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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?

#611

Post by TeMPOraL »

sasaf5 wrote: post #485

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me aga…

Did the same; my SO wanted me to send her a periodic reminder as a text message on a given hour; I put together a Tasker task that composed a bunch of randomly selected parts into a sentence.

It took about a month or two for her to notice, though I believe that what ultimately did me in was that time when I was talking with her on the phone when the SMS task executed...

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

#612

Post by TeMPOraL »

amelius wrote: post #558
sasaf5 wrote: post #485

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me aga…

How did she find out eventually?

Not OP, but in my case, I believe she finally noticed when a text message arrived on-schedule while I was having a coversation on the phone with her...

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

#613

Post by opayen »

stevekemp wrote: post #503

I built a device to show the departure time of trams at the end of my street, to avoid walking to the stop too soon, and having to stand in subzero temperatures for too long. (I live in Helsinki, and it was the end of last year when I put this together. Temperatures were colder than -20C for a week or two.)

Could you give more details about it? What device is it? How does it work?

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

#614

Post by vijayr »

mysterypie wrote: post #510

Many of automation ideas here bring an edge to one person at the expense of everyone else. The ideas fail completely if too many people start doing the same thing. Actual examples from people on this list: - User pokes immigration website repeatedly to submit his application as soon as the site starts accepting. Obviously if everyone did the same thing, no one would benefit. The thing that needs fixing is an immigrat…

If there is a bug/inefficiency to be exploited, someone will.

Not having coupons/loyalty cards is a good thing. Hammering the immigration website, hammering the university website etc might end up improving the process (hopefully?) that is also a good thing.

In a larger context, how is this different from using one's good looks, parents' connections etc to get an edge over others?

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

#616

Post by benji-york »

amelius wrote: post #556
jcun4128 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with the legality of scraping? I was hired to scrape some economic related pages and build an excel file and email it, I got that done but not sure if I should try to host this and turn it into a service or just set it up for the client and let them deal with it. It's just personal use on their part.

> How do you deal with the legality of scraping? How did Google deal with it, when they started their search engine business?

robots.txt

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

#618

Post by TeMPOraL »

iansowinski wrote: post #525

I wrote bot to checkout cinema timetables and movie scores (metacritic, rotten tomatoes and our local service) when asked - (me and my girlfriend are a bit movie-nerds). Also when you send him location in Poland it responds with the most accurate weather graphs you can get here. I'm planning to split it to two bots and expand operation of the cinema module to whole country.

Where are you based, if I may ask, and where do you get weather graphs from? Fellow Polish citizen here.

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

#619

Post by sasaf5 »

amelius wrote: post #558
sasaf5 wrote: post #485

My girlfriend needed to be texted everyday otherwise she would turn sour. So I made an sms generator that randomly composed sentences combining words from three tables and sent to her at random times. It took her many months to notice. When she found out, she was angry for 10 seconds, but that anger faded to curiosity about how the random sentence composer thing worked. After I showed it to her, she got mad at me aga…

How did she find out eventually?

Because I implemented the thing during a bus ride, the sending time was not very random, and looking at a stream of messages she suspected I was scheduling them. When I showed her that even the content of the message was automatically generated, that's when she got angry.
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