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Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

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Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#121

Post by buzzy_hacker »

I use YNAB (https://youneedabudget.com/), which requires inputting every one of your transactions by hand or importing them from your bank. The downside of the import is it takes a few days for the transaction to show up and you need to give YNAB your bank username/password, which I'm not comfortable with.

I wrote this https://github.com/buzzlawless/ynab-live-import to import credit card transactions instantly with no need of giving up my bank credentials.

The whole stack runs on Amazon Web Services. Simple Email Service receives a notification email from the bank that I've made a purchase, saves it to S3, and triggers a particular lambda function tailored to whichever bank the notification came from. The lambda function retrieves the email from S3, parses it for transaction data (account, payee, amount, date), and writes that data to a DynamoDB table. The table has a stream enabled, which triggers another lambda function when the table is updated. The function reads the transaction data from the stream and posts the transaction to YNAB using their API.

I've mentioned this on HN once or twice before and got some positive interest with people even submitting pull requests, which is awesome :) Going to find the time soon to review those and maybe add more features

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#122

Post by mark_l_watson »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #97
kryptn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh cool, I didn't know if others were doing this. I've recently just started going down this path with some zero effort IFTTT triggers but I'm not happy with how infrequent they seem to trigger. My next step is to build my own set of listeners/scrapers.

I posted the same thing on a similar thread yesterday but if you're looking to build some scrapers and listeners and make it easy for yourself I'd highly recommend Huginn ( https://github.com/huginn/huginn ). I set it up a few months back and I've been using it to scrape all sorts of info and alert me on things. IE: * A change in GBP -> NOK exchange rate, to indicate if it's a good time to buy ready for my next trip…

Thanks for the link! huginn looks cool and useful (good combination!). Impressive work by 179 contributors.

I have had numerous simpler projects automating my digital life but I made the (probable) mistake of always starting from scratch and writing stuff all on my own.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#123

Post by iKlsR »

kryptn wrote: post #29
iKlsR wrote: post #18

I have a slack workspace that has several bots, some listen for specific keywords and or phrases around the web and post to the relevant channels. Other bots remind me if I'm slacking off (maybe stayed a little too long on youtube), remind me of appointments, to drink water, if a stock price falls and some more. Also have filtered rss feeds for business and finance news etc. All of these bots also have custom identit…

Oh cool, I didn't know if others were doing this. I've recently just started going down this path with some zero effort IFTTT triggers but I'm not happy with how infrequent they seem to trigger. My next step is to build my own set of listeners/scrapers.

I found https://www.scrapingbee.com/ the other day. Checkout their blog as well, filled with useful stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#124

Post by vorpalhex »

rolandog wrote: post #110

'make all' the things with (GNU)Makefile! From pandoc pre-processing with a great tool called 'pp', to generating my CV in different languages and paper sizes, to ensuring my repositories have the latest .gitignore files. I feel it requires a significant effort to setup, but once you're there, it eases your development flow and enhances reproducible outcomes, in my opinion.

I use makefile to front each project in a consistent way (whether it's my blog, a golang project or a hardware flashing setup, `make start` will probably work..)

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#125

Post by PenguinCoder »

RocketSyntax wrote: post #113

https://smmry.com/about Summarizing long text-based articles! Found this on HN. Now when my family/ friends send me stuff they haven't actually read ... at least I can reply somewhat intelligently.

I'd still love to be able to self-host this.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#126

Post by lignux »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #121

I use YNAB ( https://youneedabudget.com/ ), which requires inputting every one of your transactions by hand or importing them from your bank. The downside of the import is it takes a few days for the transaction to show up and you need to give YNAB your bank username/password, which I'm not comfortable with. I wrote this https://github.com/buzzlawless/ynab-live-import to import credit card transactions instantly with…

What do you do about cash transactions?

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#127

Post by bathtub365 »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #121

I use YNAB ( https://youneedabudget.com/ ), which requires inputting every one of your transactions by hand or importing them from your bank. The downside of the import is it takes a few days for the transaction to show up and you need to give YNAB your bank username/password, which I'm not comfortable with. I wrote this https://github.com/buzzlawless/ynab-live-import to import credit card transactions instantly with…

That sounds a lot more complicated than just downloading bank statements and uploading them to YNAB and adds a lot more points of failure

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#128

Post by hassancf »

RocketSyntax wrote: post #113

https://smmry.com/about Summarizing long text-based articles! Found this on HN. Now when my family/ friends send me stuff they haven't actually read ... at least I can reply somewhat intelligently.

This is fantastic! Just tried it with a few blog posts. Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#129

Post by aepiepaey »

fbcpck wrote: post #71
terminaljunkid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would be interested to see why you use tampermonkey instead of GreaseMonkey. I tried both but stuck to GreaseMonkey as it was open source.

Not OP, but I decided to switch to Tampermonkey after GM version 4 which broke almost all my scripts due to the GM_## api changes. I no longer remember the exact details but it was poorly executed/communicated, and it’s easier to switch to TM instead of updating all the scripts. The dashboard interface in TM is a lot nicer than GM too

When Firefox stopped supporting legacy extensions, the Greasmonkey developers saw that as a chance to redesign their API (to use promises).

Tampermonkey used to be open source, but unfortunately isn't any more. I still use it though, as it has better UX (e.g. nicer dashboard, prefills @match when creating new scripts, better editor, etc).

An alternative to Tampermonkey that is open source and still uses the old style of user scripts is Violentmonkey (which also lacks in the UX department, if i recall correctly).

Re: Ask HN: What automation tools have you used to replace mundane activities?

#130

Post by dana321 »

You mention selenium, i use Selenium IDE

Its a browser plugin that allows you to record and playback anything that you do in your browser.

https://selenium.dev/selenium-ide/

There is a right-click action to record hovering over a section if it is hidden by css, its a well-known gotcha in wordpress admin listings and other sites that love to hide until you hover over a section.

I've still to look into whether the file format that is saved from selenium ide could be used within a virtual browser like phantomjs or the like.

For direct scraping, i tend to go straight to xpath with dom.

Its far more reliable than trying to get stuff out via regular expressions, that i only use when i need to get a certain part of the node value from a text node.

I used to use php for that, but i wrote my own programming language that uses a library called htmlquery (its a go library)

https://github.com/antchfx/htmlquery

If i have to login, i fake each request with the correct headers. Plenty of libraries around that help with that for every language.

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