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

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

#601

Post by Operyl » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #597

sushid wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds amazingly complex and cool at the same time. Have you looked into sous vide machines or pressure cookers? Those two are the items I use the most to get precisely cooked meals done in batches. I've found that a lot of meals done via the slow cooker tend to taste the same because of the consistently and the type of ingredients typically involved in them.

Or a crock pot.

Crock pots and slow cookers are essentially the same, as far as I know. The only difference I can remember is that one is a metal bowl, and the other is a ceramic bowl.

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

#602

Post by sjg007 » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

anoncoward111 wrote: post #583

tail_risk wrote: post #533

SO was complaining that I never text her while at work. Wrote a twilio app to pull random sentimental quotes from rumi and others, fit it into a personalised looking message spelling mistakes included )"thinking of you" etc.), and send it to her at random times of the day from my number. Weird thing is when I mentioned it was automated, she didn't believe me, so we kept it going till she broke up with me eventually.

Affection as a service. Automation in 2018 is looking grimmer and grimmer :)

This is like boyfriend or girlfriend as a service.

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

#603

Post by avshyz » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

I'm 25, and single. I'm very social, and I work out regularly. But I find it hard to approach women in the street, and I've always detested loud pubs (My hearing is slightly impaired, which makes it hard for me to communicate in such a place). So I've decided to sign in to OKCupid. I've always heard the dating scene in this site is toxic, but I've had no idea. I've too many toxic and horrible things written plainly in some users profiles ("I date only men with cars, I find it important to date gentlemen", "If you're of middle eastern origin - don't even bother sending a message") and been verbally abused in personal messages ("It's funny you've thought you have a chance with me", or another who've said "The only chance you've got with me is if your penis is 15 inches in length"). I was told I need to walk it off and don't let it get under my skin. But I can't. I've thought about quitting more than once, but the alternative is a status quo I've grown to hate.

But I'm an engineer, so I've decided to automate my OKCupid experience.

Using node & puppeteer I've run a histogram, it showed that in my country, 75% of the profiles are almost completely empty (less than 10 words). I used to manually dislike these profiles (as they'll keep coming back in the search results until you dislike it), but now my script does it for me. The next thing I've done was to sort these profiles - I give higher priority to profiles that have a longer word count, that features keywords I prefer ("fascinating", "studying", "reading", are words that I catch my attention).

It used to be a very basic script, but every negative and toxic encounter has motivated me to keep it going. Right now I'm working on building a frontend to show the script's results. I'm planning on showing "suggested openers" based on the questions the potential match has said or mentioned and adding NLP features (such as sentiment analysis).

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

#604

Post by projectramo » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

Congratulations!

You have entered the questions: what have you automated into HN.

This response automatically reminds you of the times this question has been asked before:

Just kidding! I didn't actually automate this response, but someone should since this question will be asked many times and this is probably the most successful collection to date.

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

#605

Post by skoocda » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

skate22 wrote: post #523

For the first 9 years of my life, my family either did not have a PC or I was not allowed to use it for more than a few minutes. My parents relaxed a little bit and allowed my brother and i to read for an hour to play video games on the computer for an hour. I played an online game called runescape where you could trade items to other players, but it was tedious and required a lot of repetitive typing: "buying chaos…

Sounds like you should be playing Factorio these days

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

#606

Post by sillypuddy » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

Turning on/off outdoor lighting as sunrise / sunset changes over the year.

Raspberry Pi runs a program that gets sunrise sunset data for my lat long, and then turns on off lights depending on that data plus preferences about when the earliest I'd expect someone to be leaving/coming.

Used to have a little timer that plugged into the outlet, but you'd keep having to update the on-off times as the seasons changed, and the clock kept drifting.

There are photo sensitive equivalents plugs, but apparently they don't work great, and they would keep the lights on all night long, and light pollution is a pet-peeve.

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

#607

Post by kansi » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:53 PM UTC

avshyz wrote: post #603

I'm 25, and single. I'm very social, and I work out regularly. But I find it hard to approach women in the street, and I've always detested loud pubs (My hearing is slightly impaired, which makes it hard for me to communicate in such a place). So I've decided to sign in to OKCupid. I've always heard the dating scene in this site is toxic, but I've had no idea. I've too many toxic and horrible things written plainly i…

That moment when you need to fix a product before you can get a date!

Anyways is it open source :D

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

#608

Post by gkfasdfasdf » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

SnowingXIV wrote: post #572

anonymous5133 wrote: post #259

I have a robot lawn mower that is wire guided. Instead of the traditional lawn mowers that basically cut the grass in all directions (making a sloppy cut pattern) my mower knows how to cut in straight lines so you get a traditional cut pattern. It also has the ability to dump the grass cuttings into a composting bin. Basically, I put down wire guide cable into the lawn and into the cement as well. It is all powered b…

Please do a writeup on this! One of the reasons I've been dragging my feet on home ownership is I'm not a fan of lawn mowing. Now if only you could also automate shoveling/snowblowing.

You could try https://lawnguru.co. My lawn was mowed within 20 minutes of signing up.

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

#609

Post by monksy » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

avshyz wrote: post #603

I'm 25, and single. I'm very social, and I work out regularly. But I find it hard to approach women in the street, and I've always detested loud pubs (My hearing is slightly impaired, which makes it hard for me to communicate in such a place). So I've decided to sign in to OKCupid. I've always heard the dating scene in this site is toxic, but I've had no idea. I've too many toxic and horrible things written plainly i…

How has your experience been with their anti-scraping attempts?

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

#610

Post by jajern » Mon, Jun 25, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

Operyl wrote: post #601

sjg007 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a crock pot.

Crock pots and slow cookers are essentially the same, as far as I know. The only difference I can remember is that one is a metal bowl, and the other is a ceramic bowl.

I've always thought Crock Pot was a brand. It's the Kleenex of slow cookers. I call my slow cooker a crock pot even though it's made by some Target brand.