
Ask HN: If you could automate anything, what would you automate? - juancampa
Try to ignore the cost of creating it. You can assume automation is free, money and time wise.
======
AlSweigart
Teaching. All education politics aside, in my experience teaching is hard
because you have to juggle and be responsive to so many people at the same
time. Teaching is hard to scale. Everyone complains that schools are so
regimented and conformist, but when YOU are the one in front of a group of two
dozen (or three dozen!) kids who don't want to be there and are distracted by
everything and you only have 90 minutes to get them through a lesson, you
realize how hard it is to convey information.

Especially since in every class there will be one or two kids who take up like
40% of your energy, and you end up completely ignoring self-disciplined kids.

If there was a way we could provide automated teaching, that would be huge.
And I mean teaching, not just making resources available. Stack Overflow and
Wikipedia and Khan Academy are great, but they won't replace schools and
teachers. An AI system that could motivate, answer questions, pose questions,
encourage learning without judging failure, etc. would be wonderful.

~~~
bewe42
As a dev with constant pressure to learn new stuff I'd prefer the flip side:
learning / acquiring relevant skills for my career. The perfect future AI-
driven tutor that presents me exactly what I need to study and at the exact
level of difficulty so that learning becomes fun and seemingly effortless (btw
something I try to solve)

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shadyrudy
Laundry and dishes. Put them onto a little conveyor belt that goes somewhere.
Everything gets cleaned, sanitized, pressed, dry cleaned, etc. The next day,
everything appears back in my closet & cabinets.

~~~
eykanal
Strongly recommend you watch Hans Rosling's TED talk on washing machines to
realize how automated it already is:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine)

That said, I do still understand your point.

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devonkim
This probably puts me in the “not a people person” camp but “Starting and
maintaining business relationships.” Most great human interactions I’ve had
simply have nothing to do with business. Yet relationships are so important to
most businesses around the world, and simultaneously most of the motions seem
really mundane and dull compared to family time, dating, or even sitting at a
bar with a random stranger.

Oh, and web infrastructure security and identity management including
derivatives like ssh configurations. I have to do it every dang job I go to
and despite it having surprisingly little deviance in terms of requirements in
most places, nobody has the same setup. Ever. It drives me up the wall every
time and it makes me somewhat dread starting new companies because it’s such a
time sink yet so important.

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Kapura
Applying to jobs. So many jobs corporate jobs require re-entering information
ad infinitum already on a CV. My ideal world would be uploading a resume to
one service and then having one-click applications that would give you a text
field to write a cover letter or whatever non-CV info you want to give the
hiring managers.

~~~
gxs
LinkedIn aims to provide an experience like the one you've mentioned.

It's been hit or miss and it gives them a little too much leverage, but it's
been effective to some degree.

~~~
patrickk
The process is still very broken. I've applied for multiple jobs where I've
been forced to use a site called successfactors.eu, and the interface leads
you to think it's integrated with Linkedin ("apply with Linkedin" button), in
reality you're forced to re-enter your CV data multiple times, or the data is
all over the place after being imported. I'd much rather send my CV attached
as a PDF along with a cover letter directly to a recruiter or HR person.

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callmeed
Laundry. Collect it, wash it, dry it, fold it, steam/iron it (if necessary),
put it away. I don't want to cummicate, coordinate, deliver, or pick-up. Just
make it happen once a week and I'd pay a few hundred dollars a month.

~~~
schappim
Believe it or not there already is a laundry folding robot:
[https://foldimate.com](https://foldimate.com)

~~~
juancampa
Interesting, wondering what's the input. Pieces one by one or (hopefully) just
a blob of dry laundry

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otakucode
Executive class job operations. Imagine how much better the world would be if
instead of having a half dozen executives breaking the companies back with
absurd compensation packages, there was just an automated system that replaced
their functionality. Employee increases in productivity could actually result
in greater employee earnings! It would be like living before 1980 again!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
It really seems like one of those jobs that ought to become a human being for
"social stuff", largely assisted by, or even taking directions from, a machine
learning system. Well, that, or an electorate of the company's workers. After
all, in established firms, there often isn't a really clear relationship
between executive compensation, executive hiring, and firm performance. Every
position needs to pay for itself, these days, so if executives can't point to
the revenue they've created...

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bjourne
Physical exercise.

~~~
yazan94
The irony in your comment is awesome

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darafsheh
Deployment of open source applications that are time consuming and painful to
install and configure. I've started a project to automate this already =>
[https://serviceshop.io](https://serviceshop.io)

~~~
throwaway2016a
Kudos on launching your startup.

It looks like a great service. I went to it at first thinking it didn't add
any value over just launching the service in a Docker swarm (most open source
apps have pre-built containers now) but I see the enterprise options as a good
value add.

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IdontRememberIt
"Life is 80% maintenance" so I would automate that. (Have I read this on
Spielberg's Taken, episode 5?)

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kirillseva
I'd automate automating things (aka strong AI)

~~~
juancampa
Fair enough. What would you have this AI do for you? Examples please

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nuna
The lab. too much human error from temporary unmotivated young workers.

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SirLJ
If I have to do something twice, I would look to automate it. The best thing
so far is my stock market trading robots, been doing it for years with a great
results. e.g. making more money on average compared to 6 digits salary... Too
bad I love my job too much or I would have retired already...

~~~
jamifsud
Very cool to hear that you've found success doing this. Any resources you'd
recommend for someone just getting started? What tools / platforms / APIs do
you use?

~~~
SirLJ
I don't want to go into too much details (for security reasons), but I am
using my brokers API, the coding is done in python and everything is hosted on
a few VPS in different location around the planet for redundancy... I would
recommend starting with Interactive Brokers API - it is free, small linux VPS,
some data for back testing and off you go, for around $100 you can start + a
lot of time of course... Start by testing any trading strategy you can fin on
the net for free, they will fail, but you'll observe why and one day you will
find your own edge...

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jmmcd
Everything to do with rubbish: putting it out, collecting it,
processing/separating it, dumping it.

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bm98
Time tracking. No matter how many fancy time tracking apps you use, it's still
painfully manual. I want a robot that watches me and quietly makes intelligent
decisions about what I'm really doing, and tracks that.

~~~
kirillseva
That's kind of easy to do these days. If you add one more requirement, "and
doesn't spy on you" \- the task becomes impossible

~~~
ivm
Our automatic time tracking app doesn't spy on you:
[https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/](https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/)

Though there's no mobile version because it stores everything locally.

~~~
wink
I, too, wanted to start tracking this a bit but

a) didn't want stuff to be uploaded anywhere

b) didn't want to test a lot of apps

c) am always up for a challenge

So 2 weeks ago I dug out my long-forgotten knowledge about WINAPI and wrote
something in Rust. It's an MVP - it queries the active window every second and
writes a bit of info to a logfile in JSON format. Then I can run a python
script on the daily log and analyze it. It's been fun, but you instantly
notice a few things:

a) using a "window changed" hook would be better, but mine's good enough for
now, but this prepared

b) idle times are important. Don't leave the computer and then wonder about
off times. Current workaround: focus the media player window that's usually
not really active

c) dual monitors are really hard. There's 2 windows open - one on each
monitor, only one will be tracked.

d) Everything is hard, when I'm listening to a podcast during some other task
that doesn't need much concentration, this won't be tracked.

e) actual quality of the data. On the one hand I'm simply not interested in
adding all my browser history to this via window titles. On the other hand,
maybe you want finer-grained tracking. Same with songs played, videos watched
for example. Mayyybeee it could make sense tracking source code files in your
editor, but I think that's too finegrained. browser vs editor is good enough
for me right now

~~~
ivm
Yes, tracking multiple activities at the same time is too hard. I just stick
to tracking the focused window.

On macOS I use accessibility API to read content on the screen, including
address bars in browsers. But a browser extension sending URLs to your app on
localhost can work too.

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bazizbaziz
Acquisition and administration of public housing projects. The world needs
more publicly housing for people of all economic statuses. It seems incredibly
time consuming to build or convert private housing due to vast amounts of
paperwork and groups that must be involved to finance and manage these
projects. Automation can help to find a business plan, search for funding,
help run governance, and do accounting for the on-going operations.

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triplee
Cleaning my 22 year old's play area (which is basically the entire apt). And
the entire laundry and dish process.

My expenses for work.

Telling people on the internet that they are wrong.

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tomjen3
Food. Millions and millions of hours are wasted everyday by people as they
scramble to prepare dinner. So many hours would be freed, so much health
improved if all we had to do was grap a tasty, nutritiounes brick, that also
filled us.

I mean if you want to make food, that is great, but just like making your own
furniture or sewing your own clothing it would be something most people didn't
have to do.

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lostphilosopher
I've mentioned this on HN before, but: calorie and nutrition intake
monitoring.

Imagine an app that tells you how many calories you've consumed and the
nutrition you've consumed in real time, with reasonable accuracy, without you
having to manually input the food you've consumed. Like hands free
MyFitnessPal. Couple that with what's already available in activity
monitoring...

~~~
tomjen3
I tried to figure out how make that some time ago - although my goto solution
was cheap Indians rather than AI, but the problem boils down to the same thing
anyone who has tried to diet this way finds: judging portions is really,
really difficult. In matters a lot whether you put one or two teaspons of
creamer in the coffee, and how much, if any, oil is over your salad.

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gehwartzen
De-cluttering my home and office space. The ability to take pictures of my
entire living space, with every item in its place, to show a robot which then
puts everything back into position every night. Maybe with the ability to add
avoidance areas so my active work projects don't get disturbed.

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koonsolo
Buying groceries, and I'm even willing to pick it up myself.

I just want a smarphone app where I click "refill", and everything that is not
in my fridge and shelves but should be, is ordered. I then go pick it up the
next day.

Nice extra: buys extra stock when discounted (taking expiration into account)

~~~
throwaway2016a
Like [https://www.peapod.com/](https://www.peapod.com/) but the items are
chosen for you without you having to manually select each one?

~~~
koonsolo
Yes. I need some sort of smart fridge and shelves that know what is still
there.

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lanius
Cooking. I cook my own meals in order to eat healthy, but the cooking itself
is incredibly tedious.

~~~
chadgeidel
I'd take this one step further. I love cooking, but not for every meal. Some
way of automating the entire calorie delivery process with the correct amount
of macro/micronutrients. Similar to Soylent - except tailored for me
personally.

I'd still cook a few meals a week and I'd still go out to dinner, but it would
be a rare occasion.

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VohuMana
Difficult:

\- Learning/Teaching

\- My money, not earning it (although that would be nice) but if there was
some way to automate investing/saving/budgeting

\- Cleaning

Less Difficult:

\- Transportation

\- Setting up new programming projects (depending what language you're using
this has been done)

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lev99
I'd automate cleaning.

Dishes, laundry, cars, floors, walls, furniture, windows, lawns, roofs, pets,
any of it and all of it. We have tools for making these tasks easier, but even
with the latest technology the amount of human labor hours spent cleaning one
individual and their environment is staggering.

The benefits include not only a reduction in labor, but health and wellness
benefits as well. In addition, cleaning automation has a history of being
widely adopted. Almost everyone in the US uses dish washers and laundry
machines. Roombas and automatic car washes are also widely distributed.

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colept
Automate automation.

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fulafel
CO2 footprint management and transparency.

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vouhardy
I'd automate growth and blossom of nature

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weej
Human Gestation.

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evandena
end to end certificate renewal and deployment. We're about 80% there, but the
last 20% is a PITA.

~~~
juancampa
I thought Let's Encrypt with ACME did this. What's the 20% you talk about. I'm
interested.

~~~
technion
\- Appliances that have no scripting API and force you to install a
certificate in the GUI (I have a lot of these) \- Some Microsoft services that
will only take a new certificate after a restart, causing downtime. You can
automate it, but not every 90 days without upsetting people. \- Political
issues

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md_
Income taxes.

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huydotnet
Bathing

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davidivadavid
Anything people do in majority out of necessity and without enjoyment. Take
your pick.

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z3t4
Cleaning spam e-mail.

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eitland
Time sheets.

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miguelrochefort
UI design and implementation.

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gsirbiladze
Income

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AnimalMuppet
Meetings.

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jenscow
Everything

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sigjuice
Everything. If you do something twice, you are doing it wrong.

~~~
throwaway2016a
Relevant XKCD you need to read
[https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/)

~~~
jmmcd
The question asks us to ignore time and cost!

~~~
throwaway2016a
I know you're getting down voted but you make a very valid point about the way
the question is phrased. Perhaps you shouldn't have been down voted so
harshly.

