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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#231

Post by ajarmst »

teddyh wrote: post #37
ajarmst wrote: post #22

I'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've ported it to a couple of other webcomics so that I can binge read. Maybe this can save you some trouble: https://www.comic-rocket.com/help/archive-binge/

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#232

Post by [deleted] »

teddyh wrote: post #37
ajarmst wrote: post #22

I'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've ported it to a couple of other webcomics so that I can binge read. Maybe this can save you some trouble: https://www.comic-rocket.com/help/archive-binge/

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#233

Post by teolemon »

gottlos wrote: post #180

Shopping list via Oscar, barcode scanner, open food facts Aircon via temp sensors and node-samsung-airconditioner still working on Owntracks/mqtt for useful automations on arrival home lights plus motion sensor, lihht color by time of day (red at late night to save vision)

@gottlos : Would be curious to see your code/a demo of the stuff you built using Open Food Facts :-)

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#234

Post by TeMPOraL »

lj3 wrote: post #172
dtech wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> in which you authorize corporations to directly and automatically withdraw funds from your bank account The corporations over there must be more trustworthy than the ones we have over here. I'd never agree to such a thing.

They're probably as trustworthy over European end as over the US end (hell, quite often those are the same corporations) - it's more that in Europe, customer protection rights make it less likely companies will make a... "mistake".

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#235

Post by TeMPOraL »

dozzie wrote: post #71
tchaffee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I evaluated Puppet, Chef, and Ansible and Ansible was by far the easiest for me to learn. My favorite thing I use it for is my personal laptop setup. I can go from clean Ubuntu install to having all the software I use along with system settings all perfect within an hour, without me being involved.

It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. You haven't learned anything beside new punctuation and keywords. Ansible is basically a glorified shell script executed semi-interactively through SSH. It doesn't exhibit a new paradigm in server management by any stretch. CFEngine, on the other hand, shows a whole another way to approach managing systems, and thus it's qui…

There are many kinds of "difficult" - sometimes the difficulties may be just conceptual, other times it's because the tool is not good for the job you have in mind.

For instance, I once took a serious look at Angular and then decided it's too difficult. I'm sure there is time and place for Enterprise JavaScript, but none of the things I'm doing right now would benefit from it (and frankly, neither do most of the smaller sites I've seen using it).

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#236

Post by ajarmst »

crispyambulance wrote: post #131
dba7dba wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

There are some really clever people here, but as a general rule, you can't truly automate something until you can do it manually to the point where you're fully aware of all the snags and exceptions that may occur. Once you reach that point, it then becomes a matter of trading-off how much time/money/effort it will take to automate the task against what benefit you get in return.

Agreed, but it's important to include one criterion in the trade-off calculation: I'd much rather be writing automation code than doing most automateable tasks (i.e. repetitive, simple decision tree). Even if I don't save any time, or even if it actually costs me a little time, I count it as a win. Especially since I often discover useful tools and techniques (holy smokes! Someone already wrote a parser for this weird thing I'm playing with!) that end up being valuable later in a completely unrelated project. True story: some colleagues wanted to integrate a departmental Moodle server with some bespoke scheduling software we were running. Turned I already had most of what we needed, because a year earlier I'd gotten irritated at hand-loading class lists into Moodle and hacked together a bunch of code to directly translate entities from one database to the other. I'd even generalized it into a bunch of types and tables that I didn't really need because OCD. All that 'hobby' code ended up being really valuable later.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#237

Post by TeMPOraL »

sotojuan wrote: post #112
kensoh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We definitely use a lot of computer power - to run Electron apps :-)

It definitely is an automation of tasks - it automates away you having to be concerned with multiple platforms, at the small cost of wasting computer power of all of your users.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#238

Post by half0wl »

neya wrote: post #210

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…

Wow, you should definitely sell this as a service. Lots of people in the market validation stage would pay for this (I know I would).

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

I'm curious - what do you use for email sending? How do you handle bounces and ensure deliverability?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#239

Post by imroot »

My expense reports and timesheets.

The three shittiest parts of my job every week are:

- Approving timesheets

- Entering in my timesheets

- Entering in my expense reports

I've written a script that goes in using a phantom.js script, and automates the submission of my timesheet on Friday afternoon at 3:00 +/- 15minutes. It now takes into account travel time, Holidays, and approving time if I have time approvals due.

Same holds true for submitting expense reports in Oracle. I upload the receipt to Expensify, and as long as it's tagged properly in Expensify, it'll automatically generate the correct expense report in Oracle for the proper project based on the receipts in Expensify. This saves me, on average, about 6 hours a month.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#240

Post by sly010 »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #120
tmerr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Selenium to drive a firefox browser under the assumption that banks don't care enough to detect it: https://github.com/tmerr/bank_wrangler . I am also slightly worried about banks not liking it, but if they do care I guess I will receive a scary cease and desist in the mail and I will cease and desist.

My concern is about what will happen if fraudulent activity happens, such as my account getting hacked somehow. Then they look into my account, discover I've been doing this somehow, tell me I've broken their TOS and I'm on my own.

On the upside you are more likely to notice a fraudulent activity if your script combs through your transactions daily.
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