[HN Gopher] Show HN: It's Been That Long - Compare your favourit...
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       Show HN: It's Been That Long - Compare your favourite movie to an
       even older one
        
       Author : jonny_eh
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2021-05-08 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (itsbeenthatlong.jonabrams.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (itsbeenthatlong.jonabrams.com)
        
       | speps wrote:
       | When it doesn't match anything, you don't even see which movie it
       | was...
       | 
       | https://itsbeenthatlong.jonabrams.com/900
       | 
       | This one was "Bringing Up Baby (1938)".
        
       | n4bz0r wrote:
       | What question this "comparison" is aiming to answer? At the
       | current state the title should rather be "get a random movie y
       | that is older than x".
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | mistermann wrote:
       | Very nice! How long did this take to do approximately?
        
       | interestica wrote:
       | https://itsbeenthatlong.jonabrams.com/694
       | 
       | 41 years since 'The Shining' came out. (or Empire Strikes Back)
       | 
       | 41 years before that, a person who came to the USA on a slave
       | ship could have seen Gone With the Wind in 1939.
       | https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/last-slav...
        
       | bscphil wrote:
       | Two quick thoughts:
       | 
       | 1. The results don't load for me in Firefox unless I reload the
       | page. I can see from the network tab that the ###.json file is
       | received, but nothing is shown. (Tested on both desktop and
       | Firefox for Android.)
       | 
       | 2. I think the request "Name an old movie..." undercuts the
       | surprise factor of discovering how old the movie you picked is,
       | which is presumably the point of the site. My first pick for an
       | old movie was Casablanca, which is too old to even generate
       | results. I picked Lawrence of Arabia and then Star Wars, but the
       | comparison films (some French thing from 1903 I'd never heard of,
       | and King Kong) only confirmed that my choices are, indeed, old. I
       | think some other prompt would be better able to create surprise.
       | You want people to be entering films like Avatar or Men in Black,
       | not films they consider "old".
        
         | interestica wrote:
         | 1. Sameish. First load is fine on Chromium, but secondary
         | searches come up blank unless you load the link again.
         | 
         | 2. You're right. Something more along the lines of "what was
         | the first movie you saw in theatres?" or "favourite childhood
         | film" might support that surprise factor a bit better.
        
       | sverhagen wrote:
       | I genuinely don't understand the point of this website. Could
       | someone explain?
        
         | rgovostes wrote:
         | You enter a movie title, and it picks an even older movie such
         | that your movie's release date is the midpoint. For example:
         | Today <-- 22 years --> The Matrix (input) <-- 22 years --> Star
         | Wars (output)
         | 
         | In other words, today "The Matrix" is as old as "Star Wars" was
         | when "The Matrix" came out.
        
         | interestica wrote:
         | Seems to just highlight relative distances in time. In Back to
         | the Future (85), he went back to a completely different world
         | of 1955. Yet, Back to the Future is further in our past than
         | that jump (yet many will say it doesn't seem _that_ long ago.)
        
           | quicklime wrote:
           | I had the impression that it was like a dynamic version of
           | https://xkcd.com/891/
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-08 23:02 UTC)