Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

A software developer and football (soccer) fan who lives in an antipodean time zone, I enjoy watching games on demand the morning after they occur. Apart from watching the games of the team I support, I like to watch one or two of the most entertaining games in any given week, but score spoilers absolutely ruin the experience for me.

So, I created https://laterball.com: a web app the algorithmically determines the best games of the past 7 days without score spoilers, to let me (and you) know which games are worth spending time watching. There was also an associated twitter bot at https://twitter.com/laterball which occasionally tweets when there's been a high-quality game until the recent Twitter API changes.

Technical stuff: the back end is a Ktor server hosted on a linode instance which pulls statistics data from an API to determine the ratings. Factors used to determine ratings include goals (number, timing, swings in score, comebacks), xG, wins or draws against the odds, cards, and a few others.

This is very nice, It would be great to add other leagues and cups.

I wish Apple did something like this with their MLS subscription. I watch quite a lot of sport on delay. All of the games in the Apple MLS Season Pass are available to watch after the game ends, but the screenshot for every game shows the final score!? Why would I want to watch 90mins of a random soccer game to which I already know the result? I won't be renewing.

Very nice project, thank you! As a european transplanted to the U.S I feel this challenge with score spoilers as well. Streaming services that do not offer hiding scores, or who even insist on leading with scores in their UI are now brands I actively avoid. Such a small simple UX detail leading to absolute shunning of a whole media company.

That’s amazing, I’ve been wanting something like that for UFC for a while, I might just steal the idea!

I would love to, but my API quota is a little restrictive :)

I would love to expand it to other sports, the only real challenge is finding an API with appropriate stats and writing a simple algorithm to decide what constitutes "watchabilty" based on the those. I would happily take advice on that re: UFC and add it to the site

I found this super frustrating too. Luckily you can disable it: https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/116mtfp/how_to_hid...

Definitely a strange default setting to have it enabled.

Wonderful!

I built something similar for NFL, it scrapes NFL stats websites (very few public APIs available afaik) and gives a 'fun index' for each game from the previous week.

I then obtain that game from a dodgy website and am able to watch it without any spoilers, but safe in the knowledge that it will definitely be a good game.

It was my first ever programming project and helped me learn Python, the code is complete shite but it works.

That's a great thought! But, how does it decides the score for watchability or how interesting the games are?

Hugged? Seems down for me

You can see for yourself at https://github.com/y-a-n-n/laterball

I stopped with the nfl because their streaming app would put up the newest video from any given team as soon as it was published... guess what comes right after the game video? the post game interview. So you load up the app and some reporter is asking a sad player a question, spoiled with spoilers mode on.

Is it fun to watch only high quality games?

Won’t the high quality become the norm after some time?

You could easily choose to watch the lower quality games too if you like