Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#31

Post by mattmanser »

jlgaddis wrote: post #22

My fellow employees and I are supposed to send a "time sheet" detailing how many hours we work, how much time we spent working on "x" and "y", etc., via e-mail every week (by noon on Monday for the previous week). I have a cron job that fires off a Perl script at 8:45 a.m. every Monday morning that composes that e-mail and sends it off for me. On the rare occasion that I was on vacation the previous week (and forgot…

Yeah, incentivizing by tickets is always dangerous, coincidentally there was a story in the UK papers yesterday about employees gaming a test system to hit 999 call targets (911 for the rest of the world)

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/17/two-g4s-poli...

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#33

Post by akerro »

dizrupt wrote: post #26
jamespo wrote: post #25

I recently wrote a python script that uses selenium/xpath to check the price of items I'm interested in and emails me when they change... has already saved me some money (or cost me, depending on your viewpoint).

Link to script?

camelcamelcamel.com

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#36

Post by enraged_camel »

k__ wrote: post #19
pawelkomarnicki wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the Slack hype...

Problem is, 99% of it is crap. Slack is okay and there are some really good bots for it. But everyone jumps on that train and so for every good integration there are 20 bad ones, that spam your channel with stuff no one needs to know :\ Takes a bit time to find the good things.

I made a bot that listens for a "coffee on" message and turns on the coffee maker at the office (using an Arduino that's hooked up to it). That way, I can Slack it when I'm leaving the house in the morning and have fresh coffee available when I arrive. :P

The only requirement is to remember to prepare the coffee machine the day before, but that hasn't been a problem so far.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useful script for your business or startup?

#38

Post by crdb »

jlgaddis wrote: post #22

My fellow employees and I are supposed to send a "time sheet" detailing how many hours we work, how much time we spent working on "x" and "y", etc., via e-mail every week (by noon on Monday for the previous week). I have a cron job that fires off a Perl script at 8:45 a.m. every Monday morning that composes that e-mail and sends it off for me. On the rare occasion that I was on vacation the previous week (and forgot…

> It sorta reminds me of how, when a "measure productivity by number of tickets closed" policy gets enacted, everyone just starts creating tickets for every menial thing they do.

I had a client who did this and so I started logging everything, pasting the commits etc. with the start and end timestamp of each group of actions (e.g. "created X table, met these issues, solved them like this").

Then I looked at the log and realised I was putting in way too many hours compared to the contract because I wanted to get the job done well, and cut back to the hours they were paying for.

Post reply on HN