Ask HN: Do you have personal bots? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#11

Post by iamaelephant » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 2:58 AM UTC

I have a bot that scrapes the local Building Consents website for my home building project and emails me if the local council has completed an inspection because my builder can't communicate for shit. I have a bot that polls the Google Health API and syncs my current weight (which comes from an electronic scale) to a spreadsheet where some friends are doing a weight loss challenge. I have a bot which scans my Downloads directory and semi-intelligently identifies movies and TV shows and moves them to the appropriate directory.

The Health API and Consents bot are .NET Core running on a Raspberry Pi. The Download bot is on my main Windows machine, written in Python.

Other bots have come and gone, of course.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#12

Post by findyoucef » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:02 AM UTC

I have one that sends PS4 deals posted to r/ps4deals based on a list of games im interested in.

I have another one that turns on a space heater remotely based on certain conditions to keep my cat warm.

I have one that sends my team mates and I notifications about our upcoming soccer matches, which includes the team we're playing including stats and time.

I don't run this one anymore but I wrote a bot that would screen shot insider ESPN articles if given a link for them and then replies with an imgur link of the article.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#13

Post by yen223 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:05 AM UTC

I've got a bank account that offers bonus interest if I use the debit card five times within a month. I don't like to use debit cards, so I built a bot that automatically makes five $1 charges to that debit card.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#14

Post by SenHeng » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:08 AM UTC

yen223 wrote: post #13

I've got a bank account that offers bonus interest if I use the debit card five times within a month. I don't like to use debit cards, so I built a bot that automatically makes five $1 charges to that debit card.

Is the bonus interest worth $5/mth?

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#15

Post by yen223 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

SenHeng wrote: post #14

yen223 wrote: post #13

I've got a bank account that offers bonus interest if I use the debit card five times within a month. I don't like to use debit cards, so I built a bot that automatically makes five $1 charges to that debit card.

Is the bonus interest worth $5/mth?

Of course, otherwise I wouldn't do it :)

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#16

Post by _5659 » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

I have three GPT-2 bots that hook up to Slack so I can pretend I have coworkers.

One of them is general queries on the latest model, one is Gwern's poetry bot, and the third is trained on toxic/moderated comments and says only sadistic cruel things to me. I don't know why I built the last one.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#17

Post by hkhanna » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:16 AM UTC

I have a bot that polls my Airtable list of birthdays and if it is someone's birthday, it sends me a push notification via IFTTT at 7am that morning so I can call or text them first thing in the morning.

https://github.com/hkhanna/birthday_notify

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#18

Post by nunez » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

Yes; several!

I have a Ruby bot running in Lambda that forwards emails in my Gmail inbox that are tagged with a specific label to Expensify automatically. This saves me a LOT of time, especially since Expensify doesn't have this feature yet.

I'm writing another small API on Lambda with Ruby that returns flight info from FlightAware in JSON format so I can use it with Tasker to do things like send travel updates on WhatsApp and log my travel in Google Keep. I do this every time I travel, and while I have a Tasker task that uses the FlightAware JSON at the bottom of the page to achieve this, it's given me stale information several times, which has been annoying.

Up deck on Trello, I want to write another bot that uses my TripIt trips to update my Slack status at work so that people know where I am!

I also have a few Tasker shortcuts that help me during my travels.

The less I have to remember to do, the better!

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#19

Post by samvimes » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

hkhanna wrote: post #17

I have a bot that polls my Airtable list of birthdays and if it is someone's birthday, it sends me a push notification via IFTTT at 7am that morning so I can call or text them first thing in the morning. https://github.com/hkhanna/birthday_notify

this is the first time I've heard of airtable. It looks sort of neat. I'm curious if it's a thing you use for personal organization or if it;s something you use for work?

Re: Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

#20

Post by spdebbarma » Wed, Oct 30, 2019, 3:52 AM UTC

_5659 wrote: post #16

I have three GPT-2 bots that hook up to Slack so I can pretend I have coworkers. One of them is general queries on the latest model, one is Gwern's poetry bot, and the third is trained on toxic/moderated comments and says only sadistic cruel things to me. I don't know why I built the last one.

Very impressive! Could we get a demonstration or screenshots?