31–40 of 51 posts
Well, 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 ).
Not to be confused with Hugin [1], the FOSS panoramic photo utility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugin_(software)
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…
Since having it setup I've used it to:
* Monitor covid travel restriction changes on the UK gov site and email me when updates are made.
* Scrape the site of a housing development where I wanted to view a house early as a potential purchase to know first when they opened viewings.
* Look for a price drop on some computer monitors on Amazon as the price was quite high when I found them.
* Daily discord report on the price of flights on a particular date when I and a group of friends were thinking about a holiday together.
* Alert when an exchange rate dropped or increased by a certain amount to help figure out when to exchange money for the same trip.
I find most of my uses include some kind of web scraping, although not always, and are usually things I want to run frequently and have run reliably. Most don't live more than a few months but it's a great tool to have knocking around as the effort to spin up an automation is much lower compared to writing a custom script each time.
I actually have n8n.io self-hosted as well because it has some nice pre-bundled integrations with various services like Spotify which huginn doesn't. That said, I've not really enjoyed using it, I find myself hitting F5 a lot because the UI breaks and won't recover and while it's more visual it's actually much harder to view the logs of a workflow. I tend to default to huginn unless n8n has a particular integration which will make the task faster to setup. Once setup though, I've not had any problems with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.).
Is it able to say login to my LinkedIn account and scan posts for keywords and alert me on matching posts?
Well, 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 ).
I have zero Ruby knowledge, how useful will it be for me? Can it all be done with drag and drop?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.).
Is it able to say login to my LinkedIn account and scan posts for keywords and alert me on matching posts?
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…
Funny how different people reach different conclusions :)
In my experience, tools and services that don't generalize enough (or allowing it rather), are less useful in the long-term and just solves something short-term. But it's easier to get traction if you solve something short-term, as it's often easier to market something that is more focused.
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 have “frenemies” who are semi popular. I want to keep alerts on their LinkedIn and Twitter. Similarly startups I want to know if they’ve stagnated or gotten funding. I would like to get earnings calls emails for some companies I like. I want to get a ping if the forex rate changes for some combos, or if gold price drops by some percent. I and family have many bank accounts and it’s a real thing that you need to kee…
That sounds so far away from how I deal with "frenemies" (I just ignore them) that I have to ask: What do you get out of reading what they are up to on Twitter and LinkedIn?
Well, 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 ).
I have zero Ruby knowledge, how useful will it be for me? Can it all be done with drag and drop?
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…
I'm CEO of robusta.dev (an automations tool for Kubernetes) and this has been our experience too. 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 equivalen…
I don't think that is true. People do want their own automations, but only when necessary. And as always, it should be as effortless as possible. That's the main fail where most of those tools struggle.
> they want something that just works out of the box.
Why not both? Personally, I want something gives me everything for the common tasks and services, but also has room to let me grow into the direction I need to go. This does not mean I want to build everything myself, or even start at zero. But between zero customizing, and doing everything yourself, there should be a common ground that allows me find my sweet spot.
And there are many good tools which do feed into this desires and are working well.