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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#61

Post by paultopia »

Scraping and compilation of various annoying web content formats, with varying levels of efficacy -- e.g. https://github.com/paultopia/scrape-ebook for open source PDF chapters and https://github.com/paultopia/spideyscrape for readthedocs-esque formats.

iCloud documents edited on iOS -> versioning and shoving in a private github repo -- https://paultopia.github.io/posts-output/backup-to-git/

CV updates via template to HTML, latex, and docx

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#62

Post by kensoh »

profpandit wrote: post #39

This is a great question. The PC has been around for a long time now. For the most part, users/developers have been sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the tool and app gods to rain their blessings. This question begs the need to be proactively involved in the process of designing how you use your PC

Same sentiments. In the beginning, the user and developer of the PC is the same person. I just feel that there are so much untapped computing power waiting for people to tell the computers to go do intelligent things.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#63

Post by rprameshwor »

18nleung wrote: post #38
dannysu wrote: post #17

A bot for reserving hotel rooms. I wrote a bot to reserve hotel rooms a year in advance for a national park in the US. It was so difficult to book. After couple days of failed attempts to reserve my desired dates, and after staying up late into the night one day, I went ahead and wrote a bot to automate the task of checking for availability and then completing the checkout process once available. And... it worked.

Yosemite?

A month before July 4th, i tried booking a camp site in Yosemite and got none. I should have known the camp sites gets completely booked 6-8 months ahead. When i called one of the camp sites, the automated machine replied -

press 1 to book for this year

press 2 to book for next year.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#65

Post by kensoh »

ams6110 wrote: post #54
tokenizerrr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use an API? Or just scraping? I've done the same, but stopped using it. Afraid my bank, if they detect it, might not like it.

Your bank would object to you accessing your own transaction data?

In theory they shouldn't, though I believe many financial websites explicitly declare in their terms of use that automated access or web scraping data is not allowed.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#66

Post by kensoh »

SirLJ wrote: post #49

Stock market trading systems, so I don't have to watch screens, also backups and also constantly improving monitoring for smooth operations

I used to write trading systems for Amibroker. This one signaled the 2009 march bull market in equities and oil. But it is a swing/longterm trading system. I was a daytrader so it is not really useful for that.

https://github.com/tebelorg/Tump/blob/master/trading_z.js

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#67

Post by SirLJ »

kensoh wrote: post #66
SirLJ wrote: post #49

Stock market trading systems, so I don't have to watch screens, also backups and also constantly improving monitoring for smooth operations

I used to write trading systems for Amibroker. This one signaled the 2009 march bull market in equities and oil. But it is a swing/longterm trading system. I was a daytrader so it is not really useful for that. https://github.com/tebelorg/Tump/blob/master/trading_z.js

Thanks, Looks very interesting, my hobby is to back test different trading systems, so I will take a more deeper look into it next week...

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#70

Post by greggman »

In the past I've always automated exporting from Maya, 3DSMax and Photoshop, meaning I don't require artists to export from either. The artist saves the source file in the project, tools build from that to the final format for the app/game.

The more typical workflow is that artists export .JPGs or .PNGs manually from Photoshop and somewhere else save their .PSD files. Similarly with 3SDMax or Maya they'd manually export using some plugin. That seems wasteful to me and error prone. Source files get lost. Artists have to maintain multiple versions and do the export manually which seems like a huge waste of time. So, I automate it.

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