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doctoboggan 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ejfox 1 hours ago [-]
not sure how it is now, but last time I looked into this it's because the board feed is run back through a control room for color correction, and then back into the display - if you run it directly on the display without color correction it's much better, this is one of the things that annoyed me the most but beyond my scope
scottlamb 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
One likely factor: the video we're watching is from 2016. I think input latency has gotten more attention (optimization effort) since then.
doctoboggan 2 hours ago [-]
No, it definitely has not gotten better based on what I’ve watched this midterm cycle.
spit2wind 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Operyl 26 minutes ago [-]
A lot of the time this cycle, Kornacki would tap the "Draw/Pen Mode" icon, accidentally write on the screen when he meant to tap a button, tap the same icon to exit draw mode, then actually touch the button he wanted. He did that _so many times_ on stream it was crazy. Wonder if they can wire in a "pen" to get rid of that UX nightmare for him.
watusername 4 hours ago [-]
Needs (2018) in the title.
holysoles 2 hours ago [-]
Was hoping it would cover this year, particularly since there seemed to be performance issues.
Also wished it covered more technical details: framework? hardware? test harnesses? I was wondering about these while watching and guess we won't know.
ejfox 1 hours ago [-]
idk if the app has been redesigned since 2018, the designs/behavior look similar, but it started as a vue app with d3 and topojson to render the reporting units, visual diffs and some basic unit testing i dunno if vitest was around in 2018 but whatever the equivalent is, but elections are not like any other software, and changes are made at the last minute no matter how disciplined you might be- the real thing was to test, test, test by hand on a spare screen before going to air, often times on set with a few seconds to spare
05 11 minutes ago [-]
ONN FactZone's Senior Touchscreen Correspondent Tucker Hope would surely appreciate that board.
> 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 5 hours ago [-]
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.
shermantanktop 3 hours ago [-]
If you know, you know. Lots of bystander comments in this discussion, finding fault or claiming they’d do it better. Maybe NBC News should be recruiting from here.
And all that is missing the real story, which is how one guy made tech magic happen, and how it feels to be praised for a technical accomplishment when those praising have very little idea what it really took.
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
> Doing that live in an emergency and seeing it on television minutes later is a pretty cool feeling.
I once heard a story of the slomo camera used during MLB games stopped working during a World Series game which meant that a huge feature of the broadcast was going to be unavailable. One of the engineering crew took it upon himself to look into it. Apparently, another camera angle caught the extra person at the camera during the broadcast which was seen by a high ranking executive who promptly called the director to see what was going on. His response boiled down to "someone is either getting fired, or getting promoted". A few innings later, the slomo feature was again available for the broadcast.
Sometimes, you just got to "get 'er done" on the air.
thakoppno 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ejfox 1 hours ago [-]
agreed, this is an artifact, I would do it very differently today
mkehrt 1 hours ago [-]
I'm baffled by the claim that live debugging of this sort was ok in 2018. That wasn't that long ago. In 2018 we definitely knew this was a terrible idea.
jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago [-]
It sure seemed like there were a bunch of moments of live 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 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe they have the CI even if not the CD…?
afavour 5 hours ago [-]
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!
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.
One likely factor: the video we're watching is from 2016. I think input latency has gotten more attention (optimization effort) since then.
Also wished it covered more technical details: framework? hardware? test harnesses? I was wondering about these while watching and guess we won't know.
https://youtu.be/lTpDK7OWh8c?si=Ywvi_bzWy0HciRw7&t=376
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.
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.
And all that is missing the real story, which is how one guy made tech magic happen, and how it feels to be praised for a technical accomplishment when those praising have very little idea what it really took.
I once heard a story of the slomo camera used during MLB games stopped working during a World Series game which meant that a huge feature of the broadcast was going to be unavailable. One of the engineering crew took it upon himself to look into it. Apparently, another camera angle caught the extra person at the camera during the broadcast which was seen by a high ranking executive who promptly called the director to see what was going on. His response boiled down to "someone is either getting fired, or getting promoted". A few innings later, the slomo feature was again available for the broadcast.
Sometimes, you just got to "get 'er done" on the air.
We did live debugging like this at the time, wouldn’t today.
> 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!