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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#271

Post by naturalgradient »

IanCal wrote: post #113
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…

This is really interesting, and what I hope all research starts to shape into in the future. Classic HN followup (at least I hope): What's currently getting in your way or annoying? What problem would you currently like to just disappear?

I actually had to think about this for a few minutes. I suppose having written a number of custom orchestration tools both in local clusters and the cloud, debugging distributed services is still incredibly tedious.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#272

Post by gkbrk »

xs wrote: post #215

I just figured out how to use ansible and python to script out changing the passwords for all the network gear in the office. It uses a random password generator api https://passwordwolf.com to fetch a new password, changes it on everything, then sends me the new passwords. I'm changing passwords monthly now but it works so well that I might set it to weekly.

Using a password generator API sounds like a terrible idea from the security perspective.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#273

Post by apexalpha »

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.

If a company makes a withdrawel that you disagree with you can log into your bank website/app and get the money back until 57 days after withdrawel.

If its >57 days but In Dutch we have a verb for it: storneren. I think it's best translated as 'to write back'. But I don't know a direct translation.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#274

Post by selfish-duck »

mxxx wrote: post #228

I get a weekly newsletter with a bunch of music recommendations in it, which I had been manually adding to a Spotify playlist. So 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

That's awesome! I'm currently working on a similar thing using Pitchfork best new music, Gorilla vs Bear reviews and Needle Drop best tracks of the week + favorite albums of the month. Very clean code btw o/

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#275

Post by Lordarminius »

egypturnash wrote: post #249
TruthSHIFT wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some news for you. You are a programmer.

If doing that stuff over about 4 or 5 years or so makes me a programmer, then I'm also a carpenter, because I've put together a few pieces of furniture over the same span.

You're a programmer and carpenter. It doesn't have to be either/or.

I must say your coding achievements are impressive (great utility). Any other skills you haven't mentioned yet? :)

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#276

Post by brailsafe »

thirdsun wrote: post #261
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…

> - Downloading a song of youtube, adding meta data via beets and moving to my music lib I don't want to be that guy, but a music collection made of probably repeatedly lossy encoded Youtube rips sounds as if it doesn't deserve the name. Not to mention the whole piracy angle - I'm not trying to claim moral authority, but music is DRM-free and reasonably priced these days. There are hardly any arguments for piracy lef…

> I don't want to be that guy

Definitely sounds like you want to be that guy.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#277

Post by patrickk »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #15
sprt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardcoded based on how I think the market will evolve in the long term, currently holding BTC, ETH, XMR, and XRP among a couple others.

Been a pretty rough week, reminds me why I should never put more than 10% of net worth here

High correlation between the BTC price and others. Lots of chaos in Bitcoin-land (August 1/SegWit drama) means most of the others are now falling, large investors just mass-dump their crypto holdings even though logically the prices shouldn't move in lockstep.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#278

Post by apexalpha »

tombrossman wrote: post #53
koala_man wrote: post #26

Backups.

Yes! Everything else in this thread is interesting but without automated backups it's all just temporary. I would add that it's a good idea to automate backups using more than one method as well. For example, use a popular software package but also copy important stuff to an extra drive. A cheap setup with a Raspberry Pi + USB drive plugged in to your router will do just fine.

I do this. I have a 24/7 on RPI at my parents' house for blocking ads and tracking. I just added a 2TB USB hard drive and set it up to sync everything at night when the line is idle anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#279

Post by Lordarminius »

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…

You just described a multimillion dollar idea.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#280

Post by dozzie »

tchaffee wrote: post #184
dozzie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You only added shell script SSH executor to your toolbelt > You've said this enough that I'll push back. That's definitely wrong. [...] For one, [Ansible] checks the current state of the system it is configuring to determine whether or not software needs to be installed. So you claim that Ansible learns the state of the system through some magic that is not possible to be called from shell? Because I could do pret…

> So you claim that Ansible learns the state of the system through some magic that is not possible to be called from shell? I never claimed that. > Because I could do pretty much the same in a shell script just fine. So could I. But I didn't have to. Because Ansible does it for me. So right there, just by comparing my declarative configuration with the current system state, it's clearly adding more value than "shell…

> So right there, just by comparing my declarative configuration with the current system state, it's clearly adding more value than "shell script executer".

Very little value in this regard. As I said, I could just as easily write declarative configuration for machine deployment in a shell script.

>> There are many big companies that throw money at dumb processes only to make them running

> You said it can't scale. You're now moving the goalposts to "well, it can scale, but it takes more money".

I'm not moving any goalposts. If a process takes unproportionately more money or effort for more input, it doesn't scale. Heck, in this case it doesn't scale even if it takes the amount of resources proportional to the input!

> [...] you keep confusing your own requirements with mine.

I don't. I'm saying that you didn't learn anything significant, and as such, you would be just as good if you put some thought into how to do exactly the same with the tools you had (shell scripts). But now you're probably worse off, because you most probably got misled by Ansible's marketing into believing it is also a configuration management solution.

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