Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf • Hacker News Board

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#81

Post by vincvinc » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

tectonic wrote: post #41

It's fun to wake up to find a project that I started on the top of HN! These days, I'm no longer very involved with the day-to-day of the project. Now that it's no longer a young project, here are some musings about Huginn and responses to people's comments in this thread, in no particular order. I've found that Huginn excels as a scheduled web scraper with lightweight filtering. That's what I use it for. On the othe…

Little known fact: this project is used widely by journalists who can't code (at The New York Times, among others) to do a variety of tasks, like eg. monitoring web pages like Trump's policy position, scraping press releases or filtering out very specific news alerts.

see Huginn for Newsrooms: http://albertsun.github.io/huginn-newsroom-scenarios/

It's been at least as useful as Yahoo! Pipes, and endlessly more reliable. Thanks a lot!

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#82

Post by tomcooks » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

tectonic wrote: post #41

It's fun to wake up to find a project that I started on the top of HN! These days, I'm no longer very involved with the day-to-day of the project. Now that it's no longer a young project, here are some musings about Huginn and responses to people's comments in this thread, in no particular order. I've found that Huginn excels as a scheduled web scraper with lightweight filtering. That's what I use it for. On the othe…

Nothing better than this kind of explanations to get convinced to try something, genuine passion seeps through your words.

You might just have fixed a couple of problems with your tool, thanks!

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#83

Post by Eduard » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #6

david_draco wrote: post #2

"Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog." I'm still laughing :) wth! (My fear is that this might actually be sustainable with ads.)

This is basically the plan of The New Yorker, but with (probably) 1000s of people.

Can you elaborate?

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#84

Post by fullwaza » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #47

tectonic wrote: post #41

It's fun to wake up to find a project that I started on the top of HN! These days, I'm no longer very involved with the day-to-day of the project. Now that it's no longer a young project, here are some musings about Huginn and responses to people's comments in this thread, in no particular order. I've found that Huginn excels as a scheduled web scraper with lightweight filtering. That's what I use it for. On the othe…

I'm excited to check this out, but I wanted to congratulate you on a truly excellent project name. Having spent many, many hours in naming struggles, I truly appreciate the perfection. And for those unfamiliar, the (also amazingly named) historian Snori Sturluson explains: "Two ravens sit on his (Odin’s) shoulders and whisper all the news which they see and hear into his ear; they are called Huginn and Muninn. He sen…

Norse Mythology by Neil Giaman is very good if you like such things. The audio book is especially good as it is narrated by the author.

https://www.audible.com/pd/Norse-Mythology-Audiobook/B01LWUJ...

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#85

Post by apeddle » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

david_draco wrote: post #2

"Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog." I'm still laughing :) wth! (My fear is that this might actually be sustainable with ads.)

For about a week a few years back, I ran a twitter bot that did essentially this for tweets powered by mechanical turk.

I enjoyed waking up every morning to an often strange political message posted by my "bot".

@CrowdWisdomBot if anyone is curious :)

Doing it with cat photos is far more clever.

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#86

Post by floren » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #78

j1elo wrote: post #53

I've seen the word "rake", so I guess... is this written in Ruby? If so, how's the performance? My home server is pretty minimal and lightweight: a Raspberry Pi. Do you think it will run it fine? (I'm gonna want to try this anyway, didn't know about it until now and it looks amazing!)

A fresh Huginn container idles at ~300MB of memory without any configuration on my part. A fresh node-red container idles at 30MB.

I was unable to run the Huginn Docker container on my Pi, I assume because there are x86 binaries in it. I'm trying the manual install now...

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#87

Post by anderspitman » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

If you like this kind of stuff, you might find my patchbay project interesting:

https://patchbay.pub/

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#88

Post by omarhaneef » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

Eduard wrote: post #83

omarhaneef wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically the plan of The New Yorker, but with (probably) 1000s of people.

Can you elaborate?

If you don't follow this, you are in for quite a treat. Enjoy:

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/contest#finalists

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#89

Post by jimsug » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

tectonic wrote: post #41

It's fun to wake up to find a project that I started on the top of HN! These days, I'm no longer very involved with the day-to-day of the project. Now that it's no longer a young project, here are some musings about Huginn and responses to people's comments in this thread, in no particular order. I've found that Huginn excels as a scheduled web scraper with lightweight filtering. That's what I use it for. On the othe…

Firstly, thanks!

This has been immensely useful to me, and yes, my main uses have been primarily web scraping and then piping it into various channels.

Been running it on a cheapish VM for a couple years, very reliable and lets you monitor things more frequently and reliably than services like IFTTT.

Re: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf

#90

Post by bluehatbrit » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:47 PM UTC

binthere wrote: post #55

I'm probably missing something here, but what is the value of this when you could write a script that would do just about the same? (Serious question, I want to know the answer, not rhetorical)

Huginn is more of a framework for writing and running these scripts. It has some built in modules to make the process easier. IE: The webhook agent is an easy want of getting POST data into a script without bootstrapping a webserver yourself, you can then just raise an event and have another script handle it. No need to write and manage everything individually, you can run everything in one place.