Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 234 posts

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

#191

Post by lostintangent »

jain_chirag04 wrote: post #186
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.

Just tried the examples on our site and it works really well! Amazing project! PS: I remember interacting with you from the early days of code-push I think :)

Hey! I definitely remember you :) It’s always satisfying to run into the same folks across different projects, over the course of multiple years.

I’m glad to hear the examples worked out of the box! We’ve been iterating on the docs and API quite a bit (based on feedback), so don’t hesitate to let us know if/how they can be improved: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright.

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

#192

Post by tomaslaureano »

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…

It's an amazing job what you have done here. I've been tinkering with exactly the same idea (and same implementation) but haven't had the time to go ahead. Your work will instantly jumpstart my own use case (VISA and Beancount) and I thank you for that. Kudos!

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

#193

Post by sheepybloke »

mnbbrown wrote: post #88
martin_a wrote: post #73

I run Home Assistant with Zigbee devices for automatic lighting at home: - switch on when I get home and sun is set - switch on when I'm home and the sun sets - switch on in the morning, full brightness, coldest color to help waking up (really helps me a lot and is not as stressful as an alarm clock) - automatically turn light off when I (my smartphone) leave home (not visible in the WLAN for 10 minutes) Will look in…

Interested why you use the coldest colour for waking up? I do the same, but use a sunrise simulation instead that goes from warm to cold.

Cold light helps you wake up in the morning, since it's more stimulating. That being said, it shouldn't be harsh like midday light; closer to an in between. I've heard it described as more of a green light than blue.

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

#194

Post by mastah88 »

lostintangent wrote: post #144
2rsf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks promising ! although most of my problems (but not all) were related to environment and not Selenium itself. > setTimeout-free automation How ? you still need an upper limit for operations

Each of the page operations (e.g. click) automatically wait for the specified element to become visible before being performed. That way, your automation code is declarative about what you want to do, and to what element(s), and you can allow the Playwright framework to handle any “waits” on your behalf (without having to rely on time as a pseudo event). To make the act of selecting elements more resilient to change,…

What about smart selectors? First run uses defined selector but also saves othe attributes. If in next run element can be found by defined selector then those saved parameters are used to locate element.

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

#195

Post by iKlsR »

beamatronic wrote: post #135
iKlsR wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I started with RSS initially. It wasn't in one go, it was over a period. If I had to give you a definitive answer however, I haven't spent more than a couple hours total on this and I've been using this close to 2 years now. Did a recap last night and I have a total of 17 bots, some post daily, others I see once a month. I'm also seeing tools being shared here that could make this a lot easier as well such as…

There’s no subscription charges or hosting costs?

None whatsoever. Other than my server which is unrelated (because the same service could run locally) where I have a twitter bot that listens for "save this" from my main account and will unroll a thread and format it nicely for reading later. See https://threadsja.com/ThreadsJa/1214555011289690112 for an example. Used to be personal but I wiped it, got a domain and other people are slowly starting to use it.

So about every service I have connected to it is on a free tier except Ploi (free as well) but I need for actual work and is also too good not to pay for.

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

#196

Post by bcantoni »

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…

+1 for having a personal Slack workspace - I think this is an under-appreciated way to host side projects and learn how to develop with Slack. There are so many services which already include Slack integration, you can wire everything up into your personal notification space.

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

#197

Post by iKlsR »

akulbe wrote: post #160
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…

would love to talk to you more about how you set this up

You can see the discussions under my main comment. Pretty much just make a slack workspace and start finding integrations for services you use. Zapier for one makes it super easy to filter out what can get to you from these but I'm seeing good things about https://github.com/huginn/huginn now.

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

#198

Post by Nannooskeeska »

johnflan wrote: post #107
jaggs wrote: post #76

A bit more basic, but I use two free desktop PC automation tools which I now can't do without. 1. TyperTask ( https://typertask.en.uptodown.com/windows ) to automate common tasks like adding different email signatures for different addresses etc etc. 2. ClipX ( http://bluemars.org/clipx/ ) for managing a huge clipboard history file. This saves me SO much time it's unbelievable.

It surprises me how many people don't use a clipboard manager. I use PasteBot on the Mac.

I've had Ditto [0] on my PC for almost a year now, and I could probably count on two hands the number of times it's come in handy for me. Can you explain what is so great about having a clipboard manager? I feel like I'm missing something, and if it would become truly useful to me by using it a different way I'd like to learn.

[0] https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/

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

#199

Post by arafsheikh »

shostack wrote: post #167
arafsheikh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thanks for the suggestion. Looks promising. Although it's not as polished as Tableau.

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

#200

Post by cpclermont »

YourMatt wrote: post #158
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…

How do you like using Node for CLI? I started playing around with it a couple years ago, and at this point, I don't even consider BASH scripts if they involve the slightest bit of logic. Part of me feels like by going all-in, I'm going to lose touch with my ability to write direct BASH scripts, which are likely to work literally forever. Meanwhile, I expect my Node scripts to have a relatively short lifespan, particu…

I've been doing pretty much the same thing. If the logic gets crazy, of if I want lots of subcommands, I'd write it with node & commander. There's only so much you can do with `jq` when it comes to processing JSON.
Post reply on HN