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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?

#171

Post by lostintangent »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #17
lostintangent wrote: post #12

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.

Any plans for a visual editor like Kantu?

Low/no-code authoring is definitely something we’re interested to explore. Once we’ve solidified the core Playwright library, we plan to build (and collaborate with the community on) tools that can simplify automation tasks even further, on top of a modern, reliable and performant core.

Are you currently using Kantu? If so, I’d love to hear more about your specific use cases, and which capabilities you’d be interested to see. Thanks!

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

#172

Post by kingkongjaffa »

avree wrote: post #170
RHSeeger wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They will if you literally give your credentials to a 3rd party when they explicity say don't give out your details anywhere, only between you and your bank.

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

#173

Post by derefr »

The script I get the most personal use of is for one of the most mundane things you can imagine—automating the repetitive process of keeping everything on my computer up to date. By "everything", I mean:

• my OS packages

• my OS-overlay packages (e.g. Homebrew, Nix)

• the versions of any standalone SDKs I use, that aren't maintained as OS packages (e.g. Rust from rustup, the Google Cloud SDK)

• any globally-installed packages for the package ecosystem of each language I install such stuff from (not libraries, but standalone utilities, e.g. youtube-dl in pip, or Foreman in Rubygems)

Here's the script: https://gist.github.com/tsutsu/270e09c68690ec85c51dbd054e22b...

I think automating this might help a lot of people, because people tend to forget that they even can update a lot of this stuff, or they don't know there's a command to get certain things to happen at all. (E.g. did you know that `brew cask upgrade` will switch out your application-bundles installed via casks with newer versions?)

I never polished it up, though, because it's still frail in some ways. (I still don't exactly trust the way it does pip package updates, for example; sometimes pip decides to upgrade packages into an inconsistent state where a package's deps get too new for it to use.)

But the idea is that you run this interactively, first thing in the morning when you sit down, in its own fresh terminal window, right after maybe letting your computer restart to update to a new OS version. It's like putting your workspace in order in the morning. It's doing the grunt work, but you're still making the decisions and fixing the exceptional conditions.

-----

I feel like this could be polished into a universal tool that'd literally update everything for everybody with one well-known command.

But, better yet, the problem could be reversed, and a standard for registering installed package ecosystems and their respective update/clean/etc. commands could be created, that installed ecosystems could register with by placing files in a directory (like e.g. pkg-config or bash-completion) such that this command could outsource its smarts to the ecosystem creators themselves.

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

#174

Post by ajot »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #125
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.

It's development has stalled long ago, but you could try OpenTextSummarizer [0]. It is available on the Debian repos [1] and you can try a web interface [2] to see if it fulfills your expectations.

[0] https://github.com/neopunisher/Open-Text-Summarizer/

[1] https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libots

[2] https://www.splitbrain.org/services/ots

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

#175

Post by excitednumber »

Does outsourcing count?

I have found a few freelance folks in non-US countries who work for very competitive wages and carry out relatively sophisticated work flows. These are tasks that I took a few good shots at automating but due to challenges (handwriting inconsistency, rotated forms, etc) I kind of gave up.

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

#176

Post by lyime »

shostack wrote: post #163
lyime wrote: 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)?

That’s a great question. I haven’t tried it but seems like you can access their private API. https://github.com/haochi/personalcapital

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

#177

Post by dhruvkar »

ctrl4 wrote: post #103
dhruvkar wrote: post #21

>>my goodness, it'd be slow and potentially flaky all via the web UI for those sites Generally, I've had better luck using undocumented APIs for this kind of stuff. I was a heavy user of Selenium to automate many a task (I work in wholesale construction goods, tons of automations needed everywhere). But then discovered that using internal APIs (which surprisingly don't change much) is far easier than trying to except…

Yup. I did this with a local Android app, that tells you the gps location of a public bus. I sniffed the http packets, found the requests i needed and made a python script that pinged me at slack when my bus was 5 minutes from my bus stop. Useful when I worked at night.

Nice, that's the next step up.

Man-in-the-middle Android apps to discover (sometimes different API backend).

I did the same with a shipping line which turned out to use a SOAP backend.

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

#178

Post by Hamuko »

avree wrote: post #170
RHSeeger wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Giving away your password voluntarily and knowingly is not a breach.

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

#179

Post by klohto »

cpclermont wrote: post #100

I have 141 custom scripts in my $HOME/bin. Most of it is in bash, but there's a couple of node.js scripts as well. - I mostly automate my bookkeeping with a set of recurring & dependent taskwarrior tasks and scripts as annotations that I run with taskopen[1]. That's creating a bunch of folders, turning some emails in mutt into PDFs, gathering PDFs from emails, fetching bills with selenium, moving files from $DOWNLOAD…

Would you be willing to share the code for Tempo automation? I am in market for the same thing.

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

#180

Post by egypturnash »

patrickk wrote: post #61
JshWright wrote: post #5

I use Home Assistant to automate a lot of stuff around my house. The one I use at least daily is a trigger based on the light switch in my bedroom. A double click down triggers an automation that turns off all the lights in the rest of the house, makes sure the garage doors are closed, and that the rest of the doors are locked.

One future Home Assistant project that I would love to implement is a whole house lighting system that gradually transitions all the lights from white/blue in the morning, to yellow/orange in the evening to aid natural melatonin production. Such a project would have to be fully automated, otherwise I'd forget to set it each day. Blue LEDs are terrible for sleep and throw off your body's natural sleep pattern. I got t…

You can do this with a bunch of any “smart” bulb that supports schedules. It is not very hard.

I used to have a little script running on my computer that changed one bulb’s color based on local weather forecasts and the time, so that I never had a screamingly bright light telling me it was about to rain in the middle of the night. That’s when it starts to get vaguely complicated.

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