All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020 - <AUTHOR> http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all-european-scientific-articles-to-be-freely-accessible-by-2020 <comment><USER2> I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it.

EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget are public funds it's basically going to be paid for by the EU in most cases.

The "when and if" means that you can choose not to publish or you can choose to publish after you have sought protection (patent). You can also, as a publisher, have a wait period before research papers become "open access" to, I don't know, be an asshole I guess.

Reference (pdf): [http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra...](http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi- oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf)

Edit: The little pdf warning.

<comment><USER3> Maybe, since publishing an open access paper is (currently) more expensive for the authors, researchers will end up publishing less often (and possibly more significant results), which is not necessarily a bad thing given the bloating state of research literature nowadays.

On a related note, a colleague of mine had this idea of an annual publication cap (3 papers) for researchers. Less burnout, less "superstar" researchers that "contribute" to 20+ papers a year (except for the fact that they have an army of Ph.D. students slaving off for them).

<comment><USER4> As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers and the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your publications and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this won't happen.

We'd need a different way to judge someone's scientific output which is definitely hard - do we start to check Twitter or blogs for scientific outreach? Do we judge scientific "novelty" (of which maybe only the author herself/himself is the expert in, so only s/he can properly evaluate)? Do we start to evaluate preprints (biology doesn't do this much)? Many open questions, and not much is happening in terms of change.

(Edit: This is, by the way, one of the reasons why there is so much more Arabidopsis than Wheat research - Arabidopsis is easier to manipulate and grows faster, so you can get more publications out for the same amount of work)

<comment><USER5> >As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers and the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your publications and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this won't happen.

Having seen this evaluation process from the inside, it would still work if everyone was limited to ~3 papers per year. In my experience sheer quantity doesn't land you a job, because quantity usually is a detriment to quality. More important factors are the prestige of the journals you published in, whether those journals are relevant to the position, how consistent your publishing record is (is there a five year break?, have you even stopped publishing?). In CS "best paper" awards from conferences also have significant weight.

Add to that that fewer papers make it easier to asses their quality, and being limited to three high-quality papers a year isn't a detriment to hiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does this mean in practice? Will the EU force the publishers to make them freely accessible? Will the EU only allow scientists to publish in open journals? Europe indirectly funds a lot of research. This will bleed into the workflow of scientists worldwide.

<comment><USER7> I bet, in practice, this will mean some researchers will avoid public funds as it will come with overhead they do not want (publishing rules). But for most this will be a big win.

<comment><USER8> Ahahahahaha.

First of all: Researchers won't avoid public funds, because there's never enough money.

Second of all: Most researchers _HATE_ academic publishers and being forced to sign over their copyright to a paywall in exchange for nothing. But institutional evaluation criteria force you to do so.

EU banning non-open publications will force publishers to allow open access OR force universities to revise their criteria to accommodate the inability to publish publicly funded work in non-open journals.

I think all of my colleagues think this is a great thing. As do I. Elsevier can go blow a goat with their copyright assignment BS.

<comment><USER9> > Elsevier can blow a goat

I'm into the history of logic at the moment. As in not the filtered oh-so-neat version that is presented at third-level but the nitty-gritty twists and turns from Ancient Greece (go team Aristotle!), Indian, Arabic, Scholastic, Medieval, Pre-modern, the rise of symbolic/algebraic logic, Kant/Hegel/Trendelenburg, on to Frege and then the multiplication of logics (modal/tense/deontic, …) in the 20th century ending with type theory.

Recently Elsevier contracted top logicians to produce a Handbook in the History of Logic. It runs to 11 volumes, each volume north of $300. So folks, if you want to get acquainted with the complete history of what is supposed to be a formalisation of rational thought it can be yours for $3,300 or thereabouts. There is no reason this should not be in the public domain, it's too fundamental and central to history of ideas. I could buy two cheap second- hand cars for that price. (Personally I have used SciHub to have a look and I don't mind saying so.)

Now I would like to think that top logicians are not complicit in this scam, but I fear they are. I have a burning desire to crowd-source a website that provides the same information. >95% of the papers/texts are out of copyright. These academics already have very lucrative salaries and grants. I don't think we can point the finger exclusively at the Elseviers of this world, they have had a little bit of help along the way. Here in HN we have a bit of an open- access echo chamber. Some academics are very happy with the status quo, and who wouldn't be with those prices? I think it's _insane_.

I'll post names and links of the details if people are interested.

<comment><USER10> > Recently Elsevier contracted top logicians to produce a Handbook in the > History of Logic. It runs to 11 volumes, each volume north of $300. So > folks, if you want to get acquainted with the complete history of what is > supposed to be a formalisation of rational thought it can be yours for > $3,300 or thereabouts.

Unless you're leaving out important details, that strikes me as a completely reasonable and uncontroversial thing for Elsevier to do. If they're going privately fund the creation of an original specialist work, I think they can charge whatever they want for it. That's worlds away from how they they've subverted the primary scientific publishing process for private profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Under the Horizon 2020 programme, open access publishing (green or gold) is already mandatory today for all EU/EC funded projects. Grant proposals must incorporate open access fees in order to be accepted. It's not much money for most project consortiums as the EU tends to fund big projects with budgets of ~10 million € and more as the norm (there are smaller ones, but ~2 million is really as small as it gets as far as I know). So a couple of 10K€ won't make that much of a difference. If it would become mandatory for all publicly research in the EU, the problem would be quite different. There are really small grants (50K€ and smaller) and if you have 2 publications out of that grant, you now pay 10-20% of your grant money for publishing fees.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Gold open access needs to die, and "open access fees" with it.

Seriously, there is no STEM field I know of where you can't find good journals that allow posting of preprints.

Green open access solves all the problems at zero additional cost.

<comment><USER12> Gold open access is where the authors pay the journal a fee for open access publishing. I don't see what's wrong with that and actually I think it's the best approach. The journal offers a service (editing, hosting, ...) and charge for that. Very simple.

<comment> semi-extrinsic The main problem is that the open access fees are so insane. Publishers currently have ridiculous profit margins, and of course they're going to try and maintain them.

Unless some US/EU regulations kick in and set a reasonable max limit to open access fees, the situation is just as bad (perhaps even worse) than the status quo:

Now, researchers from "poor" universities, small research institutuons, third world countries etc. don't get full access to the published literatute. But at least they can publish freely. If gold open access becomes the standard, they won't afford publishing anymore.

<comment><USER12> > The main problem is that the open access fees are so insane.

I'm confident that the market will take care of this. If there are people who can't or don't want to pay $3000 for an article and the profit margins are huge, there is room for journals who offer a better deal.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I don't think so. The problem is that the market is completely dominated by a few big publishers, and that it's a really hard market to disrupt because everything is about prestige.

<comment><USER12> The market has already started to change with new players like PlosOne and Peer-J successfully competing with the more traditional publishers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is one of those things thats just so common sense, its hard to imagine a solid argument against it.

Hopefully it will encourage the US to follow, although I'm sure publishers will dig their feet in and make up some bullsh*t reason why it would be a bad move.

<comment><USER14> >This is one of those things thats just so common sense

It really is, the public paid for the research, it rightfully belongs to the public.

<comment><USER15> Except it hasn't been like that for decades.

<comment><USER13> What happened? Where/why/how did it change?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish the same happened with the software written using public funding.

</comment><comment><USER17> "From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available." is not "All European scientific articles".

I've got at least three papers that wouldn't fall under that heading.

<comment><USER18> It's a matter of perspective. I'd argue most European research falls under this. If you work at a public university and are paid for it and do research during that time and publish it that should be covered. It would be pretty lame if only stuff that was explicitly funded in a research project would be covered.

<comment><USER17> Research done on unfunded projects as part of a hard money position is _super- tricky_ , which is why for a lot of things the restriction is funded research projects.

For example, if your position is at a public university, but funded by an endowment from a private foundation, is it covered?

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi If your position is at a public university, you probably work at a publicly- funded building, using publicly-funded electricity and heating, and publicly- funded office material. So I'd say it should be covered.

<comment><USER17> The building I work in was built using money from two foundations. The electricity and heating, as well as office material, theoretically comes from grant indirects - which at the moment for me come entirely from private industry.

<comment><USER19> In Europe? I always thought that that sort of thing was common in the US, but it's surprising that it happens to that extent in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems excellent but I'm afraid the EU will just pay a sweet bundle of money to the publishers for the privilege instead of making it a law. Either way I hope it also extends to the member states level eventually. The circus of avoiding conflict between EU funding and member state funding is often quite amusing so this will be interesting.

It feels almost ethically self evident that any research funded by citizens in any way should be made available to said citizens (and that's more or less 100% of research in Europe). Lets step in that direction.

<comment><USER20> What would the law say, and how would it prevent publishers from demanding money to publish now that their other sources of income have been cut off?

<comment><USER21> But they are already cashing in for publishing anything, with additional small charges like few hundred bucks for going over the page limit and big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible.

<comment><USER20> " big charges like a couple thousand for making the article openly accessible."

Yes, if you don't want them let them make money off your work, they won't subsidize publication and you'll need to pay. No law can change basic economics.

<comment><USER21> Yet somehow there are so many platforms that will happily subsidise open publication without even taking the initial thousand bucks for letting me in, like Medium, Wordpress, Blogger...

Seriously, the only reason why academic publishers can charge anything is their established position, where they are a proxy for gauging researcher's output by administration. Peer reviews are done by volunteers, discovery is provided by Google Scholar and everybody uses PDF anyways (usually printing it out, still orders of magnitude faster than fetching from a library).

<comment><USER20> Those have nowhere near the costs of academic publishers, which are usually in the thousands per paper. There's a reason papers aren't published on medium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > must be freely accessible to everyone

When? Open access after 12 months has different cost than immediate open access, and, at the pace of today's research, is not open access at all. And ERC funded research already requires open access publishing anyway.

Why not demand publishing to open access/nonprofit journals instead? Why does EU have to pay elsevier $2000-5000 per article?

This does not seem significant to me.

</comment><comment><USER23> >unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so

backdoored by default. Any reason why it is 2020 not sooner or later?

</comment><comment><USER24> To contextualize the discussion on "open access" (the practice of editors that ask for a sum of money in order to make the paper available). It costs a lot: about 1k for ACM venues. Currently I have to pay for this out of my own budget, and I don't have that kind of money (I'm a PhD student, and in addition to my scholarship (1.8k€/month net of tax, in Belgium), I get a 5k€ budget for two years that must cover material and travel -- I can also get about one additional travel grant per year).

Publisher have about zero added value except fixing the odd latex issue. Actual editorial work is assumed free of charge by professors. Other venues such as Arxiv and CiteSeerX do a better job of distribution for free. Science publishers are leeches in the system and should be removed.

I think the EU a measure will precipitate the current movement against such predatorial publishing practice. Already, publishers are walking on eggs. They move against sci-hub but they'd never dare to go against the common practice to just host everything one publishes publicly, license notwithstanding, something almost everyone does in the CS field -- maybe they say it's a "draft"... (meaning there isn't a copyright notice mostly).

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not as familiar with European journals, but if this happened in the US (more or less forced open access) it'd possibly mean that every time we want to publish it would cost researchers ~$3000.

Hopefully this (and similar) legislation comes along with a statement regarding who's supposed to cover that cost. Because some of us avoid that price tag by publishing in non-open access journals.

<comment><USER26> I haven't read the specifics of this, but typically these kind of mandates come from funding bodies to cover the work they fund. So they're expecting that publication fees will be a budget item in grant applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> To top it off, I would love that open access is tied to open data and strong councils for standard setting of such formats in a particular domain. The current swath of approaches to open research data is babylonian.

<comment><USER12> Wait, are you saying that politicians should decide which data formats we're supposed to use when we make research data public? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I think it's great that we have many competing approaches to open science at this stage. Over time, each research field will identify an optimal approach for their purposes and that approach will win. I just hope that the winner is not going to be GitHub which is becoming more and more popular at least in my field. GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...? GitHub is just not made for open science and I think an open science platform should not be run for profit. Also, more technically, git histories can be completely rewritten which means that GitHub would not be a trustworthy historic record.

<comment><USER28> > GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they > shut down or change their pricing or ...?

Well, as long as you aren't using any GitHub-specific features, it should be easy to migrate your repository.

<comment><USER12> Many people leave academia after a post-doc or two, most actually. These people will not have any incentive to manage their research data for the rest of their lives and the data will eventually be lost, unless GitHub continues to exist in its current form for the next half century, with is rather unlikely. For this reason we need dedicated research repositories that are managed by publicly funded non-profits. Zenodo.org is one example but I'm not sure if they have long-term funding.

<comment><USER28> The whole idea of git is that it is decentralized. So, even if GitHub instantaneously shut downs and erases all data (unlikely, they'd probably give a few months for people to move their repos), people's copies of the repo can be uploaded to servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Only articles based on EU funded research or also articles based on research funded by member states?

</comment><comment><USER30> Good. With whatever limitations, this is still good. It's not enough, but this is going to be a long LONG fight.

<comment><USER31> It at least partly legitimizes sci-hub in EU

<comment><USER26> Not in any legal sense - it applies to new, publicly funded research from 2020, not existing papers. Whether it legitimises Sci-hub in popular awareness is debatable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If this actually pans out, it could be incredible. It always saddens me to get a link to a scientific paper and to hit my head on the paywall.

There's of course the "(partially) publicly funded" qualifier, but I don't remember too much privately funded research in the journals that _I_ read as a CS undergrad, so hopefully it won't matter too much. (I guess other areas such as Chemistry, Biology might be more prone to falling under this qualifier?!?)

<comment><USER33> What's even more frustrating is when you're a student at a university and you _still_ can't get access to a paper because your library doesn't have a subscription to that specific journal. arXiv was the best thing to happen to physics papers, and SciHub is doing the same (but less legal).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interestingly, papers by US government employees are already in the public domain. Journals have no problem publishing those. I think one direction this could go is that public universities could insist that their researchers put their work in the public domain.

Journals don't need copyright to function. There's still value in editing, peer review, and distribution. They're just being greedy by insisting on it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Aren't they already required to publish on Sci-hub?

</comment><comment><USER36> And Aaron Schwartz is dead. RIP

<comment><USER37> I was just about to say that, he would have been proud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Slightly related, I just took part in a workshop of experts who are tasked with advising the commissioner on policy decisions for making open science happen in the EU, I've written up my notes: [https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a](https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a)

</comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone have any insights regarding the "foreign startup visas". Does that legislation have a name I can use to track progress?

It's quite annoying to have to apply for week-long business visas every time I have to travel to Europe. Especially in the summer, when it takes 2 months just to get an appointment with the consulate..

</comment><comment><USER40> Next step: As they have an exception for "IP" (intellectual property rights like patents) we must promote the logical consequence. All publicly funded research must mean all "IP" must be made available to anyone for free.

<comment><USER2> Nope. You can seek protection (patent) before publishing your results. See page 3 in the linked pdf. The paragraph begins with "misconceptions about open access.." in bold. :)

[http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/gra...](http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi- oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Has it been stated anywhere that they won't allow a temporary embargo after publishing? Like how some funding agencies allow papers to be behind a paywall for 12 months and only then require that it be open access?

</comment><comment><USER42> Once again Europe shows the way

<comment><USER17> The NIH mandate for open access after six months has been around for _years_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why wait if you know it is inevitable? (as would say Richard Bandler)

</comment><comment><USER44> Too little; Too late;

</comment><comment><USER45> I can see the evil people behind the TTIP getting in the way of this. Before this goes into effect, the US will execute order 66 and take all the articles down.

<comment> T-A Would the US be doing this to protect the profits of Reed-Elsevier (based in London), Springer (Berlin) or the Nature Publishing Group (London)?

<comment><USER45> Or they can start pulling arguments from TTIP provisions and get away with blocking parts of the initiative. Now it's good this comes from the Netherlands (Elsevier is headquartered in the Netherlands).

<comment> T-A (Elsevier is funny. Technically it's a subsidiary of the RELX group, aka Reed Elsevier, which is headquartered in London.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> But wait, scientific articles are hoaxes made for tax money, so now the lies are freely available to anybody!!! We need to cut more taxes on billionaires and publicly fund more oil projects so we can get these inconvenient science articles out of our way. Where's my next iPhone?!

</comment><comment><USER47> Some public funding of copyrighted art work purchases would be also useful, if that's the only viable alternative to decreasing copyright age to some reasonable 20-30 years.

</comment><comment><USER48> My thoughts are for those that are not with us anymore that helped make this slowly happen... I say thank you, but if I could choose I'd rather have them back and get to this results a bit later.

It's nothing new that in this field sometimes people have a tendency to put their ideals of progress before their own life.

No matter how strong is your love for your world changing ideas, YOU as a person come first.

Unless (but you could also argue about that) without your sacrifice the whole world population would be at immediate risk of extinction..

</comment><comment><USER38> Of related interest, I"m just back from a workshop on Open Science from a group that advises the commissioner. I was an invited expert in to the workshop. This is part of the route through which announcements like the one linked here get made. I've written up my noted [https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a](https://medium.com/p/7691802b543a)

</comment><comment><USER7> If trump wanted to help win over the science crowd, he could make this an issue. Seems more likely to come from Bernie though.

<comment><USER49> I struggle to see how or why a candidate who's proven to not necessarily have a stance on _any_ issues would want to do something like this to appeal "to the science crowd".

In fact, that's exactly the crowd I'd consider the hardest to win by a candidate such as Trump. You know, critical thinking being a thing and all.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough, I should have known that putting the words "Trump" in the first 100 words ofa post would be auto downvotes. I meant it to say that this is one way that candidates, particularly those who have most estranged the scientific communities, could shore up or make amends.

<comment><USER50> I don't think your downvotes have much to do with trump - more with the post being irrelevant to the conversation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PyPy3.3 v5.2 alpha 1 released - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2016/05/pypy33-v52-alpha-1-released.html <comment><USER2> Still got a way to go, but catching up with the CPython moving target fast.

I hope they can get there and, assuming the end result is better, navigate the technical and political challenges replacing CPython as standard. Adoption will remain low unless that happens because CPython is still excellent for most use cases.

</comment><comment><USER3> hallelujah!</comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business? - <AUTHOR> I imagine the HN readership loves to automate things.
I'm curious to know what tools you use to automate your business operations (if any).
For example, https://zapier.com is one such automation tool.
If you don't use any tools, do you use any frameworks or systems you've made yourself?
If you don't automate any parts of your business, why not? (I'm interested in the reasons why, not disputing the choice) <comment><USER2> I work at a fortune 100 in a department I will vaguely rename as "operating systems"; we have a large number of virtual and physical servers, desktops, and development environments. My department "sells" these systems to other coworkers in other departments. Various orchestration platforms make this incredibly easy.

Our automation workflow is build on as many standard tools as we can find, because inventing it here costs a lot of money and we're not experts at it. So it looks smart to use what exists as smart as we can. We take vendor ISOs from microsoft, linux, et cetera and use Packer/Vagrant to build them up inside a vSphere cluster. Packer is starting to get really good support for ESX 6.5, which means we can build right off a datastore and flip the template directly into our orchestration suite for "purchase". Our process is executed in Jenkins Multibranch Pipeline. Our sysadmin-turning-developers are learning a lot this year, and the Jenkins Pipeline is a great way to shield them from details they are free to know but don't have the time for.

The core of our build environment is some reflective shell script that becomes aware of its environment as it is loaded. We're able to abstract across environments, datacenters, et al just by some clever situational awareness. The basics always end up being the most valuable, and our little ecosystem orbiting around a pile of terse, self-documenting shell scripts that any sysadmin can understand has been a successful gambit.

<comment><USER3> I was not familiar with Packer. This looks great, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a consulting business.

I have a few basic zaps, like sending myself an email reminder every Monday to review goals.

FreshBooks for automating recurring invoices and payment reminders.

This one has saved me a lot of time: Calendly to let people schedule meetings on my calendar. I've set a very narrow availability window so that meetings are grouped into one afternoon.

aText app to create shortcuts for long strings that I use often, like my Zoom and Calendly URLs.

I also developed Standard Operating Procedures for my business to "automate" certain decisions or protocols.

I try to eliminate before I automate. Does the thing really need doing, or can I find a way or reason to never have to do it again? For example, instead of routing Slack messages (I am in ~5 Slack orgs at any time) to my phone or email, I just set the expectation early that I will not check Slack frequently so if they need to reach me they should use email.

<comment><USER5> Nice. What do you use for your SOP? Can you give more details?

<comment><USER4> It's just a doc that I printed out. The hardest part was actually coming up with it, and then narrowing it down to just the most important things so that the whole thing fits on one page. It's partially inspired by Ray Dalio's "Principles" book.

Examples:

\- If not "hell yes" then "no."

\- Everything can survive one hour.

\- If it's <$100 and benefits well being, productivity, or revenue: Buy it. If >$100 decide by Friday.

\- No calls on Fridays.

<comment><USER6> Ray Dalio's Principles is such an amazing book. I use his 5-step process every single day. Here's a great summary for anyone interested. [https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt](https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Longtime fan and users of Zapier.

In my previous company, we were _heavy_ users of Zapier. Literally, the easiest way to automate most SaaS companies' internal business processes.

It worked so great for us that we thought to automate some flows also for our customers (onboarding, retentions).

Ie.

\- Send a Slack message when a user is stuck with your product and send him some helpful emails

\- When there's new `signup fail` event, send a Slack alert to your Customer Success team AND to my engineering team.

\- Send a Slack alert and an email signed by your Product Manager when a longtime paying customer reply to your NPS survey with less than 6

Zapier deals well with internal data but not so well with customer data (ie. events or interactions performed by the end customers).

So, I've created a product that does just that. A few public interactive examples here (no need to signup to play with it)

\- [https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-send-tailored- onb...](https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-send-tailored-onboarding- emails)

\- [https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-slack- notificatio...](https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-slack-notification- for-churn-risk-customers)

Curious to hear your thoughts.

<comment><USER8> [Praise]

[Explain]

[Shameless plug]

I approve.

just kidding. UI looks great. Does this go in the Intercom direction?

<comment><USER7> Praise is fully deserved. We're actually even integrated with Zapier. [0]

Curiously a few people companies to use this product to supply the missing IF- THEN branches in Zapier (triggering them via Webhooks)

> Does this go in the Intercom direction?

No.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/QigGupS.png](https://i.imgur.com/QigGupS.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm importing furniture from Europe via container. There are several variables to consider. Tax rate, shipping rate, shipping insurance, sales markup, initial cost of the stock, cost of trucks and warehouses to move and store things, cost of plane tickets when I have to go there in person, currency exchange. I had an elaborate spreadsheet that got more and more cumbersome until I was just confusing myself, so I wrote a simple one-page calculator to sort the problem out methodically. Just javascript and jquery, looks like shit on mobile, and it's still pretty crude, but it gives me a back-of-envelope calculation that's enough for my purposes.

[http://rocketships.ca/srs/shipping/](http://rocketships.ca/srs/shipping/)

<comment><USER10> > looks like shit on mobile

No, it looks usable.

Just make it scale up so its no 25% of the page on mobile

This, in the `HEAD` tag, might do it

`<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1">`

<comment><USER9> Sure, I'll try it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I built Dependabot to automate keeping dependencies up-to-date / responding to security vulnerabilities at GoCardless. Spun it out into its own business. [https://dependabot.com](https://dependabot.com)

My best automating stuff story, though, is automating complaint letters to UK banks. We were pushing the limits of what the UK's Direct Debit system can handle, and as a result were seeing all the edge cases where banks got it wrong. One common one was banks accidentally charging back a payment twice, and each bank had their own, totally bespoke complaints procedure for getting in touch when that happened.

A couple of engineers and me spent a couple of days integrating with Lob and a fax provider whose name I forget to automatically write complaint letters every time the banks screwed up. Some of these were being sent to named individuals for all Direct Debit complaints related to RBS, for example.

Needless to say, the banks fixed the problems that were causing us to need to complain soon enough. :-)

<comment><USER12> Just wanted to say thanks for Dependabot! I'm excited to be trying it out with `friends` ([https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends](https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends)) and I really appreciate the quick turnaround you gave me when I found a small bug the other week.

To others, check out Dependabot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I 've built a custom ERP system, with Laravel & SQlite, to keep track of all my clients' details, their hosting plans, domain providers and all other piece of information I need. It sends automated emails when a hosting/domain has to be renewed, as well as providing valuable info about my servers. There's definitely space for further improvements, but up to now it gets the work done, beautifully.

</comment><comment><USER14> I automate extensively, but I don't use many modern/specialised tools _just_ for automation. I tend to rely on general purpose scripting tools, templates, and programming with relevant APIs instead.

For example, I write many simple programs, often just shell scripts, and I have a go-to set of popular libraries and system tools for most integration purposes. I use many types of triggers to start those activities, including scheduled jobs, hooks from local programs like Git, webhooks from online services, and various other things.

I also customise software UIs extensively. My text editor, graphics and other creative programs, browsers, and other software that I use regularly are all full of macros, templates, presets and the like, and often have reconfigured keyboard shortcuts, menus/toolbars, or event triggers set up to access them quickly or perform tasks automatically at appropriate times.

As for why I don't use a lot of the modern, dedicated automation tools, it's not that I have anything in particular against them, but after building software for the first few decades, I find it is almost always faster and more reliable for me personally to do things the "old-fashioned" way. These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually straightforward from just about any decent shell or programming language if you need to.

<comment><USER15> > These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they > automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually > straightforward from just about any decent shell or programming language if > you need to.

Could you give some examples?

<comment><USER14> _Could you give some examples?_

Sure. In fact, Zapier have a good example right on their home page, showing a connection between someone submitting a form to Wufoo and adding their email address to a MailChimp mailing list.

For automation purposes, Wufoo can trigger a webhook when a form is submitted and MailChimp have a REST API that can be used to manage mailing lists. So, if I wanted to automate that sort of task, I'd probably just set up an endpoint on a server to receive those webhooks and then write a few lines of Python to extract the required form fields and send them off to MailChimp, instead of introducing the additional dependency and potentially cost of an intermediary service like Zapier.

<comment><USER16> I used Zapier in about 2 months and had the same conclusion. It is still easier and to write a few lines of code (Node.js in my case) to expose a REST API, extract some fields and make a POST request to another service with an authorization header. The benefits of using Zapier as an intermediary service makes no sense for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a old-school fashion company where employees meet with clients and they need to fill out a form with ~60 fields. Afterwards those form results need to be transformed and inserted into multiple other templates.

I've automated this via Apps Script: An employee just fills out the form, and everything else is done automatically. (and even more: the script also sends an invoice to the client, creates a calendar event for the employee and adds the order to an internal spreadsheet)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, I wasn't aware of Apps script, thanks! Seems like this should be more popular than it is

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> # Our business (smaller ISP) stack is:

* Xero: Accounting (I'm working to move to ledger). Automates sending of monthly invoices, CC import, etc.

* Lob: Letters and checks. I have python scripts that auto-generate a lot of the content to be sent.

* Python Scripts: Payroll, current financial health checking (expected income, what's in back, upcoming bills), text alerts for critical issues, etc.

* LibreNMS: Network health

* Mattermost: Internal communication

* Gitlab: Internal configs, wiki, script backups

* Amazon S3: Backups

* GSuite: Email/Docs/Sheets

* Zammad: Automated ticket and support site. We have templates replies for 80% of our support requests.

* Stripe: Automatic CC Invoicing, financial CRM

* Bench.co: Looking at setting this up to automate book keeping.

* Airtable: Customer signups, customer data filtering, pseudo CRM

</comment><comment><USER19> If you'd prefer an open-source equivalent of Zapier, have a look at [https://github.com/huginn/huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Google Calendar. Not really "automating", but I got a big boost in productivity from assigning themes to different days, so I'm not thrashing back and forth, and I can batch up similar tasks. Of course, there are fires that screw things up, but it's generally much smoother.

2\. Eliminating tasks that don't need to be done, or that I've over- engineered. I have an accountability partner, and while that has a lot to do with setting and meeting commitments, it probably has at least as much to do with eliminating pointless tasks. ("If you're trying to do X, what if you just did Y for now, and eliminated P, Q, R, S, etc?")

3\. Self-serving/dog-fooding, but my own software tells me when prospects are interacting with lead magnets and proposals, and it automates most of the proposal process, so I can have more real conversations with people with fewer dials and less stress.

4\. OmniFocus is great for getting tasks out of my head, showing me what I need to do, handling recurring tasks, etc. I'm not really using all the functionality to the max, and I should really do a more rigorous job with reviews, but it's super helpful. (I imagine other task managers have similar features, although this seems to work best for me.)

5\. Automating customer support-- there are some customer support functions that require human intervention on the back end. If something comes up repeatedly, I write a script to automate it. Not a huge time savings, but instead of 5 minutes and a series of commands, it can be 30 seconds and something you can do from your phone. Not perfect, but helpful.

6\. Delegation. Some things can't be eliminated or automated, but they can delegated. For a while, the biggest pain in my life was audio editing for my podcast. So I outsourced it. This is a form of "automation" that we often overlook, but it's been great. (I asked @gk1 more about Standard Operating Procedures on this thread, because this is where I see a lot of opportunities for more "automation".)

<comment><USER20> Love your #1. Care to share more perhaps an example what you mean by themes for different days?

<comment><USER21> I did something similar to this in my startup days, it was called "FORMS". This is where you take a particular focus for each day of the week.

\- Monday: Finances \- Tuesday: Operations \- Wednesday: Research & Development \- Thursday: Marketing \- Friday: Sales

This allowed me to focus ON the business vs. IN the business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been a loyal user of Mailparser for years. They provide an email address where you can send any email (tracking, invoice, etc..) and it extracts data based on pre-defined rules.

Then, you use Zapier to do almost anything with that data: send it to a google sheet, use that info to trigger an email to your customer, etc... The possibilities are endless.

My favorite use case was to use it for tracking emails sent out to our customers. We would have fedex-generated emails from our 3PL sent to a @mailparser address, which strips relevant info from the email, sends it to our Sendgrid account, re-skins the email in our format and sends it along to the customer as us. Won't bore you with the details, but we had a unique challenge that required something like this.

<comment><USER23> Great to hear that you like Mailparser and that you are using it since a couple of years already! I'm the founder of Mailparser and reading your comment made my day! :-)

I thought I should mention that we also launched a sister-product called [https://docparser.com](https://docparser.com) two years. Docparser is basically like Mailparser, but for documents (PDFs or scanned documents).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> \- Zapier. I have about 30 zaps running that automate mailchimp list management, email processing and other tasks.

\- Python/PHP/Geektool. Another 5 or so processes running that automate analysis and reporting of sales, competitor and economic data.

\- Google App Scripting. Inbox cleaning & recirculation scripts running.

\- Xero API & Python. Internal financial modeling and reporting.

If I had more time I'd automate it all and never step foot into the office again.

<comment><USER25> I'm curious about the financial modeling bit - would you mind expanding on that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Time to shine. :-)

I have a Rasperry Pi sitting at home, which is running Chrome headless to scrap some webpages on a 2/3 hours interval between 8am and 11pm, stores the data scraped on a Redis instance on the same machine, then with a PHP script I push these data in another interval straight on a FB page via IFTTT because I'm to lazy to implement the FB auth myself or use more than a POST request.

<comment><USER27> How does this process relate to your business automation?

<comment><USER28> Scraping Twitter or Reddit for content and then reposting it to Facebook. Likely without attribution.

<comment><USER26> Wrong, but thanks for trying :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I use ScanBot to scan in all of my receipts and other important papers: [https://scanbot.io/en/features.html](https://scanbot.io/en/features.html)

I have it linked to Evernote, so that anything that I scan in (receipts from dining out, etc.) is waiting for me in Evernote by the time I make it home.

<comment><USER30> How is this different from Evernote's scan function?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Every month, my Gmail address receives PDF invoices for services I consume. I set up an IFTTT filter to automatically download the associated attachments into a folder in my Dropbox. I then only need to go through that folder to categorise these invoices for accounting, without having to piecemeal download and process them through Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER32> I work at a social media platform for everything related to tattoos, and here is a list of the most important automation tools that we use and for what:

* Terraform to automate infrastructure such as github accounts, email accounts and AWS infrastructure and google calendars etc.

* Ansible for all provision and configuration management.

* Codeship as CI/CD for automatic packaging and deployment of docker images. Mainly using official base images with little to no repacking, only reconfiguration.

* StylyCI to correct codestyling

* AWS Autoscale groups for autoscaling.

* Makefiles for automating local environment setup and "nice-to-have" operations

<comment><USER33> Can you explain how you use Terraform to automate google calendars?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My team has been using an all-in-one CRM named Agile CRM which has the capabilities of most of these essential tools given below.

As a growing business, we needed all the help for running our business smoothly. Here is an exhaustive list of all the best tools we needed:

1\. For scheduling appointments- A calendar app like Google Calendar 2\. For lead generation - A lead prospector tool like Agile CRM to generate leads through social media. 3\. For project management - Trello 4\. For cloud-based mobile communication - RingCentral 5\. For email marketing - Mailchimp 6\. For building landing pages - Unbounce 7\. For social listening, scheduling - Hootsuite 8\. For help desk support - Clickdesk 9\. For SEO - Ahref, Moz 10\. For competitor research - SEMRush 11\. For automatically checking your grammar even while sending your emails - Grammarly 12\. Google Analytics to observe website traffic. 13\. For building websites - wiz Interestingly, Agile CRM covers most of the above necessary (the first 8 out of the 13 given) features on a single platform. So, when we came across this CRM, we thought we would start using this free tool to manage our customer relationships as well.

And instead of using 8 different tools It is the only comprehensive, end-to- end CRM that delivers sales, marketing and support automation to help small and medium businesses manage all parts of the customer journey, from a single platform, in order to drive sustainable, scalable growth.

</comment><comment><USER35> We get a lot of mileage out of Butler for Trello (in combination with Zapier, pipes.digital, Trello mail-in to process App Store notification mails, etc).

[https://butlerfortrello.com/](https://butlerfortrello.com/)

No affiliation, just a happy user.

<comment><USER36> Mind expanding on your use case for Butler for Trello? Their landing page is a little unclear on specifics.

<comment><USER37> Not the op but I use Butler Bot (which is different from their powerup). It's been awesome--I use it automate moving tasks around on my lists based on conditions (like cards due today are pushed to the top), for creating recurring tasks or posting reminder comments. It can basically be programmed to do almost anything for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would love to know how to deal with all the various electronic invoices I receive from different services (periodically and one-off, but especially the periodic).

When trying to keep up with a dozen active domains/companies and associated services, I end up spending half of my time managing logins, searching for invoices (at quarterly tax time), etc. It's really at the point where I'd have better quality of life making less money and doing less paid work.

<comment><USER39> With my accountant/bookeeper we use hubdoc, receiptbank, and xero.

Hubdoc collects monthly invoices from a lot of services. (You have to login with them, but for less important services this is fine)

Receiptbank accepts invoices by email or scan. For other services which send by email I created autoforward rules. For others like amazon which have some personal and some business I filter into a folder and process periodically.

For paper invoices, you scan a photo and receipt bank extracts the relevant data. (It extracts this data with emailed documents too)

Xero puts it all together, and also autocalculates things like foreign exchange.

The best solution is probably a service like Bench though if it's available in your area: a cloud bookeeper.

Having one has greatly improved my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Other than Zapier, Slack reminders are a _huge_ help to us. We have reminders set up for all sorts of things, both recurring and adhoc. If you use Slack and don't use reminders, look into how it works, they are fantastic.

We also use [https://sweep.cards/](https://sweep.cards/) which is from Amy Hoy, who many of you may know of. It's basically for things that don't go in a calendar but which are recurring in some fashion, such as doing payroll each month, weekly reviews, or even minor daily tasks you need to remember to do. It has group workflow for this stuff as well if there are multiple people who need to do a single piece of a recurring task.

<comment><USER39> Does Sweep have an app or good mobile view for management? Looks very interesting.

<comment><USER40> Unfortunately I think she might be shadowbanned as her comment was immediately "dead", so I'll repaste just in case:

 _Not yet, we 're still very new! Being able to interact easily wherever you are is a high priority for us, however, so it's high on the list. We do have a Slackbot already._

<comment><USER39> You're right, she is. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> AWS, particularly Lambda, step functions and budgets.

The business is a marketplace addon.

Lambda functions handle the webhooks to add, upgrade or remove the addon.

Step functions handle guiding new users through onboarding, by sending email reminders automatically re-configuring the service based on customer actions.

Budgets make sure a customer is not using more resources than they are paying for, and send email alerts to me and customers at various usage amounts.

I have extracted a lot of my AWS and Lambda software into an open source boilerplate app:

[https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas](https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas)

It's amazing how little code and operations this business requires!

<comment><USER42> Gofaas looks amazing. Thank you.

<comment><USER41> You're welcome! Happy to share what I've learned building my own FaaS systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I automate _everything_ I can! But maybe if I have to recommend one way, I would recommend Google Spreadsheets scripts. Similar to Visual Basic for Applications in Excel, Google Spreadsheets support Javascript and you can use them for infinite things.

Some things we use them for:

* automate the bank payments to our suppliers (exporting the table format in SEPA XML format)

* tweet some of our evergreen blog posts every day (note these scripts run in the cloud, the spreadsheets do not even need to be open)

* assist in the formatting of our newsletters (we write sections in Markdown, the script formats and uploads images to our blog, uploads the finished article and schedules)

We also use Zapier extensively. One particular automation I'm really proud of is accounting: we use Zapier to collect invoice PDFs sent by email, later on I wrote some scripts using Selenium to also log in and download invoices from websites that do not send the PDF over email. This saved me tons of time. Then a small script downloads the bank statements and puts each line in an Asana task, this way I can do reconciliation: I find the PDF invoice for every entry in the bank and put them together. It is very easy to find out which invoices you didn't download yet, if an invoice still needs payment or if you were sent an unexpected invoice. Lately I have refined this further and automated some of the matchmaking too, using Apache PDFBox to read the content of the invoices.

</comment><comment> Xt-6 I am building a small tool to try to automate all the nudging around pull requests. The dream is contact only the relevant people (as opposed to spam), in an asynchronous fashion to avoid interruption. Example: Asking to fix tests, remind them to do a review, asking to fix conflict with master, asking to re-review, etc.

Alpha [http://www.reviewstatus.io](http://www.reviewstatus.io)

</comment><comment><USER44> I have been at quite a few different companies and startups, and whenever I come on it seems like the company is having crippling DevOps problems. Engineers are getting code written and services built, and it's not getting deployed because the process is so complicated. Even when they do get it up, it falls over.

I have nearly always recommended Nanobox [0]. Their service helped completely automate our infrastructure, no matter what tech we were using. They handle any project in any language. Whether it was a small startup, or medium sized, it felt like we had just hired a 5-10 person DevOps team to handle everything for us.

After we implement it, it's a night and day difference. Teams start shipping updates multiple times per day, their auto-scaling handles all of our traffic patterns, and we're free to bounce around from provider to provider to use up their free credits and get the best deals. I've recommended it to all of the previous 3 companies I've worked at now, and they are all still using it and very happy.

[0] [https://nanobox.io/](https://nanobox.io/)

</comment><comment><USER45> I often think three times before I decide to automate anything. As a dev, and co-founding with another dev, the direct response is always that it should be automated. On second thought, our billable hours are almost always better spent doing client work. This is a very relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/)

My main work (non-dev) tools are Asana and Gmail. Asana is standalone for us (looking into adding it's Timeline which seem solid). Gmail have a couple of filters.

We use a finance setup where I just forward or email my receipts and have an accountant go through it and correct all the numbers, so this is automated for our part already (we pay about $200/mo for a personal accountant to go through it).

The one thing I think we spend too much time on is support issues. Customers will mail me personally, or my colleague, and it's hard to keep track of everything. We have a small team of students doing work on this and will soon have a custom web app solution built.

<comment><USER46> I use Zoho Desk for tracking support tickets. It's free up to I think 25 users. I deal with the emailed to me case by opening a ticket and copy/pasting the email into it.

<comment><USER47> I second Zoho, Zoho everything. I run a 1 person company and love Zoho. I think their mail is far superior to gmail, their office apps are superior to gsuite, invoicing is great too. I don't use Desk or many of their other apps, but they have them, and are integrated with each other. In a way integration is better than automation. Because it is integrated in one platform it is available to all applications. I don't know if that counts as less automation or more automation but I know it means less time spent on it for me. I have no affiliation with Zoho beyond being a happy customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Automation was quite a difficult task for us at first since we had all these legacy projects that the effort to automate them wasn't worth it.

So what we did, was on the new projects we started using DeployBot, which was very nice especially for the development team. Then we started to see what can we do on the legacy projects and once we have more time from other projects we tackle one older project at a time where we automate at least parts of it.

It can be a very annoying process especially if you have people in your team who where used at a certain style of the process, but I think in the long run it was worth it.

</comment><comment><USER49> I built a website test automation platform [0] that started out as an automation challenge for my other side projects. It has proven itself useful to others so I figured I'd turn it into my next adventure as its own business.

Automation is something that I believe to be a must-have for many areas of business. ETL work, data entry, data collection, testing, etc., can (mostly) be automated as they're all very replicable. This frees your hands to work on the more important aspects of your business/job.

[0] [https://bastions.co](https://bastions.co)

<comment><USER39> Two points of feedback:

1\. From your description, I hadn't realized what this does. I run a website for my business, so I may be in the market for this. On my first read though, I skimmed and thought "very technical dev programming tool". On the second read I saw it was relevant. 2\. Lack of pricing implies the price is extremely high. If the price is not extremely high, then you should add a pricing page somewhere. Doesn't have to be front page (some people will just sign up for the free trial), but adding it somewhere would probably increase free trial signups.

<comment><USER49> I appreciate the feedback! Messaging has been one of my biggest challenges by far. I've unfairly hurt the project because of my lack of expertise in communicating its value. Not adding pricing to the home page was a decision I made due to the home page being much more cluttered than I like (probably due to my aforementioned inability to communicate effectively). I figured, if people are interested they'll head on over to the registration page to see the pricing. I see your point as far as adding a pricing page, I will do that for sure.

<comment><USER39> I saw your email, will reply later. But, here, briefly:

* say who it's for. Maybe "a tool that lets business owners automatically test their websites" or "site admins" or whoever is the target. That's to grab attention and let the prospect see "ah yes, I am in this category". Then you can discuss specifics. * pricing off the homepage is fine. It just should be available somewhere. Free trial usually involves signing up for an account, so I didn't even click. I'd want to be able to estimate the annual cost for my team before signup

Your site is similar to Pingdom, but more specialized in checking site funtionality, right? You could check out their messaging for ideas.

Edit: your page is actually pretty good btw. It was your Hacker News comment that I skipped past. Only hesitation on the site was not knowing pricing. Beyond that, I guess also knowing whether I need it, but I probably do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Great thread! There's $$$ of value in here. One could easily scrape this page an build an automation resource site ;)

Google Cloud and K8 for orchestration. Autoscaling with kubectl in a single command.

Twilio SMS API is also great. Not quite at the point where I can send a text to a machine in human language and have it launch services. But pinging from phone, receiving health reports, alerts, etc. Very reliable and secure.

[https://www.twilio.com/sms](https://www.twilio.com/sms)

</comment><comment><USER51> Web browser macros! ...to automate logins plus some daily and weekly reporting and repetitive "check something" tasks. Once set up, macros are a huge time and typing saver. Formerly I used iMacros for this, and now the open-source Kantu extension:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser- auto...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser- automation/gcbalfbdmfieckjlnblleoemohcganoc)

<comment><USER52> That sounds interesting. However despite being generally aware of repetitive tasks, I can't imagine many use cases. Would you mind sharing some more detailed examples what you're using it for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> As we get a lot of use out of Slack, I've created a bot which notifies people of incoming requests in Salesforce through Slack, based on a load score calculation.

They can claim ownership directly in Slack or assign it to someone else (who in turn gets notified in DM by the bot). It has cut response time in half across the board.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've added a couple of small cloud functions for daily statistics that are pushed to our company slack in dedicated reporting channels. Pagespeed reports for our websites, keyword rankings, crawls from Google Bot etc. Definitely reduced the monkey work for our team.

<comment><USER55> This sounds really cool. Is this being done primarily for the benefit of your marketing team? I'm always curious about automating marketing reporting or operations.

<comment><USER54> Sorry for the late response, but yes definitely done for our marketing insights. Our whole team is very data driven and Slack gives us a perfect opportunity to be transparent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> The best tools are the once you build yourself, because they will work 100% to your own specs... I build AI power robots to trade the market for me, and would never use "automation" tools, especially hosted by 3rd parties, because they will steal my ideas...

</comment><comment><USER57> I work for a fortune 500 company.

We want to automate everything but we fight against the odds. In fact, I work with people that "don't believe in automation". I don't even understand the sentence.

BTW: Docker, Ansible, an in-house tool somewhat similar to OpenStack, Go and Python.

</comment><comment><USER58> Bank API integration, corporate credit card for partner and travel billing, custom accounting and supply-chain management systems with automatic machine translation, supplier shipment tracking, inventory and BOM tracking, github webhooks, github oauth.

</comment><comment><USER59> Google Apps Script.

If you're all in on Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc., there's so much you can do with GAS. I've used it for creating automated emails with charts pulled from Sheets, scraping websites, analyzing my emails, rall sorts of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> I built a dead-simple inventory/bill of materials database on LAMP for my small electronics manufacturing business.

I've considered making it into a SaaS product (sell your by-products!), but I keep dragging my heels.

</comment><comment><USER60> I use TextExpander for support / service emails and to pull up information quickly (VAT details, addresses, etc)

Invoices and late payment reminders I've automated with my invoicing system (Crunch)

<comment><USER61> I use PhraseExpress (free version available) for answer e-mails as well. Gmail has boilerplate responses, but you can script PhraseExpress to retrieve data locally. So, if a customer is asking for an order, I can pull up details in the e-mail by doing a query locally.

<comment><USER62> I'm using PhraseExpress (free) too. I have a few macros set up for commonly used phrases, but thanks to its prefix matching and popup of multiple results, I also use it as a quick lookup tool for various strings so that I don't have to remember them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Trello for freelancer management and Google Docs for tracking campaigns, tests and evaluating/rating how good our digital content performed

</comment><comment><USER64> Sikuli

<comment><USER65> I second Sikuli and recommend Sikuli-X. In the end though the company I work for wanted to use a corporate supported solution so I now use UiPath. It is allowing us to automate repetitive tasks in a Win32 application that uses shdocvw.dll as the shell for Silverlight components, and an embedded TTY emulator among other things. Pointing Spy++ at it revealed an almost infinite event model. Automating with Windows handles just wasn't possible, so the OCR of both Sikuli and UiPath came in handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What is anyone using for Marketing Automation?

</comment><comment><USER66> Not seeing much in the way of automating bookkeeping so far. What are folks using to do that?

<comment><USER67> Xero

<comment><USER68> FreeAgent, it's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've been looking at this space for a while. Will likely implement ERPNext soon.

</comment><comment><USER70> AutoIt3 for some windows automation. Python and bash/shell scripts.

</comment><comment><USER71> Linked Helper & Follow Liker for social media

</comment><comment><USER72> Surprised Okta hasn't been mentioned here.

</comment><comment><USER73> IFTT, Jenkins, Docker-compose

</comment><comment><USER74> Humans

</comment><comment><USER75> ProcessPlan is a tool that allows you to map out any process that is systematic and repeatable. You can then step through that process like a decision tree. This video will show you how it works: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_a1TbM380&list=PLpAU9Y6nl6...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_a1TbM380&list=PLpAU9Y6nl6bltFIaGzACndufqltbXN7Az). ProcessPlan also integrates with Zapier and has a full REST API, so you can integrate with the tools you already use. Visit [https://processplan.com/to](https://processplan.com/to) learn more.

Full discloseure, I work for ProcessPlan.</comment>


Samsung Recalls 2.8M Top-Load Washing Machines - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/04/500685316/samsung-recalls-2-8-million-top-load-washers-over-disloding-lids <comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised that anyone still makes top-loading washing machines. They completely disappeared from the UK market decades ago, due to the vastly superior energy and water efficiency of front-loading machines.

Does anyone know why top-loading machines persist in the US market?

<comment><USER2> Few reasons. One is a positive history/experience with them. The Whirlpool made (most common machines on the market) top loading machines were rock solid for 30 plus years. People would often have them for 20-30 years. (and still have them, keep them maintained)

Another reason is they do a better job of washing clothes as they use more water. This is important for people that have kids, do cloth diapers, or are actually washing dirty/muddy clothes. They also don't have mold issues because of rubber gaskets and have been historically cheaper to maintain and repair.

The new top loaders, specifically Whirlpool made vertical modular washers are complete garbage. They break within 2-3 years of buying new. Whirlpool stopped making the direct drive top loading washers that everyone loved about 3 years ago. Now you can only buy them used, and I would highly recommend doing so if you need a good washer.

Front loading machines do spin the clothes a bit dryer, which saves on dry time, unless you hang dry, then it really doesn't make much difference. But they cost over twice as much and are about double the price when it comes to repairs. Hope that helps!

Here's a post I wrote up on the subject. [http://recraigslist.com/2015/10/they-used-to- last-50-years/](http://recraigslist.com/2015/10/they-used-to-last-50-years/)

<comment><USER3> " The Whirlpool made (most common machines on the market) top loading machines were rock solid for 30 plus years. People would often have them for 20-30 years."

This is no exaggeration. The one that broke for me was estimated by the technician to be 20 years old with the dryer he said was probably 30 years old. We'd kept them for years and years with no need for repairs. They did the job.

I told him in IT that complexity just made stuff break more often or take more work to fix. My prediction was that the old stuff was still more reliable & cheaper to fix. He confirmed this was true. Said the new stuff was all garbage that kept him in good business. I asked for the most reliable, used, old washer he had in stock at their warehouse at the time. The one he gave me for $80-100 looks old as the other stuff but similarly works fine.

I never buy new washers or dryers. I'd consider newer dishwashers because both Consumer Reports I read a long time ago and personal experience had them breaking a lot. I'm curious about feedback if they've improved in reliability over time. Washers & dryers the old ones win hands down at 20-30 years operation. They're the mainframes of appliances.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, you were wise to listen to him. Another tell is to go into used appliance stores and see what they carry the most of. Most used appliance shops won't even bother refurbishing many machines now because it's not cost effective and they don't trust that they will make it out of their warranty before breaking.

Dishwashers, stay away from Frigidaire entirely. They are made disposable. 2-3 years is the average life before needing a repair. I've had the best experience with Whirlpool dishwashers. KitchenAid has gone downhill in the past 5 years or so, in terms of quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone who currently has a Samsung stove, I can wholeheartedly say I hate the thing. The interface is one of the worst I've seen - touch "buttons" on a stove. It does't work half the time if your hands are the slightest bit wet - which they often are after washing hands. It's incredibly frustrating, and has completely thrown me off about buying any sort of Samsung appliance.

Samsung has such potential, but it's untested things make me wonder about their long-term value.

<comment><USER5> > touch "buttons" on a stove

What exactly is the process in an organization that leads to products like this?

<comment><USER6> Touch buttons on the stove (assuming they are like the ones we have at home) mean the stove is just one flat glass pane that is impossible to make dirty.

Yes, the buttons are kinda retarded and unresponsive, but if you fry something and have droplets of burned oil fly everywhere you just take a cloth with a little detergent and it just wipes off.

No more crusty disgusting matter growing on nooks and crannies of knobs that you have to operate on to get off the damn thing

<comment><USER7> Obviously it works great, and the next logical step is voice control /s

<comment><USER8> Non-contact interfaces would be a godsend in the kitchen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is amazing how many things that were a solved problem at least 40 years ago continue to be reinvented badly.

<comment><USER10> Know-how has to be maintained. Knowledge has to be passed down to the apprentices and juniors. Otherwise it is lost over time and has to be rediscovered/reinvented, often by failures like in the article. Technological progress is never guaranteed or a certainty. Progress is the result of incremental improvements and sustainable hard work.

<comment><USER11> I suppose the classic example is concrete.

That said, is that really the problem here, or a culture of trying to rush products to the market?

<comment><USER12> Another example is mechanical parts and linkages. In the early 20th century there were many incredibly intricate mechanical devices -- the Curta calculator is an example[1] -- that have been replaced by semiconductors. I wonder if those could even be made today without having to recreate the knowledge and manufacturing processes.

[1] [https://calculating.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/curta- calcul...](https://calculating.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/curta-calculator- breakdown.jpg)

<comment><USER13> A coworker had one of those and brought it in one day, an absolute marvel to behold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dang it. We bought the Samsung instead of LG, because of videos[1] that showed the LG exploding.

Top load models have a much large capacity than front loaders, but there are some serious challenges to overcome for these models that lack a central agitator column.

Despite being billed as "water saving", ours often has to repeat the setup for the spin cycle. It does this by dumping several gallons of water, sloshing the clothes around until it calculates an even load, then starting the drain+spin again.

If you are unlucky, this can happen multiple times. We are tipped off by the noise of the machine momentarily whacking into the surrrounding items in the laundry room.

It seems Samsung is offering "free repairs", but that makes me wonder if it's just a technician with a USB cable coming to reduce things like spin rate or make the machine even more likely to halt and prompt for intervention (ugh-- wet clothes are heavy).

[1] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_z4fjiCz6tU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_z4fjiCz6tU)

<comment><USER15> The "free repair" includes "reinforcement of the washer top." I haven't had any trouble with mine, but I don't pay much attention to it.

[https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/Samsung-Recalls-Top- Load-W...](https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/Samsung-Recalls-Top-Load-Washing- Machines)

<comment><USER14> That's good news. In any event, the spin cycle is fast enough (in the 1/2m•v^2 sense) that even before the recall, I wouldn't let my small kids in the same room with it. A repair still won't fix that precaution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is Samsung in the middle of an industrial sabatage capaign?

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks like 2016 has been a tough year for Samsung. Obviously not directly comparable, but this has somewhat reminded me of Chipotle's past troubles and the impact its had on customer perception.

<comment><USER18> Has Chipotle's customer perception been hurt that much? I know personally the threat of E. coli infection, while certainly higher than it should have been, was not really that much worse and I certainly didn't stop going to Chipotle over it. Maybe that's just myself but I know I've heard similar sentiments from others. Has Chipotle said how much damage they think was done?

<comment><USER19> They have negative same-store growth.

<comment><USER5> Post hoc ergo propter hoc

<comment><USER20> OK, sure, but what else have you got? Shall we run a controlled double-blind experiment where we expose only half of the participants to the idea that e coli was found at Chipotle, but not the other half, and repeat it in 20 distinct different cultures?

It's not exactly a crazy theory that "people eat less at a store than has been in the national news for poisoning people". Science and logic do not require us to pretend to be _complete_ idiots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently replaced a Samsung washer after the thing started to stain my clothes with rust that was getting generated from the internal parts of the machine chipping and exposing the rustable interior to the water. Got a Speed Queen and am happy.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't know what's going on with Samsung's QA process. Their cellphone apps are buggy, their newest flagship cellphone has a design flaw that is still being root-caused after global recall, now another hardware design flaw in washing machine.

But today, a complain from my friend who works in Samsung Research America at MTV may explain something: on his posted screenshot, the boss sent an email to ask them to fix bugs during the weekends...

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, at least these aren't bursting into flames. (Although, hilariously enough, they are still sort of exploding, just in a different way.)

<comment><USER24> Their other model catches on fire [1]. (Under "FAQs" click "What is the issue?")

[1] [http://www.samsung.com/au/washingmachinerecall/](http://www.samsung.com/au/washingmachinerecall/)

<comment><USER23> That is too funny, almost too good to be true...kinda like how Anthony Weiner got pulled into all this Clinton scandal business.

<comment><USER25> Funny you say it this way. I would say Hillary got pulled into the Weiner scandal..

<comment><USER23> That is a better way of saying it, I was more thinking of it from the perspective of the media coverage

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, Samsung has made its entire business out of making the crapiest goods possible. They are masters of the "it works within the definition of 'works' according to the warranty until the warranty expires" which Americans just can't get enough of.

</comment><comment><USER27> I own an affected model. The exchange program is seemingly not worth it. My compensation offer was $295 if I purchased a Samsung replacement, $195 for non-Samsung. I chose the "repair" because those amounts were approximately 25% at best the cost of a suitable replacement. I have several dogs, so I do a lot of laundry daily and need an expensive unit geared toward large families because of it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would argue this is far more serious than the phones that were recently recalled:

> "The washing machine top can unexpectedly detach from the washing machine > chassis during use, posing a risk of injury from impact," according to the > Consumer Product Safety Commission.

How scary is that? This likely could cause death. You are talking about the water, clothes, and the weight of the drum flying out and potentially hitting you.

<comment><USER29> If you watch the video the aftermath does not look like it would be life threatening to be standing next to it. Could send you to the hospital though.

<comment><USER30> If you read the article, in at least one instance someone ended up with a broken jaw. That much force is definitely enough to kill someone, it would just depend where they were hit and their baseline health. Imagine a child standing next to the machine when it fell apart. Or an older person getting hit in the head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> They should pivot to military contracts.

<comment><USER32> And building exotic buildings like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa#Development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa#Development)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why does anyone buy fancy washers?

<comment><USER34> Using less water is what got me interested. When I bought it I was worried about loading the septic drainfield with excess water and soap. Then I moved to a city where water is very expensive. The energy to heat the water is a concern too.

I found that compared to a normal American style top loading machine with agitator, it takes better care of my clothing.

I happened to choose a machine that can spin at 1200 rpm, which is apparently rather fast for a laundry machine. The electric dryer seems to work a lot faster.

Now my machine is getting old, I had to repair the electronics once, and am wondering when the gasket will tear and will I be able to find a replacement, etc. I have had to repair top loaders more often but parts for these kinds of machines seem to stay in the market for 30 years or more. That's probably not going to be the case for this fancy import.

<comment><USER2> Fancy dryers dry faster only because the fancy washer is spinning the clothes faster at the end of the cycle. The technology inside clothes dryers hasn't changed in 30 years, even in the fanciest models. Look up the parts, they still use all the parts and design from models 30 years ago. It's actually comical. Source: I repair dryers.

They haven't found a better way to convert electricity into heat, or a faster way to use a flame to dry the clothes. Even old dryers had moisture sensors to turn the machine off once it sensed the clothes were dry.

<comment><USER34> The computer brained dryer might be better at temperature regulation but otherwise I see nothing that the mechanical timer-control and simple electronics can't do.

<comment><USER2> In the old mechanical brained dryers a simple set of thermostats regulated the temperature. They can be purchased for $5 on ebay to replace if they act up. A new computer brain? $100-$200

<comment><USER34> If it's available, that is! I know most appliance repair techs are not going to go through this, but there are probably two components on the computer control that I can not buy off the shelf. The SMPS transformer and the cpu with masked firmware. The washingmachine had a third, the 3phase driver for the big motor, which is off the market now.

I figured the simplest dryers just had a "one heater, or two in series, or two in parallel" switch and a melting safety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sounds like using an accelerometer to measure vibration and reduce spin speed if vibration is too high might be a good addition to washing machines.

<comment><USER34> My made in 2004 LG frontloader has a simpler device for this. A ball bearing rests in the path of an LED light. If it shakes, the ball moves, allowing the light to shine on a phototransistor. The machine will slow down or stop and toss the load around depending on how much trouble it is having.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> if they get really good at retrofitting their recalled shitty hardware then maybe this'll just be something samsung owners should just expect going forward.

i hope this doesn't happen in their heavy industries unit though. can you recall ships that leak/sink.

</comment><comment><USER37> Samsung: A symbol of quality™</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle data that needs to be loaded in chunks? - <AUTHOR>

Hello Hners,
I am thinking of starting a blog where I would write articles on tech related topics (best practices, lessons learnt, approaches used to solve and design solutions to problems, etc) based on surveys from developers who have experience with the topics I'd be addressing.
I'd like to start with the following topic: Loading data in chucks.
I'm sure all of you have been to sites where all of the data is not loaded at once.  More data is either loaded automatically as you scroll to the bottom of the page or there is a button that you can click to load more data.
For those of you who have added this feature to a site you worked on, can you please take a moment to answer the following questions?  You can write your responses as comments or use the google docs form I created: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1p0428UJCp80CqHjNMHp-U1LuG5iKAk_WqDPFhRUI-4o/viewform?usp=send_form
1. Did you prefetch all the data at once, and then append chunks of data to the page as needed? Why or why not?
2. Did you run a query to fetch data from the database each time more data needed to be loaded? Why or why not?
3. Did you use another method apart from the two types listed above? If yes, can you please explain your method?
4. How did you determine the starting point of the next query? (only applicable if you answered yes to 2nd question)
5. How did you deal with such situations where data is subject to change? (only applicable if you answered yes to 2nd question) For example, a collection of articles sorted by the number of 'likes' each article has, and loaded in chunks of 2.  (1) Number of likes of each article before 1st query  (article1: 10 likes, article2: 7 likes,  article3: 3 likes, article4: 1 like) (2) Number of likes of each article before 2nd query  (article1:10 likes, article2: 7 likes, article3: 25 likes,  article4: 5 likes)
6. What database did you use? <comment><AUTHOR> 7\. Provide your details if you want to be added to the contributors' list: Full Name, Link to Blog/Personal Site/ Twitter profile/ Github/ Bitbucket, etc (optional).

Clickable: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1p0428UJCp80CqHjNMHp-U1LuG5i...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1p0428UJCp80CqHjNMHp-U1LuG5iKAk_WqDPFhRUI-4o/viewform?usp=send_form)

You can submit your email address here [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1TDPbZGNaOxemsCwvHVH3xzND1h4...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1TDPbZGNaOxemsCwvHVH3xzND1h4qm9dIpB6IPGd40lw/viewform?usp=send_form) if you are interested in participating in these surveys, or you'd like to be notified when I publish the article I'm writing.

Thank you for your time!</comment>