Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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For those of us in the news industry, "tronc" has been the entertaining/depressing meme of the summer:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/06/...

Several years ago, a developer at the Los Angeles Times (part of Tribune Publishing) created one of the most simple yet useful examples of automated journalism: Quakebot https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/how-break-news-wh...

Quakebot still has a byline and its own section on the LAT website [0], but it remains mostly unchanged since its first reveal (perhaps its implementation is more automated, but its public output is about the same). That Quakebot -- and all the other ways that public data can be efficiently harnessed as a service to readers and reporters alike -- isn't talked about in Tronc's buzzword-heavy press releases about machine learning and artificial intelligence is, IMHO, indicative of Tronc's questionable aims and viability.

[0] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquakesa-earthq...

Yes, "Tronc" was a huge step down for the once-famous Chicago Tribune. I wrote in to their "Colonel Tribune" columnist, and got back a rather sad reply.

The National Weather Service has an API endpoint [1] which returns weather forecasts in XML. Put in a latitude and longitude, and it calculates a forecast for that location. The data is returned in a structured format. This is the underlying data for most weather sites. One XML item is <wordedForecast>, which looks like this:

    WEATHER FORECAST FOR 2 MILES SE SAN JOSE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
    CA ON JULY 11TH AT 2:34 AM.
    TODAY, JULY 11TH: SUNNY, WITH A HIGH NEAR 81. NORTHWEST WIND 6
    TO 16 MPH, WITH GUSTS AS HIGH AS 21 MPH.
    TONIGHT, JULY 11TH: MOSTLY CLEAR, WITH A LOW AROUND 55. NORTH
    WIND 16 TO 21 MPH DECREASING TO 7 TO 12 MPH AFTER MIDNIGHT.
    WINDS COULD GUST AS HIGH AS 26 MPH.

That's what you hear in broadcast radio weather broadcasts.

[1] http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=%1.4f&lon=%1.4f... (fill in lat and lon).

(Note that, if you have a NOAA-capable radio, you can also have this read to you in a the NWS's classic, distinctive robot voice. Brings back memories of waiting with my family for the tornado warnings to pass as we holed up in the basement).

> you can also have this read to you in a the NWS's classic, distinctive robot voice

That "robot voice" is relatively new. Not that long ago, it was a tape loop of a person reading the forecast, played over and over and updated every few hours. Definitely into the late 90s I think.

In my childhood home we had a radio with a "weather" button that, when pressed, would turn the radio on and tune it to one of the standard NOAA frequencies for a set amount of time (probably about a minute or so). It was astonishingly useful, on par with the Amazon Echo I have today and use for a similar purpose, but with probably six orders of magnitude fewer transistors involved. Simple, but effective.

NWS actually stopped using all-caps in its forecasts back in May: http://www.noaa.gov/national-weather-service-will-stop-using...

I'm honestly surprised they haven't yet replaced news anchors with something akin to a Vocaloid.

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