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

Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 671 posts

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#271

Post by LeoPanthera »

edpenz wrote: post #160
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> A secure-but-readable password generator I love pronounceable passwords, but there's research indicating that such generators typically produce lower than expected entropy. Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

> Do you mind sharing what algorithm you use?

Actually, I do mind. And so should you! I developed it myself, however, and feel reasonably confident about it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#272

Post by hysan »

Some of the more useful (to me) scripts that I've hacked together:

- Flash card generator that combines ffmpeg, waifu2x, and other libraries to upscale clipart and turn them into flashcards for use in a classroom. Sizes it for printing on a number of standard paper sizes. It was really useful for when I used to teach children.

- Tunneling script that, in a much less elegant way, did what ngrok does before ngrok was a thing.

- Backup and restore scripts to reprovision my linux computers.

- Pomodoro timer that can warn you (text-to-speech) and optionally set your monitor brightness to 0 for N minutes to force myself to take breaks.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#273

Post by LeoPanthera »

lq0000 wrote: post #214
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> * A replacement front-end for "ffmpeg", see above I have one of these too... It's kind of frightening how hard ffmpeg is to use without some kind of custom frontend. I have probably dozens of bash/python scripts to invoke ffmpeg for different common tasks. - One to extract audio - One to extract all the individual streams from a container - A couple different transcoding scripts - One specifically for gifs - One to…

People always say this but... I'm not sure I agree. I think people confuse "hard" with "powerful".

With the exception of cropping I can do all of the above from memory. Maybe I just use ffmpeg a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#274

Post by lucb1e »

heyoni wrote: post #230
omaranto wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the generator from xkcd sounds pretty good. https://xkcd.com/936/

Problem is so many websites have these arbitrarily low password lengths that usually max out at 20 characters.

I haven't seen those in a while now. For random sites you should use a password manager anyway though, not try to remember a thousand passphrases. You're going to end up reusing passwords if you try to memorize them all, or else you'll have to write some down and then you are already using a password manager :). Or you use a system and then 1-2 cracked passwords/-phrases will likely break them all.

Note that this advice is for the average, common site. If you have special considerations for your bank, broker, or similarly high-value sites, different advice might apply of course (but this is not really the place for that and there are already enough recommendations online).

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#275

Post by a_chris »

I've built several personal projects to be honest; background jobs, tasks automation, telegram bots to find a house to rent or buy, most of them are kept provate.

The two I'm most proud of are a web analytics that, coincidentally, I've made public today after a few weeks of work:

https://github.com/a-chris/faenz

I developed it for collect data for my personal website and it is working well so far, really happy of it.

The other one is a Google Chrome extension to manage bookmark because I think the default one is a mess and very unpratical to use. I haven't worked on it for a while:

https://github.com/a-chris/peffect-bookmarks-manager

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#277

Post by kaiju0 »

deanmoriarty wrote: post #262

I wrote a scraper for various dating websites that would automatically generate activity on my behalf according to several empirical criteria (very simple stuff, no ML!), so that I could minimize the amount of time spent manually fishing. It worked amazingly well, it got me hundreds (yes, 100+) of dates, incredible dating stories and a lifetime of memories, all in a semi-automated way without me requiring to “swipe r…

You sure you are not this guy?

https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#278

Post by thwayunion »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #223
LeoPanthera wrote: post #87

Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…

> Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Raising my hand in agreement! A couple highlights: - Video syncing library before those became cool (2014). Originally built on top of firebase; now rewriting with my own backend. Very slow going :) - Twilio server + interface. I'm my own service provider (thanks to Twilio)

> - Twilio server + interface. I'm my own service provider (thanks to Twilio)

What does this mean? You run a pbx that implements twilio's apis and can be accessed via twilio's api endpoints? Or something else?

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#279

Post by doodpants »

slig wrote: post #172
doodpants wrote: post #66

Heck yes, all the time. While it seems like the major computer/OS vendors these days are trying to turn computers into limited purpose appliances, I was first exposed to computers as a child in the late 70's, when it was expected that anyone who owned a computer would also want to program it for their own purposes. My own personal projects tend not to be very large in scope, but can be quite handy. Some examples incl…

>- Programs to actually solve various types of puzzles all on their own (I've written over 70 of these in the last 10+ years!) Cool, are these open source?

No, they're not in any public repo or anything. Besides, if you solve puzzles using a solver you didn't write yourself, it's cheating. :-)

Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?

#280

Post by Karrot_Kream »

kaiju0 wrote: post #277
deanmoriarty wrote: post #262

I wrote a scraper for various dating websites that would automatically generate activity on my behalf according to several empirical criteria (very simple stuff, no ML!), so that I could minimize the amount of time spent manually fishing. It worked amazingly well, it got me hundreds (yes, 100+) of dates, incredible dating stories and a lifetime of memories, all in a semi-automated way without me requiring to “swipe r…

You sure you are not this guy? https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/

That guy used k-Modes to game the questions on OKCupid to maximize his matches, which is (well the line here is fuzzy) an ML technique. So probably not?
Post reply on HN