21–30 of 51 posts
I implemented it where I used to work and it ended up being the glue between a lot of services.
Started using it when our Zapier bill started approaching $4k per month, and it ended up replacing most of the functionality that we were using Zapier for.
Very powerful and versatile product.
Still, Huginn is a very nice tool.
I tried using this a year or two ago—seemed like a really cool idea, and I still think it is—but I couldn't find an actually useful application for it in my life. Not saying there aren't plenty of neat applications out there, but once the initial "that's cool" feeling wore off, I wasn't sure how to actually get some value out of the system. For me, it felt like a time sink. Curious to know if others have found use ca…
I think it’s definitely a mindset to think of everything you do or read every day and think if you can offload it to someone or something else. Once you switch that knob on you notice so much every day.
Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610 - Dec 2019 (143 comments - beaten only by crows that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12)
Huginn can now run for free on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772 - July 2014 (2 comments)
Tell HN: There's two separate products on the front page, huginn and hugin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7589281 - April 2014 (3 comments)
Huginn: Like Yahoo Pipes plus IFTTT on your server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605 - April 2014 (94 comments)
Show HN: Standing Queries about the World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582316 - April 2014 (14 comments)
Huginn – Know when the world changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431676 - March 2014 (1 comment)
Introductory Screencast for Huginn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387501 - March 2013 (1 comment)
Huginn, an Open Source IFTTT / Yahoo Pipes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5377651 - March 2013 (70 comments)
Past related threads: Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21772610 - Dec 2019 (143 comments - beaten only by crows that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-12-12 ) Huginn can now run for free on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090772 - July 2014 (2 comments) Tell HN: There's two separate products on the front page, huginn and hug…
Very funny, since "Huginn" and "Mininn" were a mythological pair of ravens [0].
I 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 integration…
People don't want the ability to write their own automations - they want something that just works out of the box.
Very early on we realized this based on feedback and pivoted to focusing on out of the box alert insights (powered by automations we wrote) and not write your own automations.
I don't know what the equivalent is for the web.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.).
An 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/
Is 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.
Examples of what i do with huginn:
1) twitter watching for peaks in activity in keywords around my home country (this one is hard, football interferes with it)
2) pulling in data from an API and storing it (where i jury rig a grafana dashboard to read from a view over the huginn data)
3) stuff that sends me push notifications on certain events (a bit of a rube goldberg machine, but: homeassistant zigbee device action is to hit a webhook on huginn, that webhook sends a push notification through huginn + alexa notifier event)
4) I have a zigbee panic button outside the house (again, attached to home assistant) in case someone is locked out without a phone and without keys that will then hit a webhook on huginn that will call the other adults of the house with a message
5) keep an eye on the job pages of a few companies i was interested in, filter out for roles with keywords in the title, and email me the details.
6) I'm waiting for certain products to become available, i have huginn watching those pages and sends me an email if it becomes available (if the manufacturer doesn't have a 'let me know when available' function) - this is unfortunately quite custom for each site, but do have a common chain afterwards
7) there's an english language news site that doesn't have rss or any form of notification, so i scrape their headline ticker and send myself push notifications
It's not necessarily as flexible as i'd like - but it gets enough of the job done often enough, for anything else i can feed in webhooks from custom scripts, etc.
If you get used to thinking in huginn, you will also be able to remove a lot of duplicated work and create common chains/funnels for events, that way you'd only need to add in one new agent at the top of a chain and you've already done the rest of the work.
edit: formatting