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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?

#161

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.

10% of the time I have to copy paste the text

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

#162

Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright . Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.

Can you attach it to an existing browser window/session that is already open? Ie. I navigate and authenticate to a site, run code, and it continues from there with what's on screen?

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

#163
post #134

Automated investing and wealth reporting. I use a few services to automatically invest money into a few different financial vehicles at a regular basis * Vanguard finds (bi-weekly transfer into various ETFS) * Titan Invest (robo advisor bi weekly) * IRA and 529 (monthly) I use personal capital to connect see view my cash flow and returns across all my accounts. I have been doing this for the past 3 years and my retur…

Have you figured out a way to automate exporting of data from Personal Capital into somewhere else (spreadsheet, DB, etc)?

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, but it also keeps YNAB more in sync with your bank account, since transactions will typically take a couple days to show up in the statement.

> transactions will typically take a couple days to show up in the statement Wait, in what century do you live that your online banking transaction overview doesn't have up to date data ? Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ?

A banking "statement" usually refers to a PDF you can download; the electronic version of the thing they'd previously send you by mail.

The online banking CRUD interface might have up-to-date data, but it isn't an API, and being behind some weird proprietary single-sign-on setup makes it pretty hard to scrape, too.

> Also, your bank allows you to log in with just a username/password ?

Yes, this is common in the US (and here in Canada, too.) We sometimes get asked for "security questions", but support for 2FA is extremely rare, and I don't think there's any bank in North America that requires 2FA to login to your online banking. (The "government or bank issues you a smart card that can be used for session encryption; bank issues you an adapter to plug it into your computer" thing doesn't happen here.)

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

#165

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…

> you need to give YNAB your bank username/password

I am constantly amazed by the people that are willing to do this for various value-added finance sites; people that I would normally consider sane. Unless your bank provides (and you used) a read-only account authentication, if something goes wrong and your money disappears from the bank, the bank is going to tell you to take a hike. I can't imagine taking this kind of risk with my money.

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

#166
In a somewhat similar vein to the OP, some of the details associated with publishing a new podcast can be rather manual and error-prone. This is especially annoying in the context of simple interview/discussion podcasts that don't really take all that much time to edit/post.

A fairly simple Python script can automate the fiddly things like creating XML for a new podcast and uploading things to wherever you're hosting. (I used to use a script to add intro and outro audio too but I now do that as part of the audio leveling process with Auphonic.)

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you comfortable sharing your personal expenses with so many public sources?

Tableau Public is the one that makes me uncomfortable. If this dashboard continues to work well and be useful I'll look into self-hosted alternatives.

Could you use Google Data Studio for it instead?

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

#168

Playwright is a new alternative to Selenium, and besides being cross-browser, is focused on performance, developer ergonomics and reliability (death to flakiness!). Might be worth checking out? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright . Disclaimer: I work with the Playwright team at Microsoft.

Can you attach it to an existing browser window/session that is already open? Ie. I navigate and authenticate to a site, run code, and it continues from there with what's on screen?

Playwright allows you to connect to existing browser instances, but it currently requires you to get the “debug URL” of the browser instance first: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/blob/v0.11.1/docs/ap....

I’d love to hear a bit more about the scenario you have in mind, since that might help inform some improvements we can make. Thanks!

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

#169
post #56

I use telegram, ifttt, Google sheets to calculate expenses. At my last job, I used Zapier & Zoho CRM to automate creating leads from email requests which saved me hours of time.

Was at a startup that was super low-overhead (and as dysfunctional as a 4 person team could be), we used Zapier to automatically create Gmail drafts as replies to new lead enquiries on the website and follow-up responses as needed. We could then spice up the response if needed, or just bulk run through and hit "Send".

Appears personal to all email systems and spam filters, but actually was semi-automatic marketing automation.

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

#170

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…

> you need to give YNAB your bank username/password I am constantly amazed by the people that are willing to do this for various value-added finance sites; people that I would normally consider sane. Unless your bank provides (and you used) a read-only account authentication, if something goes wrong and your money disappears from the bank, the bank is going to tell you to take a hike. I can't imagine taking this kind…

Sorry, but there’s no bank in the world that would tell you to simply “take a hike” if your password was breached and your money was stolen.
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