Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393717

by xcubic • 7 years ago

63 63 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What do they do?

I only run a small one for kicks: it updates my github page with a dummy commit each day. They got rid of streaks, but I still leave it running out of some misplaced sense of sentimentality.

A few years ago, a friend and I built one that would scan twitter for tweets in the vein of “like to win $ITEM” or “RT to win $ITEM.” Our bot would automatically perform the requested action, and then text me (via twilio) for each DM and mention we got (so I could manually respond and claim the prize). We didn’t disguise it well, and were shut down after about 4 weeks, but it was fun while it lasted! :)

nchelluri3• 7 years ago

cool. very cool.

(i know this is a "low content" post for hackernews, but this is a new thread with no posts, so ymmv.)

ethanpil• 7 years ago

What about your prize bot violated Twitter policy?

TheGrumpyBrit• 7 years ago

Most likely rate limits

nyuszika7h• 7 years ago

Automated liking/retweeting is not allowed.

londons_explore• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can just backdate commits for the same effect...

yunruse• 7 years ago

If there’s one thing that always annoyed me about the Github commit display it’s that… well, it displays commits, and not a much better (if not perfect) metric such as LoC. Depending on the feature or volatility of the branch my own commits can vary wildly in how granular they are.

passivepinetree3• 7 years ago

Definitely. It's not indicative of any sort of quality, which naturally makes it fun to game! I randomized the amount of commits on each day so my graph has varying shades of color!

rovr1382• 7 years ago

I have a few things running that check stack exchange tags, Twitter, subreddits and sends alerts via slack to me when something matches.

Just a way to stay up to date on some things.

nchelluri3• 7 years ago

that's excellent. what language, what's the design, do you have your own personal slack server, and so on.

rovr1382• 7 years ago

They’re all using Python.

A bunch of friends from back in college got together about 2 years ago for Christmas. We all decided to use slack since we use it for work. I just created a private channel there and the python scripts all post to the channel

- Reddit is using the .json endpoints on the url, https://reddit.com/r/funny/.json - Stack exchange loads the URLs and uses beautifulsoup. - For Twitter I use twython

For posting to Slack, I use the slackweb package.

nchelluri3• 7 years ago

no. kind of like the sometimes heard of painter whose house never has a decent coat of paint i rarely write any code for myself. i write code for a living.

but here are some of the little bots i've written on the dime:

- ?lunch - an eggdrop command that displayed the catered lunch that day

- scheduling bots that posted to channels who was "on call" for that day

- yeah, that's it. in terms of bots. i thought i had more but i can't think of jack

bexsella• 7 years ago

I've got a simple run running that calculates my girlfriend's GPA. The University doesn't display your GPA where topics are listed, but it does list the grade and weight. The calculation is easy and it only runs once a month, and notifies her when new grades have been added.

haydn3• 7 years ago

I've got one that grabs a few pages of my favourite background site and replaces my windows backgrounds every week. It'll loop through the thousands they have there a hundred at a time, so I'm right for the next couple years.

sayhitovincent• 7 years ago

To manage my wife's medication on the correct timeframes I built my own bot. It's connected to our normal day to day messenger channels so it's been nice and convenient. https://reminderbot.io

happppy• 7 years ago

Where do you host your bot?

iamaelephant• 7 years ago

I have a bot that scrapes the local Building Consents website for my home building project and emails me if the local council has completed an inspection because my builder can't communicate for shit. I have a bot that polls the Google Health API and syncs my current weight (which comes from an electronic scale) to a spreadsheet where some friends are doing a weight loss challenge. I have a bot which scans my Downloads directory and semi-intelligently identifies movies and TV shows and moves them to the appropriate directory.

The Health API and Consents bot are .NET Core running on a Raspberry Pi. The Download bot is on my main Windows machine, written in Python.

Other bots have come and gone, of course.

findyoucef• 7 years ago

I have one that sends PS4 deals posted to r/ps4deals based on a list of games im interested in.

I have another one that turns on a space heater remotely based on certain conditions to keep my cat warm.

I have one that sends my team mates and I notifications about our upcoming soccer matches, which includes the team we're playing including stats and time.

I don't run this one anymore but I wrote a bot that would screen shot insider ESPN articles if given a link for them and then replies with an imgur link of the article.

yen2232• 7 years ago

I've got a bank account that offers bonus interest if I use the debit card five times within a month. I don't like to use debit cards, so I built a bot that automatically makes five $1 charges to that debit card.

SenHeng• 7 years ago

Is the bonus interest worth $5/mth?

yen2232• 7 years ago

Of course, otherwise I wouldn't do it :)

creatornator• 7 years ago

I don't think it would have to be worth $5/mo--if the debit card is charged to an account you own, you aren't losing anything by making that transaction, and you only gain the interest

bobbean• 7 years ago

Money can be exchanged for goods and services. Even if you don't use a bot, you could just buy like, 5 things you need.

passivepinetree3• 7 years ago

How did you do this? Does your bank have APIs you can code against? Did you use other (Paypal?) APIs?

_56592• 7 years ago

I have three GPT-2 bots that hook up to Slack so I can pretend I have coworkers.

One of them is general queries on the latest model, one is Gwern's poetry bot, and the third is trained on toxic/moderated comments and says only sadistic cruel things to me. I don't know why I built the last one.

spdebbarma• 7 years ago

Very impressive! Could we get a demonstration or screenshots?

xcubic5• 7 years ago

Funny. Are they open source?

_56592• 7 years ago

Yeah, I forked them over onto my github profile. The poetry model is available on Gwern's website.

https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2

https://github.com/odomojuli/slack-gpt2-poetry

You can train your own GPT-2 bot using minimaxir's GPT2-simple

https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple

hkhanna• 7 years ago

I have a bot that polls my Airtable list of birthdays and if it is someone's birthday, it sends me a push notification via IFTTT at 7am that morning so I can call or text them first thing in the morning.

https://github.com/hkhanna/birthday_notify

samvimes• 7 years ago

this is the first time I've heard of airtable. It looks sort of neat. I'm curious if it's a thing you use for personal organization or if it;s something you use for work?

ars2• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it be easier to just make a yearly repeating calendar entry with a reminder?

o-__-o2• 7 years ago

Lol I started doing this two years ago and now I have a reminder for all of my friends, family, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. It really makes a person feel good to send them a text on their bday

nunez• 7 years ago

Yes; several!

I have a Ruby bot running in Lambda that forwards emails in my Gmail inbox that are tagged with a specific label to Expensify automatically. This saves me a LOT of time, especially since Expensify doesn't have this feature yet.

I'm writing another small API on Lambda with Ruby that returns flight info from FlightAware in JSON format so I can use it with Tasker to do things like send travel updates on WhatsApp and log my travel in Google Keep. I do this every time I travel, and while I have a Tasker task that uses the FlightAware JSON at the bottom of the page to achieve this, it's given me stale information several times, which has been annoying.

Up deck on Trello, I want to write another bot that uses my TripIt trips to update my Slack status at work so that people know where I am!

I also have a few Tasker shortcuts that help me during my travels.

The less I have to remember to do, the better!

Hnrobert42• 7 years ago

Not a bot, but... you could have TripIt update your Google calendar. Then link Slack to the calendar. It will update your status when in a meeting. Not sure about other statuses.

ars2• 7 years ago

I have a bot that downloads and saves statistics from a game I play, and then plays a couple of the boring mechanical parts of the game.

xcubic5• 7 years ago

May I ask what game?

seanwilson• 7 years ago

I wrote a Chrome extension that checks websites for best practices:

https://www.checkbot.io/

It acts like a search bot does and gives SEO advice.

alain_gilbert• 7 years ago

I use your chrome extension and love it :)

I can recommend this chrome extension.

xcubic5• 7 years ago

I know. I use it. Thank you very much

winrid• 7 years ago

Yes!! Bots are so fun to make and just have run. Like forever running rube Goldberg's machines :)

For over a year I had a Pi with a camera in a window at my Parents' house that took a photo every 15mins and uploaded to a server of mine. Then I had a mechanism to play back as a video. It was nice to watch the seasons go by while on the other side of the continent. They weren't very good at keeping it plugged in though.... Backend was in Play2/Scala since it was hip at the time and client in Python.

I worked on software for devices mounted on powerlines and had to build that functionality. That inspired me to have my own.

Have a Screeps bot in the top 20. About 40k lines of JS...

Working on a bot that can quickly connect you to a real person at https://watch.ly

Definitely want to build more. Following this thread for ideas. :)

jingw222• 7 years ago

I built a Reddit daily digest bot. It grabs top posts from each of a pool of subreddits that I'm interested in and send them via email on a daily basis. It's a open source [side project](https://github.com/jingw222/redditdailybot).

alltakendamned• 7 years ago

A few, doing things like submitting every article/link I add to my Pocket list to archive.org to combat long-term link rot and scraping fund information to help me doing data analysis supporting my investment strategy.

o-__-o2• 7 years ago

I wrote a bot that watched twitter for stock symbols and then applied a social sentiment index based on the tone of the tweet. The historical stock quotes were downloaded, and the stock was added to a polling system to capture future quotes. The social sentiment could then be turned into an indicator to determine when to buy/sell especially if used with other indicators.

Well I forgot about the system then twitter changed their api rules. When I went back it had captured data for 2 years. I backtested the trades and I found that it sucked for indexes/etfs, worked mmokay for pop stocks (think Tesla, bynd, suneq) but really shined for pump and dump stocks. With Twitter out I added stocktwits, Reddit, and tradingview. I now have twitter again and all of these feeds are run on various dedicated servers feeding into a mothership

NB: the system was originally written for a stock pumper who disappeared after a month of development

donclark• 7 years ago

Neat concept. Is there somewhere we can see this in action?

Teledhil• 7 years ago

I made a bot that sent me alerts whenever La Resistencia, a Spanish TV show, had tickets available to be in the audience. It is a very popular show and tickets are usually available in their web for less than 5 minutes. I even made an app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.teledhil.la... It no longer works because they added a recaptcha.

I also have a chat bot based on megahal, a bot that downloads subtitles for my torrent videos. At work I made a bot connected to slack that alerted of some server issues.

spzb• 7 years ago

Does home automation count? I have an OpenHab/Node-Red setup that automatically turns on the dehumidifier if the indoor humidity goes above 60%, turns a light on a dusk and off at dawn and one that sends a notification to my phone when the tumble dryer finishes (because I tend to forget it and wonder where all my clean clothes have gone)

zblesk• 7 years ago

I do have some, the most interesting ones running in Huginn https://github.com/huginn/huginn

I use it for some data gathering and most importantly, notifications and a 'personal newsletter'.

There are quite a few people in this thread that wrote things that send notifications to them; my setup kinda goes the other direction, because I don't want to be constantly spammed and nagged by my own bots.

So for instance, there are some software projects I want to keep up with, but I neither want to be interrupted by notifications, nor do I want to have a bunch of spam in my RSS reader. So I set Huginn up to watch some RSSs, some webs and instagrams and things like that, collects them, and then sends me one summary mail every two days.

Similarly, I also get one Pushbullet notification with all the headlines from a news portal every day.

Huginn is great, you guys.

mxab• 7 years ago

How do you run huginn? I've been thinking about setting it up on a raspberry pi 4 but I'm not sure whether that's a good fit performance-wise.

udayrddy• 7 years ago

I created a LinkedIn bot in 2017, during my last semester, to apply jobs on LinkedIn that match my profile. It helped me to invest my time in developing skills through freelancing instead of applying jobs.

catacombs2• 7 years ago

I have an annoying co-worker who constantly haggles me on Slack. I've since made a Slack bot, masquerading as me, who communicates with said co-worker. It's been a life saver.

TheHunter• 7 years ago

Sounds like a job for Son of Anton

catacombs2• 7 years ago

Son of Anton can handle anything.

apankrat• 7 years ago

Wrote one just this weekend.

Not a chatty variety though. Keeps an eye on new CVE vulnerabilities being posted and forwards them to me.

https://github.com/apankrat/cve-monitor

SwiftyBug2• 7 years ago

I have a bot that every 30 minutes iterates over every comment on the top 25 posts in Reddit /r/all and replies "Mom's spaghetti" to any comment that contains the string "eminem".

xcubic5• 7 years ago

How much karma have you gained? ^^

SwiftyBug2• 7 years ago

Actually I get more downvotes. People don't seem to find it that funny

davchana• 7 years ago

Does scripts count?

I have a Google Script, which adds a new row everday at 2am with blank fields for me to put time in & out in timesheet. Same script generates a pdf every month & puts it in my gmail draft.

Another one auto downloads all the changed repos from my gitlab & guthub.

dplgk2• 7 years ago

I guess anything that is a script that repeats is a bot? I have one that scrapes over 2,000 used car websites to tell me if a specific type of collectible car is available under a certain price.

xcubic5• 7 years ago

I did this while looking for a new apartment.

stevekemp• 7 years ago

Alerts from some services which I manage are sent to a slack channel, as well as alerts/alarms from systems like datadog.

There exists a bot which will notify an on-call engineer to examine the channel, via a phone-call - This uses a custom scripting language to handle decisions and twilios API to trigger phone-calls.

(Hard to be on-call if you can't get woken up by things breaking; slack messages are too easy to ignore.)

Ask HN: Do you have personal bots?

Related Stories