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

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

#691

Post by EvanKRob » Fri, Oct 13, 2017, 7:03 PM UTC

orky56 wrote: post #690

I've gotten sick of listening to broadcast news on my commute so I've made my own. I scrape r/worldnews, r/news, & r/politics and then put the content through a text-to-voice program. This is done daily so I have hands-free news consumption experience. If people find this valuable, I'm considering creating a paid service out of it.

Umano was a great app that was similar to this. In some unexplained moved, Dropbox bought it and shut them down. It used real people to read the articles but it was definitely worth paying for.

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

#692

Post by EvanKRob » Fri, Oct 13, 2017, 7:05 PM UTC

tylerjaywood wrote: post #141

I have a house plant that is watered automatically, but not based on any pre-determined schedule. I have the plant's livestream and its moisture level available publicly on pleasetakecareofmyplant.com and the decision to water is crowd sourced on reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant by way of a daily vote.

This is fantastic. I had a similar idea but it was for a friend of mine. She constantly made the wrong choices in life and I'm positive things would turn out better if she crowdsourced all of her decision makings.

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

#693

Post by mazerackham » Fri, Oct 13, 2017, 9:02 PM UTC

tylerjaywood wrote: post #275

jshap70 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm truly amazed that this has been going for over a year now and the internet hasn't murdered it

Some have tried, but it would take some coordinated effort over several weeks at this point to over or underwater the plant. I've found that the folks who consistently vote take it relatively seriously to the point they have discussions about optimal schedules and for the most part stick to them.

sounds like bitcoin lol

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

#694

Post by chaostheory » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 12:28 AM UTC

jwong_ wrote: post #680

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.

I like this idea for fostering relationships that I either get anxiety or not sure what to say. What do you ask them to hang out with? A calendar invite? Or SMS?

Just an email. It was born from a project that died years back as one of my first YC submissions. Sounds like I need to resurrect it and add IM and SMS as a new MVP.

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

#695

Post by eaandkw2 » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 1:47 AM UTC

Grustaf wrote: post #609

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 everyone started doing the same thing, no one would benefit That is true, but I don't think anyone is claiming to make the world better. The question was more how individuals improve their situation, gaining a competitive edge if you will. That will always come at the cost of others, but in this case the hacks are really things almost anyone can do, so it's hard to object on moral grounds.

That isn't always true. If everyone started eating healthier and started exercising the world would benefit from a smaller demand of health care. If everyone stopped polluting the environment would be cleaner.

I think what is being talked about is something along the lines of if everyone became a minimalist then most people would be out of a job.

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

#696

Post by Quiark » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 8:52 AM UTC

jackpotek wrote: post #452

hoskdoug wrote: post #154

I have a script on AWS which scrapes the UK National Rail website for my commute every few minutes between set times in the morning and afternoon, and sends me a Slack notification if there are delays or cancellations. I could check manually but train problems are actually infrequent enough that I usually don't bother, although they are highly disruptive when they do happen.

Hey, I work for company that works with UK National Rail. Where are you located? Are you looking for a job? Which technologies have you been using?

This is how you catch and jail the bad boy who's scraping your website :P

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

#697

Post by vacord » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

This feels like it was work sort of, but I was program director of my college radio station, WKDU in Philadelphia in 2005 or so. It was a volunteer position, and I was to oversee programming quality and the schedule, etc.

One of my duties was to randomly listen to radio shows to check for errors and issues, and make sure people are actually doing their shows.

We had a live stream, so I used some linux stream ripper and cron jobs to record the stream into 3 hour chunks (the default show length) and then time stamp them. This made it really easy for me to spot check shows and have a record in case issues came up.

There was one freshman DJ that I didn't really care for, and he had a 6am slot (It's early, but it's drive time, so you actually get a ton of listeners). He kept skipping his show and as the program director, that made me mad.

I ran into him one day and asked if he had done his show that morning and he said yes, and I was like "ok great!" But I went home and listened to his mp3... and he had not been on air.

Later at school I again ran into him, chewed him out for lying to my face, and then saw him crying afterwards.

The beauty of automation.

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

#698

Post by jurasource » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

shujito wrote: post #649

jurasource wrote: post #590

I "automated" (trained?) my kid to make her own breakfast at the weekends so I can sleep longer. Started when she was around 4, it's easier now she's 7. Lots of parallels with hacking code: * Specific rules (if there are more than 2 stars showing on your clock, it's too early to get up) * Trial and error (put cereal in a jar and loosen the lid slightly, put milk in a tiny jug at the bottom of the fridge) * Optimisati…

can you elaborate on more details? seems fun/interesting

Now I think about it, we started when she was about 2, leaving a marmite rice cake in a bowl outside her door, with a bottle of water (with a sports cap), that was just enough to delay her slightly.

As she got older, I'd put some greek yoghurt in a bowl with cling film over the top in the fridge, and a plastic cup of water with tin foil over the top and cutlery on the table.

Now I just say "no cartoons before 7", and she sorts her own water out, makes some bread and butter (don't trust her with the toaster yet) and helps herself to yoghurt.

She woke me up at 9 this morning, happy with that!

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

#699

Post by thepredestrian » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 4:19 PM UTC

live3dio wrote: post #422

Used python and selenium webdriver to scrape free movie pirate sites for URLs and images. The script had to traverse the pirate sites using id tags, and simulate a click in the movie iframe for the site to populate the iframe's src attribute. Then it generates a static html page from that list of URLs. It automatically updates a netflix style website for me and my friends to watch movies. This negates all the pirate…

What that is would be an Oracle: http://www.oraclize.it/

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

#700

Post by wingerlang » Sat, Oct 14, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #606

wingerlang wrote: post #465

I've mentioned this before on HN. - I've automated taking screenshots of my laptop screen + webcam and fuse them and organise by year/month/day/hour. This gives me a nice lookback at what I was doing on a particular day (assuming I was at my laptop, which I mostly am). - I also send my GPS location each 30 minutes, again from my laptop, into a database for a nice visualisation where I was at some time. - Automaticall…

What does the stagnation folder structure look like? I have a large data sorting operation of my own to do, and that approach sounds quite maintainable going forward.

It's nothing special at all, just a differently named folders essentially.

The flow is basically:

- All files on desktop older than 1-2 days is moved into Downloads folder (very busy and anything goes in there)

- All files what have been in Downloads folder after ~30 days are moved to "need review" folder.

- Nothing special about "need review" folder, but it's present in my dock so I see if a "new" file has arrived for needing review.

The nice thing about it is that the files slowly trickle into my view, so I usually only have to deal with a few files at a time which makes it very easy to see if I need to throw it or move it somewhere more permanent. My downloads folder used to slowly build up to massive sizes and I usually didn't have the effort to categorise it so it went into some "downloads-date" folder (since there miiiight be something I wanted to save inside it). This no longer happens.