The Guardian's Typerighter | Hacker News Reader

The Guardian's Typerighter

github.com

41 pointszerojames21 comments

This is a bit tangential, but I think there are ways to increase the value of this project. And please, don't take this the wrong way. I'm trying to make a constructive suggestion (to the maintainers).

Why not present it as a library with a sensible API and a directory of example uses. Including an example of a single binary, minimalistic server that has a very simple, minimal interface allowing you to submit documents and review the results? Or even a command line utility that takes a document as input and spits out the result on stdout or a file?

Imagine how much more immediate the experience would be if you can just fetch a binary and run it on the command line. Or how much easier it would be for people who might want to make use of this in, say, a blogging platform, if you could show them a 10-20 line example of how to make use of this as a library in your own code.

If you provide people with a smooth path for bot adoption and extension, the chance of people engaging positively increases. When I'm presented with this project the core problem this solves gets lost in all the pomp and circumstance involved in running it.

I don't think it's tangential at all – tools are meant to be used by people, and thinking about how to make tools low-friction and easy-to-use is intrinsically interesting, regardless or not of whether it's meaningfully actionable :) But only the authors would know what's feasible for them. I can only imagine that working at a legacy newspaper is a resource-strapped place for software engineering.

Lately I'm less convinced everything ought be dolloped out on spoons; having the source available for even just a few willing to delve down into the weeds is already a boon, imho.

Not that I would campaign specifically against such improvements, but that I think having raw, uncut gems laying around can be fine.

Speaking only on the technical aspects, I think this is a cool (technical) idea, but over-engineered:

> Both the Checker and Rule Manager services are built in Scala with the Play framework. Data in the Rule Manager is stored in a Postgres database, queried via ScalikeJDBC. > > Google credentials are fetched from SSM using AWS Credentials or Instance Role.

For what's essentially a regexp checker? Good lord. Sounds like someone had fun though.

Speaking on the sociological aspects, I like it less. How many squiggly red underlines do you think it will take before the writers fall in line and switch their creativity off? There's something to be said for technology staying out of the creative fields.

Speaking on the irony aspects (emphasis mine):

> The goal of the Typerighter project is to address the above challenges with a universally available document proofing service, via an _easy-to-use and minimal interface_, that is accurate, transparent, and responsive to change.

I fail to see the problem

Brings to mind the recent overview that Ars Technica did of their infrastructure stack: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/ars-o...

Approx. 12 different AWS services and 30+ instances...

> How many squiggly red underlines do you think it will take before the writers fall in line and switch their creativity off?

That’s definitely a hard line to walk. On the other hand, not everyone is David Sedaris, and most writing should cut down on the cuteness and just give me the facts.

I worked at a company that had a style guide we were supposed to abide by for all the blog posts, social media posts, and knowledge base content--but then the person in charge of it would arbitrarily change his mind about something and require us to go back through 250 articles and lowercase a word. He wouldn't tell us this was happening. He would just start using the term the way he wanted until someone pointed it out, then insist the whole knowledge base be redone to accommodate him.

At least with this he would have had to make a pull request to update the guide where we all could see it!

The Grauniad finally building electronic counter-measures. Great newspaper regardless.

Ironic. I was reading their opinion article by the Ukrainian ex-defense minister just this morning, and caught a very basic spelling mistake any spell checker would have found.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/08/ukrain...

It's still there. "morehas".

Classic Grauniad. Let's see if any Guardian editor reads HN.

It was correct when I just looked at it, and you still read it, though. Eventual correction works and is less important than getting the news out.

Any-way - the fact that they have a system that seeks to improve the copy and direct it towards their style guide is something to be celebrated when most of the news about, erm, the news, is how AI is replacing actual writers.

They fixed it some time between my comment and yours.

Maybe I'm spoiled with our programming tools, but I would have imagined a major newspaper to have an automated style and spell checking system that runs every time one presses Save on their CMS, and this is proof they don't. I am surprised why no one at The Guardian has set this up before — it's not rocket science, but their core business.

This is just about priorities and theirs are different to yours - firstly, we don't know that they don't have a system that catches and warns of possible errors, we only know that articles may be published without addressing them. Secondly, the fact that it was corrected post-publish suggests that errors are picked up, but timely publication is more important.

The core business is delivering news, and typos halting publication is not a trade-off they want to take, they'd rather have the subs or copy editors batch process or review all the corrections required - maybe they use Pull Requests? :D

One day private eye might even buy a computer!

It's interesting that the Guardian was so famous for their typos (in the 1970s) that it earned them the "Grauniad" nickname.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian (2nd paragraph)

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/may/12/guardian-200-t...

Next they just need to add a spellchecker.

> Next they just need to add a spellchecker.

The Guardian is known as the Grauniad for good reason.

Even to this day, their paper remains riddled with basic spelling errors.

I read the Guardian pretty often and I don't really see "basic spelling errors" in articles very often.

I've only seen obvious errors in live coverage (the feeds that get updated in real time). It's more understandable there because it's often somebody in the field writing about something as it happens.

Interesting, I normally find at least one in every major article, I wouldn't be shocked if the Graun averaged one per page.

Thanks Guardian, for making this open source! I really would love to see rules as well. Open source would be best, but if this is not possible even a proprietary snapshot would be super interesting to see.

Typerighter uses an extended ruleset but the core is based on the Guardian's publically available style guide: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a

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