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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#121

Post by nfriedly »

noja wrote: post #117
nfriedly wrote: post #114

Paying all of my bills. All of them. My bank (Fidelity) can connect to most bigger companies to have the bills automatically sent to them and then they automatically pay it (with an optional upper limit on each biller). For other bills, I got all but one to put me on "budget billing" (same amount each month, so Fidelity just sends them a check for that amount without seeing the bill). For Windstream, which varies by…

> Paying all of my bills. All of them. What kind of bills? Like grocery bills? or recurring bills? Aren't you using direct debits/standing orders/credit cards for those?

Everything that's recurring: mortgage, electricity, insurance, internet, iphone payment plan, etc.

My wife handles our groceries and such. We actually have two separate accounts: "mine" gets the paycheck, pays the bills, and transfers money to "hers" twice a month.

We also have a third "giving" account that gets a bit of money set aside to give to or buy things for other people. This can be anything from a car repair to just buying someone lunch.

Direct debit is fine if you trust the other side not to screw up and charge too much, leak your credentials, etc, but I've seen exactly that happen several times. You're basically giving them to withdraw as much as they want from your bank account.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#122

Post by tchaffee »

dozzie wrote: post #115
tchaffee wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn? I needed something that was very quick to learn and I had most of my setup automated in Ansible before I had even finished trying to learn the other options. Ansible won hands down o…

>> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. > It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn? On its own it's not a wrong thing, but as I said, you didn't learn anything substantially different, so you're stuck with the approach that doesn't scale. You only added shell scr…

If I had spent the time to learn a "proper" configuration management system, it would have been a loss. I had a very limited amount of time to make it worth automating what amounts to a few hours of manual work.

> you didn't learn anything substantially different

So what? Learning something substantially different wasn't one of my requirements. My goal was to automate a few simple deployments, including my personal laptop setup, which previously took at least a day. Ansible got the job done and I haven't looked back.

> You only added shell script SSH executor to your toolbelt

You've said this enough that I'll push back. That's definitely wrong. I can write shell scripts. I would have never attempted this in a shell script. Ansible was far easier than writing a shell script, and it does a lot more than just executing scripts via SSH. For one, it checks the current state of the system it is configuring to determine whether or not software needs to be installed.

> you're stuck with the approach that doesn't scale.

That wasn't one of my requirements either. Although I'm not even sure your claim is true considering that there are some pretty big companies using Ansible, and it was recommended to me by someone who is one of the better programmers I have met in my long career.

The whole point of my original post was that I actually tried products instead of reading about pros and cons. Based on my needs, Ansible was far superior to the other products I tried. Because my requirements aren't your requirements. I'm not so sure why it seems that it's so important to convince me and / or others that Ansible isn't a real tool. People should spend some time trying a few of the most popular tools and decide for themselves which tool best meets their needs. Which may include constraints like how much time they can budget towards learning a tool. "Proper" tool or not.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#123

Post by kvz »

Since I have a toddler in longing for a house with a garden which starts ar 800k EUR in pleasant neighborhoods in Amsterdam now, which is above my paygrade. So i wrote a script that compares surrounding towns on a number of metrics (4+ rated restaurants per citizen for instance) and let's me know when there are houses for sale with a garden facing south (or north but only if it's sufficently long that we are likely to enjoy some sun (10m+), etc.

So far this has not resulted in us buying a house and the hours that went into the project would have probably long paid for a good real estate agent :)

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#124

Post by saimiam »

My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated.

It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on what's important to me.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#125

Post by erezsh »

kvz wrote: post #123

Since I have a toddler in longing for a house with a garden which starts ar 800k EUR in pleasant neighborhoods in Amsterdam now, which is above my paygrade. So i wrote a script that compares surrounding towns on a number of metrics (4+ rated restaurants per citizen for instance) and let's me know when there are houses for sale with a garden facing south (or north but only if it's sufficently long that we are likely t…

Interesting! Any chance you might make the script public?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#126

Post by abeinstein »

saimiam wrote: post #124

My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated. It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on w…

How do you automate these?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#127

Post by Toast_ »

udkl wrote: post #108
Toast_ wrote: post #69

I'm aggregating flash sales and sending post requests to azure ml using huginn. It's a work in progress, but huginn seems to be working well. Also considering giving nifi a go, but the setup seems a bit over my head. https://github.com/huginn/huginn http://nifi.apache.org

What are you doing with the data in Azure ML ? What is your experience with Azure ML ? How does it compare to the ML offerings from AWS ?

I'm ranking the sales based on their title. Azure makes it dead simple to use your trained model as a web service. I'm not familiar with aws, I just sort of fell into incorporating ml to my project, and since I'm in bizspark, everything that I'm doing is free. Another solution I'm considering is using prediction.io for the webservice.

http://predictionio.incubator.apache.org/index.html

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#128

Post by maccard »

greggman wrote: post #70

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 exp…

I learned this one the hard way. It makes sense though, submit the source not the output (as we do for source code).

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#130

Post by raitom »

saimiam wrote: post #124

My day to day decisions are mostly automated - what to eat for breakfast? what clothes to wear any given day of the week? when to walk my dog and for how long? When to leave work and which back roads route to take to get back home? Lunch options? When to call the folks? Exercise schedule? All automated. It gets a little repetitive and boring at times but I'm able to save so much time and energy this way to focus on w…

I never thought about automate those things. That's a cool idea! I can use the yelp api for lunch, some rfid chips for my clothes,...
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