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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#201

Post by etreymaster »

tjalfi wrote: post #176
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…

This reminds me of a quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann! . When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind - nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide…

What about trying new things, experimenting with life?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#202

Post by fma »

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.

Nice! I've never been able to get a date I want for a national park. So much easier when single and or in college. I see other days, or a room here and there...but not enough for my family and for the dates to coincide with everyone's schedule.

I also don't have the foresight to book that advance. I've settled with staying offsite and just driving. Not the same experience but good enough compromise I guess.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#203

Post by fma »

nurettin wrote: post #80

In my city, there are many stadiums which cause traffic congestion during rush hours. I made a scraping bot which tells me if there's going to be traffic on my designated routes the next day. Going to try making it an app and see if it's any useful to others.

For sure. I live in Atlanta and basically the stadiums are smack in the middle of high traffic interstates. I believe Waze does already, but even viewing it for the work week would be nice. For example, those who have a few days to work from home can pick the days there are games and major events.

Luckily I do not pass by those stadiums on my way to work.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#204

Post by nvr219 »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #55
shade23 wrote: post #34

- Downloading a song of youtube, adding meta data via beets and moving to my music lib - Adding tasks to my todolist client from every app I use(including my bookmarking service when I bookmark with specific tags) - Changing terminal colours based on time of the day(lower brightness in the evenings and hence dark colours, too much sunlight in the mornings and hence solarized themes) - Automatically message people who…

> - Automatically message people who message me based on priority(parents immediately/girlfriend a longer buffer). I'm curious what these automatic messages say. Are you talking about something like an answering machine message? "I'm at home but my phone hasn't moved in 20 minutes so I'm probably in the shower"?

Imagine if Archer could make elaborate text message pranks. Leave it!

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#205

Post by poidos »

naturalgradient wrote: post #4

I take enormous pleasure in automating every part of my research pipelines (comp sci). As in, I like to get my experiment setup (usually distributed and many different components interacting with each other) to a point where one command resets all components, starts them in screen processes on all of the machines with the appropriate timing and setup commands, runs the experiment(s), moves the results between machine…

I do this as well (research in computational chemistry.) Incredibly useful once set up, plus forcing oneself to think about a project in abstract terms to automate it can give valuable perspective.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#206

Post by evolve2k »

etreymaster wrote: post #201
tjalfi wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a quote from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann! . When you're young, you have all these things to worry about - should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It's much easier to just plain decide. Never mind - nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide…

What about trying new things, experimenting with life?

I think the idea is to remove decision making from things you personally don't care too much for to give you more time to focus on those decisions you do care a lot about.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#208

Post by singold »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #88

In 2003 I had a perl script to query the job boards for keywords , scrap the result and send out an application email with CV attached to it (I took care to send one application to a single email). I think this was a legitimate form of spamming - at that moment the local job market was very bad.

That's cool, did you manage to get a job that way back then?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#209

Post by saimiam »

abeinstein wrote: post #126
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?

For breakfast, I decided to stop trying different cereals and stick to oatmeal. Been a horse for about 2 years now. Same with lunch - find 5 reasonable choices in the office caf, repeat.

For work clothes, I have 5 decent combos which I repeat M-F. Doesn't bother me to repeat. Helps that I'm a dev so I'm always Feynman-ing myself away from unnecessary meetings and face time with business side clients.

For commute routes, I watched my phone's gps for a few weeks, tried different routes, seeded new ideas for routes and detours by brute forcing options into the backend and now I can consistently get home within 50 mins of leaving work which includes driving down a few floors of parking at 10-15 mph. I used to take anywhere between 45-90 minutes before. Plus my mpg is usually at a respectable 26-28 mpg for a midsize sedan.

Hope this helps.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#210

Post by neya »

I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time.

For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce items, so I naturally tried out some of the plugins and was shocked at how long it took for me to get a simple task done. I had such a terrible experience that I'd never recommend it to anyone. Wordpress by itself is fine, but when you try to extend it, you face so many hiccups.

That's when I realized there's no use blaming the tool. It's because of the differences in philosophies between me and the core Wordpress team. So, I naturally spent another 4 months writing a Rails app for this travel startup and still wasn't satisfied with my time to market. Clearly, there had to be a better, faster way?

In essence, I realized every online startup requires these components:

1. Authentication / Authorization

2. CMS - To manage content on the site, including home page, landing pages, blog, etc.

3. Analytics - To help track pageviews, campaigns, etc

4. CRM - To manage a sales pipeline and sell to customers. Also to know very well who your customers really are.

So, I went ahead and wrote this mammoth of an application in phoenix (using DDD's architectural patterns), that has all the modules above. Now, everytime I have an idea, I just login into my interface, setup the content and the theme/design and launch a campaign...bam! My idea is now live and I can test it out there on the market.

You can think of it like a complete combination of all the startups out there:

1. Mailchimp - I can send unlimited emails, track opens, analyse them. Handled by my marketing module. I can customize the emails too, of course.

2. Unbounce - I can design my own landing pages. Handled by my CMS.

3. Buffer - I can schedule shares from within my interface based on best times by engagement. Handled by my marketing module.

4. Hubspot - My system has a full, hubspot/zoho clone of CRM.

Here are some of the key highlights:

1. All my data is collected on BigQuery and I own it instead of sending to third parties.

2. There is no forced limitation on my marketing - For example, if you used mailchimp, you know you're limited to just 2000 recepients. If anything more, it quickly gets expensive. But my system is my own, no limitations whatsoever.

3. I can spend less time developing my idea and more time executing it.

4. I have my own custom business dashboard for each of my idea, that tells me how good/bad it's performing, so that I can turn it off when needed.

Probably not the kind of automation you were expecting, but yeah.

EDIT: Added more details.

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