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Comment by dlytle | Hacker News Reader

I never understood what was interesting about sports or sports journalism until I moved back to Nebraska.

I've been watching Nebrasketball, the mandatory Huskers games in the evenings, and roller derby, all with a group of very sports-aware people and one aspiring sports journalist. His commentary on the football/basketball games converted me from a bored observer to actually enjoying the sports.

I'm impressed by what this site is generating, but I'm not too worried about it displacing actual writers. It's the difference between a local news affiliate press release, and an article in the New Yorker or the Atlantic, or BBC reporting. There's still something that a passionate human can bring to the equation that will be almost impossible to automate.

That said, StatSheet is really damn impressive.

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I agree that we aren't replacing anything. There will never be one source for a particular topic (although our content is significantly less expensive to produce).

But I wouldn't underestimate the potential for automated content to be even better than what the best journalists can produce. We are at the infant stage of automated content. We have a long way to go and it will only get better.

You've already surpassed Adrian Wojnarowski, but computers have a long way to go to replace even average humans:

http://www.truthaboutit.net/2010/11/wizards-claw-raptors-109...

That's a bit of a joke, but the real value automation will provide is not the translation of statistics into narrative, it is providing the right statistics. I can honestly say that your generated stories are better than most AP articles in that regard.

Have you looked at computing any advanced basketball statistics? Highlighting those and turning them into narrative could go a long way toward raising awareness about them in the general (sports) public.

Yes, we compute a bunch of advanced stats for statsheet.com. I've intentionally shied away from doing too much "advanced" stuff on the individual sites because i want them to be consumable by the average fan. Some feedback we get about statsheet.com is that it can be overwhelming.

That said, we'll be adding more unique stuff over time. We started doing a "Fan Satisfaction" chart: http://carolinaupdate.com/north-carolina-basketball/fan_sati... that attempts to objectively measure the subjective notion of "fan satisfaction".

Where in Nebraska are you? I've only met one other Nebraskan on HN. Sorry to everyone else that this is OT... it's a rarity to meet a Nebraskan on HN.

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