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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
161–170 of 349 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#162Downloading porn and culling the old stuff. Currently automated management of over 100TB and growing!
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#163Oh boy, sigh, I wish I could share something I just automated, it's insane. Like, everyone that sees it tells me it's pure genius.
Problem is that it isn't ready to for the public. I'll do a show HN next week, but by GOD it is a brilliant piece of automation and scaling :P
Soon (this is more for me than anyone else, i'm literally bursting with pride right now)
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#164Most of my side projects have been about automating the little things that end up taking me a lot of time. At my first job, part of my work (next to junior dev) was to deploy EARs on Websphere. I automated it so that people just had to drop it on a shared folder and I'd just take a look if it failed to install automatically. I wrote a command-line tool to search and download subtitles https://github.com/patrickdessal…
What is EARs?
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#165I frequently wipe and install from scratch my Linux desktop and laptops. I've been spending more time recently working on setup scripts that automate as much of this as possible. Things like installing packages, setting up firewall, checking out code projects and installing dependencies. Currently this is mostly a bash script plus my dot-files, but I'm always looking for ways to improve this process.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#166My 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?
Habit probably.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This confuses me a little -- the UK has the direct debit guarantee which is incredibly ironclad. If I think something is funny, I call the bank and the money is back in my account immediately -- without argument or any reason required. The DD is then cancelled and the company can argue with me, sure, but I get my money back.
Yea, our banking system in the states is pretty behind.
I've had it happen to me once and a family member once where we each had to close a bank account to make someone stop taking out money. Both were a while ago, so it may have gotten better in recent years, but it burned my trust in the system.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#168Paying 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…
As an European, it seems amazing that you even need to automate half of this stuff/that it is a perk of a single bank. Over here nearly everything recurring is done with direct debit, in which you authorize corporations to directly and automatically withdraw funds from your bank account, and it's a required feature if you want to connect to the European payment system. (don't worry, you can charge it back in case of…
Yea, here in the states we have a crappy insecure version of direct debit that I've seen abused more than once, so I don't trust it anymore. For one thing, you can't do charge backs. Once the money is gone, its gone.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#169I'm the kind of nerd who greatly prefers writing automation code to doing anything remotely repetitive. (I'm afraid to work out the actual timings because I'm pretty sure that I often spend more time coming up with the automation than just doing the task would take). I've got a script that automatically rips, converts and stitches together audiobooks from the library so that I can play them on my phone. It just beeps…
I go about automation in even less efficient way. I spend many months doing repetitive tasks. And than I realize I should automate them, and proceed to spend hours coming up with scripts/tools to automate them. Happens way too often...
Check out the ski rental problem, it will explain how much manual work to do before automation is right.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#170I frequently wipe and install from scratch my Linux desktop and laptops. I've been spending more time recently working on setup scripts that automate as much of this as possible. Things like installing packages, setting up firewall, checking out code projects and installing dependencies. Currently this is mostly a bash script plus my dot-files, but I'm always looking for ways to improve this process.
Ever since I completely tarnished my last linux install last fall I've been trying to adopt habits to fail safe my data and setup (mostly bash and choosing cloud storage for my data). I'd love to see those bash scripts if they are not too sensitive to your integrity/privacy.
Here's how far I've come: https://github.com/GustavHenning/usefulBash