https-bot VS espanso

It's inspired by this comment I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26599746.

I actually saw several comments with HTTP URL posted, and that was the only one I bothered to comment on. So I thought that this is something better suited for bots than human.

I hacked this together over yesterday and today: https://github.com/fishy/https-bot.

Basically it uses the Firebase API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) to find comments with HTTP URLs in them, try the HTTPS version, compare the contents, post back a comment if the contents are more than 95% similar.

The "95% similar" part was actually the first part I wrote in the code. At first I tried a few existing go packages implementing diff/lcs, but most of them was quite slow and does a lot of allocations when I'm comparing two randomly generated 10KiB blobs, so I wrote my own (https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/fishy/https-bot/similarity), which is optimized for space (it does almost no allocations), and it's also faster because allocations are slow. (I know this is an unfair comparison that most of the existing implementations need to give you an output that can be used to reconstruct the two blobs back, so at least some of their allocations are required and unavoidable)

I also wrote a bug that it would find the same HTTP url in every run and post the same comment over and over again. My apologize to dang or whoever dealt with it (or maybe the system is good enough that it blocked those repetitive comments automatically).

In the end it successfully made 6 comments across ~4 hours (not including the repetitive ones). All of those comments are flagged (likely due to hn policy), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26692588 is the only one that's still visible to other users at the time of writing, if you are curious.

I just killed it completely from the request of dang. Although it only lived for a few hours, it's still a fun exercise. Maybe I'll convert it into a reddit bot next? Who knows.

Thank you for the feedback. I added FAQ to the README and answered this question: https://github.com/fishy/https-bot/blob/main/README.md#this-...

If you want a standalone cross platform text expander I currently enjoy using Espanso[1]

[1]: https://espanso.org/

# espanso match file # For a complete introduction, visit the official docs at: https://espanso.org/docs/ # You can use this file to define the base matches (aka snippets) # that will be available in every application when using espanso. # Matches are substitution rules: when you type the "trigger" string # it gets replaced by the "replace" string. matches: # signatures - trigger: ";n" replace: "Nikola" - trigger: ";b" replace: "Brežnjak" - trigger: ";li" replace: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-bre%C5%BEnjak-892b9a24/" - trigger: ";sn" replace: "Kind regards,\nNikola Brežnjak\nhttp://www.nikola-breznjak.com/blog" - trigger: ";web" replace: "http://www.nikola-breznjak.com/" - trigger: ";em" replace: "[email protected]" ## git - trigger: ";ga" replace: "git add ." - trigger: ";gb" replace: "git branch" - trigger: ";gc" replace: "git commit -m " - trigger: ";gd" replace: "git diff --color " - trigger: ";gf" replace: "git fetch --all" - trigger: ";gi" replace: "find . -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete" - trigger: ";gl" replace: "git log" - trigger: ";gp" replace: "git push origin main" - trigger: ";gs" replace: "git status" - trigger: ";gt" replace: "git remote -v" - trigger: ";gu" replace: "git pull origin main" ## blog - trigger: ";bimp" replace: "https://nikola-breznjak.com/blog/books/want-improve-read-books/" - trigger: ";brem" replace: "https://nikola-breznjak.com/blog/miscellaneou/make-remote-developer/" ## emojis - trigger: ";eew" replace: "⚠️" - trigger: ";eet" replace: "🤔" - trigger: ";eeb" replace: "💰" - trigger: ";eem" replace: "💪" - trigger: ";eetm" replace: "™" - trigger: ";eeh" replace: "❤️" - trigger: ";eeu" replace: "👍" - trigger: ";eep" replace: "🙏" - trigger: ";eef" replace: "🤦" - trigger: ";ees" replace: "🙂" - trigger: ";eeg" replace: "😎" - trigger: ";eev" replace: "👋" - trigger: ";eel" replace: "😂" - trigger: ";eec" replace: "👏" - trigger: ";eeo" replace: "✅" - trigger: ";eer" replace: "🚀" - trigger: ";eex" replace: "⏭️" ## replies - trigger: ";ryw" replace: "You’re welcome 👍" - trigger: ";rlmk" replace: "Please let me know 👍" - trigger: ";rbtw" replace: "Btw, how are things on your end?" - trigger: ";rt" replace: "Thank you! 👍" ## misc - trigger: ";fd" replace: "firebase deploy" - trigger: ";wed" replace: "Happy Wednesday (a dy on which, historically, most people wed on - thus: Wed nes day). Not really, but it would be a fun fact actually 🙂" - trigger: ";cl" replace: "console.log(" - trigger: ";se" replace: "select * from " - trigger: ";o" replace: "open ." - trigger: ";im" replace: "" vars: - name: "clipb" type: "clipboard" - trigger: ";ch" replace: "chrome://history" - trigger: ";;c" replace: "code ."

This should work for you. Free, cross-platform and works everywhere not just the browser. https://espanso.org/

Huh, didn't know abbrev had that limitation (wonder why?). Gave it a go in espanso (https://espanso.org/), and it does work there.

I use a tool called "Espanso" to accomplish something similar at work. It only runs locally, so no weird data scraping issues to worry about. And it's easy to update as things changes becauase everything lives in a simple yml file.

https://espanso.org/

It can do simple text replacement, so I have words, phrases, and sentences I use frequently compressed into a few keyboard clicks. It can also grab what is in your clipboard, so that can be incorporated into responses, which is simple but very handy.

A simple text replacement looks like this in the yaml file:

If you don't know what a text expander is, see: https://espanso.org