some of the comments below talk to more on the cost-benefits of running/maintaining a huginn server, and the dearth of usecases?
What is one is able to get a hosted Huginn server?
Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#12I ran a startup that I shut down a few years ago that was designed to do something very similar to this. It is dead now but the site is up at https://refinery.io (docs have screenshots)
What I figured out is that... it's really hard to get this type of thing right. The more generic something is, the less useful it is. Zapier is a pretty amazing tool but it's also incredibly difficult to write all of their integrations. This tool suffers from a lot of the same problems (integrations are where the value is).
It's cool to see others talking about this though. It makes me want to Open Source the core tech we used to build Refinery (including the half-baked version that uses Temporal for long-running action sequences).
Thanks for the reminder about this!
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#13Well, it’s fun to see Huginn on HN! I’m the original author, but now it’s maintained by other excellent folks.
I still use Huginn almost daily. It’s kind of my exocortex at this point, and the secret sauce for staying abreast of space industry news for Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com).
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#14Well, it’s fun to see Huginn on HN! I’m the original author, but now it’s maintained by other excellent folks. I still use Huginn almost daily. It’s kind of my exocortex at this point, and the secret sauce for staying abreast of space industry news for Orbital Index ( https://orbitalindex.com ).
Do you have a writeup, or know of writeups by others, that go into detail of your use? Always a bit hard to imagine given universal tools like this.
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#15I ended up going with node-red over huginn since it met my needs better, but having a "glue" service like this is useful. Whether it's building an api for sites that lack one (eg, alert me when this clinical trial actually gets results) or handling exceptions (when X is down, toggle Y switch).
Sure, you can write code and deploy it, etc to do this. The glue service just presents a low code approach to most simple things.
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#16Is anyone here an active user of Huginn? Basically roll your own Zapier. I’ve always been interested in it but never taken the time to get it set up and configured.
I use it daily at my law firm. It monitors online court dockets for many of my lawsuits and sends me an email when there is a new entry/order/filing. Incredibly useful.
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#17An alternative to this (more similar to node red, actually) is n8n [1], which is pretty cool, but as others have said here, I never found a good application for this.
[1]: https://n8n.io/
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely think there needs to be some kind of sea change for this kind of tool to really have an impact. I fret that there's not enough middle-brow interest in tech & computers for even the best designed, most capable user-scripter (like Huginn or Node-RED) to become truly high impact. Developers tend to find a lot of value add versus deploying whatever industrial ops practices they know. So whose left to support…
We had a roll out of a (good) low code finance tool at work and frankly the uptake was breathtakingly underwhelming. The average user is substantially less computer literate than most techies assume. The jump from navigating menus in excel to the logical flow of code just isn’t there, regardless of graphic or not. I don’t mean that in a “users are stupid” sense but rather that the missing piece can’t really be filled…
In my experience, the biggest thing programmers do that normal people don't is imagine {all possible scenarios} and then design a system that's tolerant of them.
If you can funnel things into a well-defined state before turning it over to non-programmers (e.g. data warehouse), you get better results.
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had a roll out of a (good) low code finance tool at work and frankly the uptake was breathtakingly underwhelming. The average user is substantially less computer literate than most techies assume. The jump from navigating menus in excel to the logical flow of code just isn’t there, regardless of graphic or not. I don’t mean that in a “users are stupid” sense but rather that the missing piece can’t really be filled…
In my experience, the biggest thing programmers do that normal people don't is imagine {all possible scenarios} and then design a system that's tolerant of them. If you can funnel things into a well-defined state before turning it over to non-programmers (e.g. data warehouse), you get better results.
> In my experience, the biggest thing programmers do that normal people don't is imagine {all possible scenarios} and then design a system that's tolerant of them.
In my experience programmers don't do this any more than other people called on to design systems, and in fact frequently leverage the fact that software is updatable to avoid imagining failure scenarios until they occur, and only then making software resilient against that particular failure.
Re: Huginn: System for building agents that perform automated tasks online
#20Well, it’s fun to see Huginn on HN! I’m the original author, but now it’s maintained by other excellent folks. I still use Huginn almost daily. It’s kind of my exocortex at this point, and the secret sauce for staying abreast of space industry news for Orbital Index ( https://orbitalindex.com ).
Do you have a writeup, or know of writeups by others, that go into detail of your use? Always a bit hard to imagine given universal tools like this.
I have a few on my blog, https://blog.andrewcantino.com, but nothing comprehensive. I mostly use it to monitor Reddit/HN/Twitter/various blogs for certain keywords, and also to keep an eye on local things that I want to know about (weather, events, emergencies, etc.).