11 ms·

Plain Text Sports

309 points by abzug 5y ago

swinnipeg 5y ago
I like it! Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating this info. It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I would read each morning as a kid. The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be capture all of the important points on one clean page, as the newspaper used to.
- warmwaffles 5y ago
  > Sites like NHL.com Unfortunately, in order for me to avoid that hell, I use the mobile app and wish I didn't have to.
- brewdad 5y ago
  I've made CBS Sports my go to for scores. It loads quickly (for me at least), it's easy to read. They provide betting lines right up until game start (if you are into that) and even tell you what network is broadcasting the game, including competitors. https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/scoreboard/ https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/scoreboard/
- abcanthur 5y ago
  Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really different and richer experience at night when the games are in progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin. It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still refresh the box score of your own game in <second to check on foul trouble.
  - throwaway1777 5y ago
    That is very neat, and great use of a low bandwidth style site. On the other hand at the NBA games I’ve been to they have the box score on the jumbotron.
    - abcanthur 5y ago
      true, but usually only for players currently on the court and who knows what direction you'll have to rubberneck to read it. This is one instance where I like mixing the small mobile screen w my real world view, it's an augmented reality!
nvr219 5y ago
I hate using google but the experience of getting MLB scores and game status from google is so much better than actual MLB websites. I would totally use this instead!!
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Also one of the few things that Siri seems to be good at. As long as you are only interested in certain very large sports teams. (She has no idea there are any minor league baseball teams.) But at least if you ask for a score and the game hasn't started yet, she's smart enough to tell you the time it starts, rather than giving you the scores for yesterday's game. Though, maybe she should do both for completeness.
kevincox 5y ago
Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display. Of course removing the override breaks it because it has a max-width set in px. But why does it have a max-width? It is important not to have long lines of text but there are no long lines on this page, each box has it's own size. So by removing font-size and max-width rules this is far more readable for me. And while I'm at it don't force Courier, not a great font, just use monospace and get the user's default monospace font. But I find this quite funny, while it is obviously going for a plain-text appearance it actually uses javascript and a lot of "complex" CSS like flexbox making it actually scale nicely to different size screens once the max-width is removed. But if the implementation is actually using these complex features why target a plain-text look? Maybe it is a personal preference but for me simple line borders are a lot less noisy and distracting than +------+.
- sigzero 5y ago
  I believe it just describes the display of the data (i.e. plain text).
- lelandfe 5y ago
  > Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of having to author everything in em/rem is mostly over – keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues. I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on a root element are a ubiquitous practice. Examples include HN itself, Google, MDN, Apple, etc. That being said, 13px is quite small. I'd encourage at least a 16px minimum. But for now, simply zoom in with Cmd/Ctrl-+
  - kevincox 5y ago
    I'm sure I have "problems" quite often but the sites listed are quite readable. Sure, I would prefer them to use my default font size but something with their contrast, font or otherwise seems to make it not stand out. > non-default font-size users like yourself What does this even mean? The default font is being overridden and irreverent here. Are you suggesting that there is a default default font that is expected to be used across all browsers?
once_inc 5y ago
This feels very much like teletekst, which is arguably the best thing on TV worldwide.
wallawe 5y ago
Where do you get your data from? I've found sports data (especially odds/lines) to be overly expensive when trying to build hobby apps.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Betting data is expensive because people are building trading/arb bots with that data.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  ESPN has a surprisingly comprehensive JSON API that isn't locked down. If you're only using it for a hobby app, you won't run into any issues. It's been around for quite a while.
  - zouhair 5y ago
    Shutdown for almost 8 years[0]. [0]: http://www.espn.com/apis/devcenter/blog/read/publicretirement.html http://www.espn.com/apis/devcenter/blog/read/publicretiremen...
  - mad_vill 5y ago
    I thought they shutdown their public api.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      Officially, yes. But here's the NFL scores API, for example: http://site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/football/nfl/scoreboard http://site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/football/nfl/sc... It's a "private" API for their website, but like I said it's been around for a while and using it in a hobby app isn't going to be an issue. Using it commercially is just begging for trouble, though.
- mark-ruwt 5y ago
  As someone who maxed out multiple credit cards trying to pay for sports data, I know this pain all too well. If you're working on a hobby app, we give sports data away for free. https://areyouwatchingthis.com/services/sports-data-api https://areyouwatchingthis.com/services/sports-data-api
smcl 5y ago
I'd love something like this for European football leagues. The "best" I've found is https://livescore.com https://livescore.com but for a while they stopped working on iPhone (they really wanted you to download their app) and I'm quite sure they're probably full of trackers and stuff.
- dagurp 5y ago
  I've used https://m.livesoccertv.com/ https://m.livesoccertv.com/ or https://www.bbc.com/sport https://www.bbc.com/sport they're not too heavy
  - leeman2016 5y ago
    https://m.livesoccertv.com/ https://m.livesoccertv.com/ took more than 4 MB. And if you navigate to Sunday's results it took 18.2 MB, which I think is too heavy. I wish there was something light weight like HN.
    - smcl 5y ago
      I'd happily throw something together myself by scraping a collection of different sites, but I suspect the "live" part is what could be tough. I don't imagine there's free live scores API floating around. And even BBC's scores are frequently minutes behind. And I don't think this is the kind of thing I can justify spending money on (unless I plastered ads all over it, defeating the original purpose).
jdauriemma 5y ago
This is great! I wonder what needs to happen in order to get `curl plaintextsports.com` to Just Work, similar to `curl wttr.in`. EDIT: After inspecting the HTML, I think Plain Text Sports is a bit of a misnomer. With that name, I might have expected a lot of <pre> tags in the markup, but there are no none to be found. Instead, CSS is used for the layout, even line breaks. So, Hypertext Sports?
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  Yeah, I thought we'd see the results inside of a <pre> tag. Instead, the HTML is empty. Looks like a single page app. $ curl plaintextsports.com % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 183 100 183 0 0 1060 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1063 <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>CloudFront</center> </body> </html>
  - jdauriemma 5y ago
    Adding `https:// https://` will get you the HTML, but there's very little plain text to parse. The markup's layout depends on CSS.
- grenoire 5y ago
  Removed <head> and added font-family: monospace to the <body>. It's definitely not plaintext.
_joel 5y ago
Should be called Plain Text American Sports, but fair effort nonetheless
goblinux 5y ago
Beautiful. I love it! Dark mode is beautiful. So very well done. This went right to the top of my bookmark list. Only constructive feedback would be if it can better fill a normal 16:9 desktop monitor - it looks optimized for mobile, which is great - but it's too small and narrow for keeping open on the PC If you like MLB - this reminds me of Playball which runs in the terminal. https://github.com/paaatrick/playball https://github.com/paaatrick/playball
- lc9er 5y ago
  This is really great. Thanks for posting it.
- dogline 5y ago
  That URL for playball is cool. Thanks!
sumnole 5y ago
I was wondering what kind of sports could be played through plain text.
- pipeline_peak 5y ago
  Code Golf
erickhill 5y ago
Sadly, it's https. So a lot of older computers that still live and breathe off of sites like this (see: 68k.news) can't access it due to the bizarre (or Google pressured) security certificate ... for a sports scores site.
- oneplane 5y ago
  That's nonsense and you know it. If you really want to use plain-text web access you can run a local decryption proxy outside of your low-power old computers and use them as if it's 1989.
  - erickhill 5y ago
    I actually have no idea what you just said (and you can believe it). But I'll Google "local decryption proxy" and see if that's something feasible I could try with, say, my Powerbook Pismo running macOS 9.2 with no modern browsers. I'm no engineer, so please don't assume everyone here is.
    - mminer237 5y ago
      This site is specifically targeted to software engineers, so it's a reasonable assumption that we can talk about the relevant topics without having to simplify things for people outside that group. For a reverse proxy, you would want a computer capable of the encryption methods the modern web's security standards demand and to install a web server on it which you can access from the older computer. The server computer does not have to be fancy at all. A Raspberry Pi can do it. For software I would recommend either Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy) or NGINX (https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-proxy/ https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-...). It can be rather complicated and difficult for someone to do, especially if you're not a web programmer. If both that and upgrading your computer aren't in the cards at the moment, I would think using the recently-discontinued browser Classilla is your best bet: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ It at least supports some deprecated forms of TLS & SSL. I hear there's a fork called Phoenix that kind of supports TLS 1.2 even. (I would recommend using the most updated browser regardless.)
CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago
Hey, HN! Creator here! I started building Plain Text Sports last year when I was watching an NFL playoff game in rural southwest Wisconsin. We had poor TV reception -- the image was going in-and-out -- and the local radio station was mostly static. I tried to check ESPN, but the loading bar was as frozen as the ground outside. I then had the idea for a website designed for the pure sports fan: no ads, no images, just scores, play-by-play and stats, with a simple information-dense display. I initially added support for the NBA so I could follow my beloved Milwaukee Bucks. I posted it to /r/nba, got over 600 upvotes in a few hours, and got perma-banned for self-promotion. (I did a Show HN too, but it didn't take off. [1]) Over the following months I added NHL, MLB, NFL, college basketball and football, and added standings and team schedules so it could really be a one-stop-shop for my sporting needs. Just this past month I added MLS and NWSL (National Women's Soccer League). I plan on adding the WNBA and the Premier League later this year too. Obviously I designed the site with minimalism and efficiency in mind, as a reaction to the bloated web we see today. We don't need heaps of JavaScript just to display a bit of text, nor do we need half-a-dozen sites tracking our "engagement", and our "retention". People just want to get the information they're looking for, as fast as possible. Technology shouldn't get in the way. Despite the austere presentation, I'm really proud of the design of the site. As a commenter noted, it's not actually plain text, but does use some CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript (sue me!). But there are a lot of small details that I put a lot of effort into: the game times on the front page automatically show up in your local time zone, and the boxes automatically expand to fit long time-zones. For the NBA, the raw play-by-play data I get is very granular. A steal, for example, is both a turnover by the offensive player, and a steal for the defensive player, but I combine those into a single event in the timeline. For the NFL, I draw an ASCII drawing of the field showing the progress of the most recent play [2]. When a team wins a championship, they get an ASCII trophy and a dedicated spot on the front-page for the next week. It's been really fun trying to figure out how to pack as much information as possible into a 45 column-wide display. A streamer I watch on Twitch [3] who does marketing at Nvidia also had a competition amongst his viewers to make their own ads, and that led me down another rabbit hole of fun "plain-text" videos. [4][5][6]. Plain Text Sports also led to my next project. I get a lot of data from publicly accessible, but undocumented JSON APIs, and it was frustrating digging through giant JSON files trying to understand how certain situations were represented. That led me to build jless [7], a command-line JSON viewer, which made it to the front page last month. [1]: Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314 [2]: ASCII football field: https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1436003783327293452 https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1436003783327293452 [3]: Atrioc, Nvidia marketing streamer: https://twitch.tv/atrioc https://twitch.tv/atrioc [4]: Never Miss Moment Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1qY0vOJWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1qY0vOJWc [5]: Bucks Championship Run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WHcP4PTBHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WHcP4PTBHY [6]: Wisconsin Sports Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsm0MirOEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsm0MirOEg [7]: jless, a command-line JSON viewer: https://jless.io https://jless.io
antidaily 5y ago
This rules -- but needs to actually be plain text.
h3mb3 5y ago
This made me remember that quite a lot of people in some countries still use teletext for sports cores. Similar to this site, it's fast, simple and very much low-def. In Finland (where teletext was big back in the day), you can still access web versions of the main TV channels' teletext services [1][2]. Not sure about other countries. Even if you don't follow sports that much (like me), it's also a great way to browse news in general – without any clutter or clickbait, as the technology is so restricted. I've noticed it's so much easier to avoid doomscrolling traps compared to regular websites, especially during the latest global horrors. [1] https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv [2] https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/new2008/100-01.htm https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/new2008/100-01.htm
- pantulis 5y ago
  Spaniard here. My dad still uses teletext for that, even though he is more or less capable with a computer. He loves just typing the page numbers and watching the scores updated in almost realtime.
stadium 5y ago
It'd be fun to have a sms subscription to a particular league's schedule, a team's activities, or a single game.
ubertaco 5y ago
I did a `curl https://plaintextsports.com/mls/standings https://plaintextsports.com/mls/standings` and, to my surprise, got an HTML response back (rather than just plaintext data). Seems like this isn't actually plaintext (as in the mimetype `text/plain`), but is instead just "minimalist-aesthetic sports" (with the caveat that for some reason there's CSS styling to make the font unreadably small at 2560x1440, which was what led me to try `curl` in the first place, assuming that since it'd be plaintext, I could just get the data in plaintext without any extra CSS formatting making it hard to read).
- stevage 5y ago
  Yep, seems we're all unclear on what the actual intent is here since it seems to fail most of the use cases that "plain text" brings to mind.
- teaearlgraycold 5y ago
  $ curl -X GET https://plaintextsports.com/ -H 'Accept: text/plain' | head <html translate="no"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="google" content="notranslate" /> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no"> <title>Plain Text Sports</title> :(
CJefferson 5y ago
This does look really nice, and the author should be proud, however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism of this website). If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rather than ASCII art) is also much better, as a screen reader would try to read the art, and get confused by boxes next to each other.
- caslon 5y ago
  Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface? Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down. Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static. Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check the results of any mainstream sports event, rather than going through the million hoops to get search engines to give you a page where you can find results.
  - TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
    This site is HTML, replacing <div> with <table> wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans. Plain text is good because it 1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily <table>s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike. Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit. Bring accessibility in the mix (which we should always do) and it's a non-starter.
    - yupper32 5y ago
      > Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. Says who? The owner of the website here owes us nothing.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Noticed NCAA basketball on there -- if anyone trying to keep up with March Madness, this twitter bot is handy for games going down to the wire: https://twitter.com/tothewirebot https://twitter.com/tothewirebot
compsciphd 5y ago
Back in 1997 I was studying overseas and we didn't have internet access, but we did have e-mail access over uucp. There was a service back then which would end you a text mode version of a web page (which would probably be much harder today, as users of w3m or links could attest) and we'd have it setup to email us the scores every night. 25 year younger me would have loved this site for that. :)
- anthk 5y ago
  Today you have RSS2email which is similar and it can be perfect to share news between retro-nerds.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hnarn 5y ago
As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and smartphones took over. Swedish state television (SVT) still provide "Text-TV" online at https://www.svt.se/text-tv https://www.svt.se/text-tv -- many Swedes including myself still know some of the numbers by heart, 100 being the index and 377 being the favorite page of dads all over the country (live sports results). I vividly remember being a kid (before DSL broadband or even dial-up was a thing in my life) flipping through the pages and guessing numbers between 100 and 999 to see where I would end up, long before I would end up doing the same thing on the early Internet. SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.
- Someone 5y ago
  > SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services says “The Netherlands has run a regular Teletext service since the end of 1977 on the public broadcasting channels”. That would make that older. Ceefax was from 1974, so it seems there’s room for an even older still operating one.
  - hnarn 5y ago
    Ceefax was shut down in 2012.[1] I have no idea about the Dutch one, it's possible that it's older. edit: According to this site[2] the Dutch teletext was broadcast "on the open network" on April 1, 1980. There's also a Swedish source claiming that Swedish Text-TV is the oldest in the world.[3] [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20032882 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20032882 [2]: https://over-nos-nl.translate.goog/organisatie/geschiedenis-van-de-nos/ontstaansgeschiedenis-nos-teletekst/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://over-nos-nl.translate.goog/organisatie/geschiedenis-... [3]: https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1216116 https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1216116 "idag har faktiskt Sverige världens äldsta ännu aktiva Text-TV"
pipeline_peak 5y ago
It should output with curl in plaintext as easy as https://wttr.in/ https://wttr.in/
williamsmj 5y ago
See also http://www.ismytrainfucked.com/ http://www.ismytrainfucked.com/ for NYC subway updates.
- ciabattabread 5y ago
  The detail pages aren’t updated. https://justmta.info/ https://justmta.info/ has it all on one page.
Maursault 5y ago
I like plain text. But this site is not plain text. It is HTML and css. <head><meta name="referrer" content="origin"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="news.css?QZejSKY7mNWXnObVdaSN"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico"> <title>Submissions from plaintextsports.com | Hacker News</title></head>
bluedino 5y ago
Always liked these for having in a terminal window at jobs that didn't allow websites like ESPN.com Always wished for one with play-by-play
BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
I remember back in the earliest days of mobile "internet" (when WAP had a more innocent meaning) there were sites/services like this you could access from a Nokia phone. Due for a comeback?
every 5y ago
Doesn't look good on actual plain text browsers such as lynx or links2, but still works, sorta...
lanstin 5y ago
I thought this was going to be esports for Zork or Rogue.
timely-shine 5y ago
My only complaint is that I'd love NCAA boxscores like the pros, but otherwise, I love it!

309 points by abzug 5y ago

I like it! Sites like NHL.com or ESPN.com are borderline hostile navigating this info. It is reminiscent of the morning sports pages in the newspaper I would read each morning as a kid. The one improvement would be if there was page that summarized the league. i.e. Click on NHL and it lists scores, games that day, standings, and possibly scoring leaders. That would be capture all of the important points on one clean page, as the newspaper used to.

warmwaffles 5y ago
> Sites like NHL.com Unfortunately, in order for me to avoid that hell, I use the mobile app and wish I didn't have to.
brewdad 5y ago
I've made CBS Sports my go to for scores. It loads quickly (for me at least), it's easy to read. They provide betting lines right up until game start (if you are into that) and even tell you what network is broadcasting the game, including competitors. https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/scoreboard/ https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/scoreboard/
abcanthur 5y ago
Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really different and richer experience at night when the games are in progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin. It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still refresh the box score of your own game in <second to check on foul trouble.
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  That is very neat, and great use of a low bandwidth style site. On the other hand at the NBA games I’ve been to they have the box score on the jumbotron.
  - abcanthur 5y ago
    true, but usually only for players currently on the court and who knows what direction you'll have to rubberneck to read it. This is one instance where I like mixing the small mobile screen w my real world view, it's an augmented reality!

nvr219 5y ago

I hate using google but the experience of getting MLB scores and game status from google is so much better than actual MLB websites. I would totally use this instead!!

reaperducer 5y ago
Also one of the few things that Siri seems to be good at. As long as you are only interested in certain very large sports teams. (She has no idea there are any minor league baseball teams.) But at least if you ask for a score and the game hasn't started yet, she's smart enough to tell you the time it starts, rather than giving you the scores for yesterday's game. Though, maybe she should do both for completeness.

kevincox 5y ago

Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display. Of course removing the override breaks it because it has a max-width set in px. But why does it have a max-width? It is important not to have long lines of text but there are no long lines on this page, each box has it's own size. So by removing font-size and max-width rules this is far more readable for me. And while I'm at it don't force Courier, not a great font, just use monospace and get the user's default monospace font. But I find this quite funny, while it is obviously going for a plain-text appearance it actually uses javascript and a lot of "complex" CSS like flexbox making it actually scale nicely to different size screens once the max-width is removed. But if the implementation is actually using these complex features why target a plain-text look? Maybe it is a personal preference but for me simple line borders are a lot less noisy and distracting than +------+.

sigzero 5y ago
I believe it just describes the display of the data (i.e. plain text).
lelandfe 5y ago
> Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of having to author everything in em/rem is mostly over – keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues. I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on a root element are a ubiquitous practice. Examples include HN itself, Google, MDN, Apple, etc. That being said, 13px is quite small. I'd encourage at least a 16px minimum. But for now, simply zoom in with Cmd/Ctrl-+
- kevincox 5y ago
  I'm sure I have "problems" quite often but the sites listed are quite readable. Sure, I would prefer them to use my default font size but something with their contrast, font or otherwise seems to make it not stand out. > non-default font-size users like yourself What does this even mean? The default font is being overridden and irreverent here. Are you suggesting that there is a default default font that is expected to be used across all browsers?

once_inc 5y ago

This feels very much like teletekst, which is arguably the best thing on TV worldwide.

wallawe 5y ago

Where do you get your data from? I've found sports data (especially odds/lines) to be overly expensive when trying to build hobby apps.

beaconstudios 5y ago
Betting data is expensive because people are building trading/arb bots with that data.
jaywalk 5y ago
ESPN has a surprisingly comprehensive JSON API that isn't locked down. If you're only using it for a hobby app, you won't run into any issues. It's been around for quite a while.
- zouhair 5y ago
  Shutdown for almost 8 years[0]. [0]: http://www.espn.com/apis/devcenter/blog/read/publicretirement.html http://www.espn.com/apis/devcenter/blog/read/publicretiremen...
- mad_vill 5y ago
  I thought they shutdown their public api.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    Officially, yes. But here's the NFL scores API, for example: http://site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/football/nfl/scoreboard http://site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/football/nfl/sc... It's a "private" API for their website, but like I said it's been around for a while and using it in a hobby app isn't going to be an issue. Using it commercially is just begging for trouble, though.
mark-ruwt 5y ago
As someone who maxed out multiple credit cards trying to pay for sports data, I know this pain all too well. If you're working on a hobby app, we give sports data away for free. https://areyouwatchingthis.com/services/sports-data-api https://areyouwatchingthis.com/services/sports-data-api

smcl 5y ago

I'd love something like this for European football leagues. The "best" I've found is https://livescore.com https://livescore.com but for a while they stopped working on iPhone (they really wanted you to download their app) and I'm quite sure they're probably full of trackers and stuff.

dagurp 5y ago
I've used https://m.livesoccertv.com/ https://m.livesoccertv.com/ or https://www.bbc.com/sport https://www.bbc.com/sport they're not too heavy
- leeman2016 5y ago
  https://m.livesoccertv.com/ https://m.livesoccertv.com/ took more than 4 MB. And if you navigate to Sunday's results it took 18.2 MB, which I think is too heavy. I wish there was something light weight like HN.
  - smcl 5y ago
    I'd happily throw something together myself by scraping a collection of different sites, but I suspect the "live" part is what could be tough. I don't imagine there's free live scores API floating around. And even BBC's scores are frequently minutes behind. And I don't think this is the kind of thing I can justify spending money on (unless I plastered ads all over it, defeating the original purpose).

jdauriemma 5y ago

This is great! I wonder what needs to happen in order to get `curl plaintextsports.com` to Just Work, similar to `curl wttr.in`. EDIT: After inspecting the HTML, I think Plain Text Sports is a bit of a misnomer. With that name, I might have expected a lot of <pre> tags in the markup, but there are no none to be found. Instead, CSS is used for the layout, even line breaks. So, Hypertext Sports?

gwbas1c 5y ago
Yeah, I thought we'd see the results inside of a <pre> tag. Instead, the HTML is empty. Looks like a single page app. $ curl plaintextsports.com % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 183 100 183 0 0 1060 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1063 <html> <head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head> <body bgcolor="white"> <center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center> <hr><center>CloudFront</center> </body> </html>
- jdauriemma 5y ago
  Adding `https:// https://` will get you the HTML, but there's very little plain text to parse. The markup's layout depends on CSS.
grenoire 5y ago
Removed <head> and added font-family: monospace to the <body>. It's definitely not plaintext.

_joel 5y ago

Should be called Plain Text American Sports, but fair effort nonetheless

goblinux 5y ago

Beautiful. I love it! Dark mode is beautiful. So very well done. This went right to the top of my bookmark list. Only constructive feedback would be if it can better fill a normal 16:9 desktop monitor - it looks optimized for mobile, which is great - but it's too small and narrow for keeping open on the PC If you like MLB - this reminds me of Playball which runs in the terminal. https://github.com/paaatrick/playball https://github.com/paaatrick/playball

lc9er 5y ago
This is really great. Thanks for posting it.
dogline 5y ago
That URL for playball is cool. Thanks!

sumnole 5y ago

I was wondering what kind of sports could be played through plain text.

pipeline_peak 5y ago
Code Golf

erickhill 5y ago

Sadly, it's https. So a lot of older computers that still live and breathe off of sites like this (see: 68k.news) can't access it due to the bizarre (or Google pressured) security certificate ... for a sports scores site.

oneplane 5y ago
That's nonsense and you know it. If you really want to use plain-text web access you can run a local decryption proxy outside of your low-power old computers and use them as if it's 1989.
- erickhill 5y ago
  I actually have no idea what you just said (and you can believe it). But I'll Google "local decryption proxy" and see if that's something feasible I could try with, say, my Powerbook Pismo running macOS 9.2 with no modern browsers. I'm no engineer, so please don't assume everyone here is.
  - mminer237 5y ago
    This site is specifically targeted to software engineers, so it's a reasonable assumption that we can talk about the relevant topics without having to simplify things for people outside that group. For a reverse proxy, you would want a computer capable of the encryption methods the modern web's security standards demand and to install a web server on it which you can access from the older computer. The server computer does not have to be fancy at all. A Raspberry Pi can do it. For software I would recommend either Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy) or NGINX (https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-proxy/ https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/reverse-...). It can be rather complicated and difficult for someone to do, especially if you're not a web programmer. If both that and upgrading your computer aren't in the cards at the moment, I would think using the recently-discontinued browser Classilla is your best bet: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ It at least supports some deprecated forms of TLS & SSL. I hear there's a fork called Phoenix that kind of supports TLS 1.2 even. (I would recommend using the most updated browser regardless.)

CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago

Hey, HN! Creator here! I started building Plain Text Sports last year when I was watching an NFL playoff game in rural southwest Wisconsin. We had poor TV reception -- the image was going in-and-out -- and the local radio station was mostly static. I tried to check ESPN, but the loading bar was as frozen as the ground outside. I then had the idea for a website designed for the pure sports fan: no ads, no images, just scores, play-by-play and stats, with a simple information-dense display. I initially added support for the NBA so I could follow my beloved Milwaukee Bucks. I posted it to /r/nba, got over 600 upvotes in a few hours, and got perma-banned for self-promotion. (I did a Show HN too, but it didn't take off. [1]) Over the following months I added NHL, MLB, NFL, college basketball and football, and added standings and team schedules so it could really be a one-stop-shop for my sporting needs. Just this past month I added MLS and NWSL (National Women's Soccer League). I plan on adding the WNBA and the Premier League later this year too. Obviously I designed the site with minimalism and efficiency in mind, as a reaction to the bloated web we see today. We don't need heaps of JavaScript just to display a bit of text, nor do we need half-a-dozen sites tracking our "engagement", and our "retention". People just want to get the information they're looking for, as fast as possible. Technology shouldn't get in the way. Despite the austere presentation, I'm really proud of the design of the site. As a commenter noted, it's not actually plain text, but does use some CSS and a tiny bit of JavaScript (sue me!). But there are a lot of small details that I put a lot of effort into: the game times on the front page automatically show up in your local time zone, and the boxes automatically expand to fit long time-zones. For the NBA, the raw play-by-play data I get is very granular. A steal, for example, is both a turnover by the offensive player, and a steal for the defensive player, but I combine those into a single event in the timeline. For the NFL, I draw an ASCII drawing of the field showing the progress of the most recent play [2]. When a team wins a championship, they get an ASCII trophy and a dedicated spot on the front-page for the next week. It's been really fun trying to figure out how to pack as much information as possible into a 45 column-wide display. A streamer I watch on Twitch [3] who does marketing at Nvidia also had a competition amongst his viewers to make their own ads, and that led me down another rabbit hole of fun "plain-text" videos. [4][5][6]. Plain Text Sports also led to my next project. I get a lot of data from publicly accessible, but undocumented JSON APIs, and it was frustrating digging through giant JSON files trying to understand how certain situations were represented. That led me to build jless [7], a command-line JSON viewer, which made it to the front page last month. [1]: Original Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314 [2]: ASCII football field: https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1436003783327293452 https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1436003783327293452 [3]: Atrioc, Nvidia marketing streamer: https://twitch.tv/atrioc https://twitch.tv/atrioc [4]: Never Miss Moment Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1qY0vOJWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t1qY0vOJWc [5]: Bucks Championship Run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WHcP4PTBHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WHcP4PTBHY [6]: Wisconsin Sports Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsm0MirOEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLsm0MirOEg [7]: jless, a command-line JSON viewer: https://jless.io https://jless.io

antidaily 5y ago

This rules -- but needs to actually be plain text.

h3mb3 5y ago

This made me remember that quite a lot of people in some countries still use teletext for sports cores. Similar to this site, it's fast, simple and very much low-def. In Finland (where teletext was big back in the day), you can still access web versions of the main TV channels' teletext services [1][2]. Not sure about other countries. Even if you don't follow sports that much (like me), it's also a great way to browse news in general – without any clutter or clickbait, as the technology is so restricted. I've noticed it's so much easier to avoid doomscrolling traps compared to regular websites, especially during the latest global horrors. [1] https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv https://yle.fi/aihe/tekstitv [2] https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/new2008/100-01.htm https://www.mtvtekstikanava.fi/new2008/100-01.htm

pantulis 5y ago
Spaniard here. My dad still uses teletext for that, even though he is more or less capable with a computer. He loves just typing the page numbers and watching the scores updated in almost realtime.

stadium 5y ago

It'd be fun to have a sms subscription to a particular league's schedule, a team's activities, or a single game.

ubertaco 5y ago

I did a `curl https://plaintextsports.com/mls/standings https://plaintextsports.com/mls/standings` and, to my surprise, got an HTML response back (rather than just plaintext data). Seems like this isn't actually plaintext (as in the mimetype `text/plain`), but is instead just "minimalist-aesthetic sports" (with the caveat that for some reason there's CSS styling to make the font unreadably small at 2560x1440, which was what led me to try `curl` in the first place, assuming that since it'd be plaintext, I could just get the data in plaintext without any extra CSS formatting making it hard to read).

stevage 5y ago
Yep, seems we're all unclear on what the actual intent is here since it seems to fail most of the use cases that "plain text" brings to mind.
teaearlgraycold 5y ago
$ curl -X GET https://plaintextsports.com/ -H 'Accept: text/plain' | head <html translate="no"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="google" content="notranslate" /> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no"> <title>Plain Text Sports</title> :(

CJefferson 5y ago

This does look really nice, and the author should be proud, however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism of this website). If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rather than ASCII art) is also much better, as a screen reader would try to read the art, and get confused by boxes next to each other.

caslon 5y ago
Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface? Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down. Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static. Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check the results of any mainstream sports event, rather than going through the million hoops to get search engines to give you a page where you can find results.
- TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
  This site is HTML, replacing <div> with <table> wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans. Plain text is good because it 1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily <table>s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike. Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit. Bring accessibility in the mix (which we should always do) and it's a non-starter.
  - yupper32 5y ago
    > Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. Says who? The owner of the website here owes us nothing.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Noticed NCAA basketball on there -- if anyone trying to keep up with March Madness, this twitter bot is handy for games going down to the wire: https://twitter.com/tothewirebot https://twitter.com/tothewirebot

compsciphd 5y ago

Back in 1997 I was studying overseas and we didn't have internet access, but we did have e-mail access over uucp. There was a service back then which would end you a text mode version of a web page (which would probably be much harder today, as users of w3m or links could attest) and we'd have it setup to email us the scores every night. 25 year younger me would have loved this site for that. :)

anthk 5y ago
Today you have RSS2email which is similar and it can be perfect to share news between retro-nerds.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hnarn 5y ago

As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and smartphones took over. Swedish state television (SVT) still provide "Text-TV" online at https://www.svt.se/text-tv https://www.svt.se/text-tv -- many Swedes including myself still know some of the numbers by heart, 100 being the index and 377 being the favorite page of dads all over the country (live sports results). I vividly remember being a kid (before DSL broadband or even dial-up was a thing in my life) flipping through the pages and guessing numbers between 100 and 999 to see where I would end up, long before I would end up doing the same thing on the early Internet. SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.

Someone 5y ago
> SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_teletext_services says “The Netherlands has run a regular Teletext service since the end of 1977 on the public broadcasting channels”. That would make that older. Ceefax was from 1974, so it seems there’s room for an even older still operating one.
- hnarn 5y ago
  Ceefax was shut down in 2012.[1] I have no idea about the Dutch one, it's possible that it's older. edit: According to this site[2] the Dutch teletext was broadcast "on the open network" on April 1, 1980. There's also a Swedish source claiming that Swedish Text-TV is the oldest in the world.[3] [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20032882 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20032882 [2]: https://over-nos-nl.translate.goog/organisatie/geschiedenis-van-de-nos/ontstaansgeschiedenis-nos-teletekst/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://over-nos-nl.translate.goog/organisatie/geschiedenis-... [3]: https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1216116 https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/1216116 "idag har faktiskt Sverige världens äldsta ännu aktiva Text-TV"

pipeline_peak 5y ago

It should output with curl in plaintext as easy as https://wttr.in/ https://wttr.in/

williamsmj 5y ago

See also http://www.ismytrainfucked.com/ http://www.ismytrainfucked.com/ for NYC subway updates.

ciabattabread 5y ago
The detail pages aren’t updated. https://justmta.info/ https://justmta.info/ has it all on one page.

Maursault 5y ago

I like plain text. But this site is not plain text. It is HTML and css. <head><meta name="referrer" content="origin"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="news.css?QZejSKY7mNWXnObVdaSN"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico"> <title>Submissions from plaintextsports.com | Hacker News</title></head>

bluedino 5y ago

Always liked these for having in a terminal window at jobs that didn't allow websites like ESPN.com Always wished for one with play-by-play

BHSPitMonkey 5y ago

I remember back in the earliest days of mobile "internet" (when WAP had a more innocent meaning) there were sites/services like this you could access from a Nokia phone. Due for a comeback?

every 5y ago

Doesn't look good on actual plain text browsers such as lynx or links2, but still works, sorta...

lanstin 5y ago

I thought this was going to be esports for Zork or Rogue.

timely-shine 5y ago

My only complaint is that I'd love NCAA boxscores like the pros, but otherwise, I love it!