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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#111

Post by dev1n »

aabaker99 wrote: post #89
edwinksl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe containers like Docker are useful for your use case?

Docker can distribute the software needed to run the job well, which is definitely part of the issue and something I should use more. However, I also have in mind a pipeline of scripts where one script may be a prerequisite to the other. Condor has some nice abstractions for this by organizing the scripts/jobs as a directed acyclic graph according to their dependencies. I was thinking other batch systems might suppor…

You should check out pachyderm [1] for setting up automated data pipelines. Also great for reproducibility.

[1]: http://www.pachyderm.io

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#112

Post by sotojuan »

kensoh wrote: post #62
profpandit wrote: post #39

This is a great question. The PC has been around for a long time now. For the most part, users/developers have been sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the tool and app gods to rain their blessings. This question begs the need to be proactively involved in the process of designing how you use your PC

Same sentiments. In the beginning, the user and developer of the PC is the same person. I just feel that there are so much untapped computing power waiting for people to tell the computers to go do intelligent things.

We definitely use a lot of computer power - to run Electron apps :-)

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#113

Post by IanCal »

naturalgradient wrote: post #4

I take enormous pleasure in automating every part of my research pipelines (comp sci). As in, I like to get my experiment setup (usually distributed and many different components interacting with each other) to a point where one command resets all components, starts them in screen processes on all of the machines with the appropriate timing and setup commands, runs the experiment(s), moves the results between machine…

This is really interesting, and what I hope all research starts to shape into in the future.

Classic HN followup (at least I hope): What's currently getting in your way or annoying? What problem would you currently like to just disappear?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#114

Post by nfriedly »

Paying all of my bills. All of them. My bank (Fidelity) can connect to most bigger companies to have the bills automatically sent to them and then they automatically pay it (with an optional upper limit on each biller).

For other bills, I got all but one to put me on "budget billing" (same amount each month, so Fidelity just sends them a check for that amount without seeing the bill). For Windstream, which varies by a dollar or two each month, I just send them an amount on the upper end and then let a credit accrue. Both of these require an update maybe once a year or so.

Windstream is a bit funny - I don't know why they can't pick a number and stick to it. Also, they apparently raised my "guaranteed price for life" a couple of times and didn't notify me until ~8 months later when they were threatening to disconnect my service for being more than a month behind. (They had turned off paper billing on my account but didn't actually enable e-billing - service still worked so I didn't even think about it. We eventually got it straightened out, but Windstream is ... special.)

Beyond that, I made a bot that automatically withdrew Elance earnings to my bank account (that got me banned for a week or so when I posted it to their forum).

I made another bot that bought and sold bitcoins and litecoins and such. It was moderately profitable until my exchange (criptsy) got hacked and lost all of my float (worth ~$60 USD at the time.)

I connected an Arduino IR blaster to my TV to make it automatically turn on my sound bar (the TV would turn it off, but not on?!) - http://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2015/01/samsung-tv-turn-on-...

Oh, and of course, code tests and deployment. Nearly every git commit I make gets a ton of tests, and for most projects, each tag gets an automated deployment to to npm or bluemix or wherever.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#115

Post by dozzie »

tchaffee wrote: post #105
dozzie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. You haven't learned anything beside new punctuation and keywords. Ansible is basically a glorified shell script executed semi-interactively through SSH. It doesn't exhibit a new paradigm in server management by any stretch. CFEngine, on the other hand, shows a whole another way to approach managing systems, and thus it's qui…

> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn? I needed something that was very quick to learn and I had most of my setup automated in Ansible before I had even finished trying to learn the other options. Ansible won hands down o…

>> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn.

> It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn?

On its own it's not a wrong thing, but as I said, you didn't learn anything substantially different, so you're stuck with the approach that doesn't scale. You only added shell script SSH executor to your toolbelt, while you still haven't seen a proper configuration management system.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#117

Post by noja »

nfriedly wrote: post #114

Paying all of my bills. All of them. My bank (Fidelity) can connect to most bigger companies to have the bills automatically sent to them and then they automatically pay it (with an optional upper limit on each biller). For other bills, I got all but one to put me on "budget billing" (same amount each month, so Fidelity just sends them a check for that amount without seeing the bill). For Windstream, which varies by…

> Paying all of my bills. All of them.

What kind of bills? Like grocery bills? or recurring bills?

Aren't you using direct debits/standing orders/credit cards for those?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#118

Post by ASipos »

Downloading fan fiction from fanfiction.net

I have written a Python script that builds a HTML out of all chapters of a given fan fiction and then calls Calibre to convert it to MOBI for my Kindle.

Unfortunately, my life doesn't have too many automatable aspects... (I am a math researcher.)

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#120

Post by tokenizerrr »

tmerr wrote: post #109
tokenizerrr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use an API? Or just scraping? I've done the same, but stopped using it. Afraid my bank, if they detect it, might not like it.

I use Selenium to drive a firefox browser under the assumption that banks don't care enough to detect it: https://github.com/tmerr/bank_wrangler . I am also slightly worried about banks not liking it, but if they do care I guess I will receive a scary cease and desist in the mail and I will cease and desist.

My concern is about what will happen if fraudulent activity happens, such as my account getting hacked somehow. Then they look into my account, discover I've been doing this somehow, tell me I've broken their TOS and I'm on my own.
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