And it can fill all of those automatically. Then there's stuff built-in to Anki, like statistics that let me know I've learned precisely 2521 unique characters in total, which is great for motivation. (The numbers must go up!)

I guess you will want to keep using your homegrown program, but maybe this can give you some inspiration for features to implement.

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

#420

Post by shoover » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 1:27 AM UTC

peacelilly wrote: post #93

Checking the radar. In the midwest, weather comes at you from a long ways away, so I wrote a script to set my desktop background to be the current national radar mosaic every 15 minutes. Explicitly setting the background programmatically was very unreliable in practice. The beauty of my script is that it simply wgets the image, checks if it is valid, resamples the image using a high quality algorithm (slow but worth…

Brilliant. I never know what to use for a background and usually keep a solid color. I’m stealing this.