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 it…
:) reminds me of startup generator http://tiffzhang.com/startup
Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
221–230 of 349 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#222My 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…
For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.
One caveat, though - if you do this, commit to it. Don't do what I did and keep one or two pairs of non-conforming socks just because I liked them. Because now they just recirculate through my sock drawer, gumming up my otherwise perfect system. :P
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#223My 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…
For the clothes it's as simple as creating a LIFO system of some sort... for example putting the clean laundry at the bottom of the drawer (underneath what's in there), or the end of the closet rack.. and pulling the day's clothes from the top of the stack or the other end of the closet rack.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#224Earlier 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?
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#225- 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…
Any hints appreciated! I'm also experimenting with Telegram, which I think will also solve my issue.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#226Sooo slooowly that the homepage still has stock cats&dogs images. The most upsetting thing is that I've got more than one person telling me "I like the homepage". My mental reaction was "wtf!?".
Anyway, I still don't tweet much, but I'm getting there.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#227Even if the task happens infrequently and the script takes longer than the task, automating it is worth the investment: - It prevents having to remember or re-discover how to handle the task next time. - It ensures the task is handled consistently. - It prevents potential manual errors.
For example, on the financial side, my company runs bank accounts in five countries, each with different GST/VAT taxes. Over time, I've developed scripts that grab the mid-month exchange rates that our Internal Revenue service requires to be used; crunches downloaded bank transaction data into categories (including tax inclusion or not); and exports it all into a huge Google spreadsheet. This provides global and country balance sheets and profit and loss, and when tax reporting time comes for each country, a tab on the spreadsheet provides all the figures so filling returns is a five minute process. Occasionally the scripts will flag an unrecognised transaction, and rather than manually correcting this in the spreadsheet, I'll add a rule to the script so it is recognised next time.
Cumulatively this probably took several tens of hours to code, but it means we don't need to employ an accounts clerk. It takes about fifteen minutes a month to download the bank data (manually - oh how I wish banks had APIs) and run the scripts. Our accountant loves this - the spreadsheet is shared with him, he can check our formulae or add other metrics, and he prepares our annual report an order of magnitude faster than any of his other clients.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#228So I recently wrote a CLI in Node that takes a URL and a CSS-style query selector (ie, '.album-title'), then scrapes the page, searches for each found instance and adds them all to a spotify playlist.
github.com/markreid/scrapify
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#229A 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.
Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?
#230I'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…
At least in the US, the Overdrive app for android let's you rent audiobooks from the library so you can play on your phone. No need to rip or convert.