
Ask HN: Do you have any bots running doing some task? - ge96
I don&#x27;t know why I have this thought&#x2F;obsession with the idea of developing bots that do work for me while I work elsewhere myself.<p>I have a Raspberry Pi that I setup as an &quot;always on server&quot; that I can program. I know why not rent a VPS and have the hosting provider deal with power&#x2F;connectivity. The answer to this is a dumb &quot;cron problem&quot; where with Rasbperry Pi it worked. I currently use Apache on Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu.<p>Aside from PHP&#x2F;JavaScript those are the only languages I know how to use to do things... I have in mind to start learning Go but have not had the time.<p>Anyway the other question is &quot;What do these bots do?&quot; Scraping? (taboo)... maybe you run a Bitcoin node and watch demand&#x2F;sales... I don&#x27;t know... just that thought of automating something to do something for you.<p>But what does it do? haha<p>edit: one interesting thing, I&#x27;ve seen some really shitty, lowest of the low jobs on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk where you do things like &quot;translate photos of receipts into data&quot; for a couple of pennies... tasks like these I suppose you could try to build a bot for &quot;train a neural net&quot; yeah anyone can do that... but... it is something though... should go back there and see.
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rurban
I have a couple of git merge, rebase, mirror cronjobs, which fetch from some
crazy svn or mercurial remote, rebase my branches and commit to my GitHub
forks, triggering CI and even deploy. Mostly upstream is not able to or too
slow catching up with proper dev practices. I also had a combined
openssl/libressl repo, keeping thrm up to date, but the CVS bridge was too
unstable.

Git rebases rarely need manual intervention with rerere enabled.

Summary: git bridges

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ge96
Those are for your own purpose right? Not for commercial use? Not a bad thing,
I'm split on both myself.

Did you have any problems running/setting up CRON? I can't seem to get them to
run on Debian/Ubuntu Apache, I had no problem having it run on Raspbian Apache
though haha on my RPi.

Do you have some GUI or popup notification that's like "I just did this".

I use Linux with i3 and pop up notifications I don't know how I would do that
natively but with Chrome I noticed on some sites like Slack for example, they
do popups that appear on separate windows/outside of the browser window. Not
exactly related (what I wrote) but thanks for chiming in.

edit: I'm also wondering about alternatives to persistent/scheduled services
like I'd like to learn Go eventually not sure why aside from hype/insane
performance numbers that I've seen that isn't event relevant to me at this
stage but... you know have a "Go process" running non-stop even after exiting
back end and it does scheduled stuff... I don't know need to learn more. Aware
of PHP approach (what I can do) and no-hup but CRON is ideal/Daemon.

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rurban
Notifications: Cron sends mail automatically. The trick is to silence output
in the default case, no updates from the server. So I write to a session log
file and grep it.

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ge96
Oh nice. I always get that 'You have mail' due to failed outbox/not
configured.

