Show HN: It's Been That Long – Compare your favourite movie to an even older one | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: It's Been That Long – Compare your favourite movie to an even older one

itsbeenthatlong.jonabrams.com

10 pointsjonny_eh17 comments

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".

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.

Thanks for 1, I can replicate that!

Put in a fix for 2 as well.

Excellent feedback, I'll address asap!

Although, I can't replicate your Firefox issue. Are you running extensions/adblockers?

Update: NVM, it's all fixed :D

I genuinely don't understand the point of this website. Could someone explain?

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.

Okay, I meant the point that is just one level deeper than the obvious (this) one.

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.)

I had the impression that it was like a dynamic version of https://xkcd.com/891/

Yup, also this: https://twitter.com/DaveKingThing/status/1386722993196335106

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...

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)".

Good point, I've pushed up a fix!

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".

Very nice! How long did this take to do approximately?

Thanks! I got the initial app "working" in about a day. Then I tightened things up a bit, added deeplinking, and a sharing button whenever I had a spare hour or two on weekends over the following few weeks.

Nice....I wish I hadn't stopped programming.

A seed of an idea, curious what you think:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27098339

Reply on news.ycombinator.com