Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 749 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#351

Post by dave84 »

andai wrote: post #158
dave84 wrote: post #40

I wrote a Chrome plugin to double check the price per kg for online groceries as the values provided by my supermarket are basically fiction.

Are the $/kg incorrect? So you take the price and divide by weight?

Yes, they are often incorrect and appear to be manually entered and not updated to reflect price changes as the system does not seem to have a field for item weight.

Yes, and normalize it to price per kg. The product weight needs to be extracted from the item title or description in many possible formats (100G, 100 g, 100 grams), the price location and format however is uniform.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#352

Post by zrail »

hajrice wrote: post #334
zrail wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Just run it through a company” isn’t the whole story. You also have to qualify as a trader and file an election to use the mark-to-market rules, and then you actually have to do mark-to-market accounting.

Profits that come from Stocks remain in your trading account. You transfer them from your trading account into your business bank account. The actual profit/difference is taxed. I don't understand what's so complicated?

It’s not particularly complicated but it’s far from optimal. If you’re not doing anything special your profits are taxed as ordinary income but you don’t get to deduct business expenses, nor do you get to count that income toward deductions like self employed healthcare or retirement account contributions.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#353

Post by marketgod »

hajrice wrote: post #315
marketgod wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you back tested this. It seems really risky.

What do you see as risky? I don't invest in companies I don't believe will be around in 10-15 years -- I don't invest in penny stocks. I invest in REAL companies (Amazon, Shopify, Atlassian, etc.)

In a bull market you are going to have great returns but it just seems lucky. It's almost better and sit and hold. I'd back test the parts where I wasn't in the market, how much % profits were missed out due to compounding, fees, not being in the market and the time spent.

Generally earnings aren't a great event to bet on as they get baked in until unless they are exceptional. It feels like picking up coins in front of a steam roller.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#354

Post by hnruss »

Finances. Paychecks are direct deposit, monthly bills are auto-pay, and my wife and I each get an allowance deducted weekly from our shared checking account into our separate checking accounts. We do still have a monthly non-automated task where we enter the current state of all of our accounts into a spreadsheet, and copy the totals into another spreadsheet that tracks our finances over time. It has been really helpful to help plan and see our progress.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#356

Post by wompwomp67 »

A_Person wrote: post #170

Ok, I'll bite! About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that…

> NSFW

I missed that part and kept going and almost ejaculated in excitement.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#357

Post by EdCoffey »

Someone1234 wrote: post #338
EdCoffey wrote: post #304

1. When I plug my camera's SD card into the front of my Linux server it automatically copies off any new photos and sorts them into a YYYY/DD/MM folder structure. 2. I wrote a cryptocurrency trading bot because I'm too lazy/uninterested to actually learn anything about the market. It seemed to do pretty well when the market was flat or going up. Hard to tell if it's doing badly now or if it's just reflecting the stat…

For #1, do you have any way of detecting dupes? For example if you inserted the same SD Card twice would you get two copies of the photos?

I only use one SD card and one camera, so I just store the name of the last file copied (e.g. DSC02745.ARW) and the next time the card is inserted I only copy files that come after that one when sorted by name. It would be pretty easy to extend to multiple cards and/or cameras, but I've never had the need.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#358

Post by krrrh »

bytematic wrote: post #247
greenyouse wrote: post #236

Digital archiving of important physical mail is a nice way to go paperless and keep track of documents. Get a good scanner and shredder, then set up a system to track your scanned documents. No more misplacing files and having to stuff cabinets with papers. Proxy phone number via Twilio or Google Voice for the times when you'd rather not give your real number out. Audio translations for digital books using espeak + p…

I wish there was a good recipe website where you could press a button to import it and change it / save it. Could make sharing recpies and searching for them centralized and readable instead of the current system of blog posts and images or shudder gifs.

Paprika for iOS took me pretty far in this direction. I bought it on a recommendation from a friend so I could strip out the blog posts and index recipes, but the grocery shopping features ended up making it something I used all the time. You still share with the original URL, but I've got friends who are into cooking on it now and it's just as quick for them to save.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#359

Post by egypturnash »

sumedh wrote: post #327
egypturnash wrote: post #311

Colored lights (LIFX) change color automatically during the day. mostly thanks to their scheduling, though the one in the foyer changes color based on both the time of day and on the temperature and rain forecast - during the day I can glance at the light and know how to dress. That happens with a Python script on my computer, which I should really move to the Raspberry Pi in the living room that I could leave on 24-…

I want to do something similar with my Lifx lights, they would glow green in the morning if the train is 10 mins away, they would glow red if its 5 mins away which means I wont be able to walk to the station and catch it.

My little light script is here if you want to see how it's hitting an a web API for the weather, then talking to the bulbs: https://github.com/egypturnash/weatherlight

It ain't pretty, and the menubar app part of it stopped working a while back, but it still does the job.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#360

Post by King-Aaron »

wodenokoto wrote: post #290
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #284

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…

Please do post pictures and videos. It sounds like a real life rube goldberg machine!

> It sounds like a real life rube goldberg machine!

It has a very "Wallace and Gromit" sounding vibe to me!

Post reply on HN