Astro Hacker News - Building the NBC News Big Board

doctoboggan |next [-]

Why is the input latency so bad on the display? The touch/draw visibly lags behind by 500ms or more, is that an issue with the software or with the hardware? Also seems to be an issue with registering touches, as Kornacki often has to press two or more times when toggling between screens.

IMO we should have the technology to make the input lag an order of magnitude smaller, right? I didn’t see any mention of latency on the blog post so I’m wondering if the author doesn’t see it as a problem.

spit2wind |root |parent [-]

This. I can't watch people like Harry Ente, not least because of the pain in watching the delay when they draw or click on something.

watusername |next |previous [-]

Needs (2018) in the title.

cube00 |previous [-]

> The workflow on election night, from my couch: edit some JSON, VPN into the NBC network, SSH into the server, git pull from master, pm2 restart all, text the producer that it's updated — then watch my change go out on air a few minutes later through Hulu. Doing that live in an emergency and seeing it on television minutes later is a pretty cool feeling.

Less "cool" and more asking for trouble if you make one misplaced comma, quote, or curly brace. The entire apps crashes and shows nothing to the broadcast audience or worse an error screen they'll screencap and meme.

coffeefirst |root |parent |next [-]

True but on election night you’re just changing things from null to one of two strings.

I’ve spent 17 years in news and it’s not uncommon to operate short term journalistic stuff off a Google sheet or xml file. It’s basically fine.

thakoppno |root |parent |next |previous [-]

That part stood out to me too. However this article was from 2018, not last week it seems to me.

We did live debugging like this at the time, wouldn’t today.

jauntywundrkind |root |parent [-]

It sure seemed like there were a bunch of moments of life updating? Discussion with Chris (producer), saying, ok, it's updated now, try this. Yes a lot was data updates but there were a bunch of other times it seemed more systems code etc.

kdazzle |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Maybe they have the CI even if not the CD…?

afavour |root |parent |previous [-]

Yeah I hope that’s a simplification. At the very least I hope some automated testing is scanning that code change in a PR before it gets pulled down to the server.

> worse an error screen they'll screencap and meme.

Or even worse, you misattribute a result to the wrong candidate, it gets screencapped and used as evidence in another “election fraud” conspiracy theory.

I actually think the safety guards they’d add for software like this would be the more interesting part of the story!