4 ms·

What happened in my birth year?

12 points by sebkomianos 15y ago

lylejohnson 15y ago
I appreciate the effort that you must have put into this, but it was a little depressing watching the last 41 years slowly count down as the screen faded to black!
fferen 15y ago
Yeah, because no one watches movies in theaters or reads books on paper these days. We're not quite that far in the future yet.
srl 15y ago
Nicely done. It'd take considerably more effort, but it'd be nice if it wasn't so blatantly copied from wikipedia - it should be possible to perform minimal word-order changes without too high a risk of breaking things. (Also, forcing sentences into past tense would be nice too.)
AgentConundrum 15y ago
That was pretty painful to read. I'm a relatively slow reader, and that - when coupled with some other distractions around me - meant that I got behind the text crawl at times. When a picture would appear, and most of the text would get quickly pushed off screen, I would have to scroll up and try to catch what I missed while the page struggled to push me back down to the newest words. Eventually I just gave up and let it finish before reading. It would be nice if the page could detect when I scroll up and stop writing until I'm ready to resume.
- mkr-hn 15y ago
  Try to close it. You'll get a prompt.
mkr-hn 15y ago
All the cool stuff happened in 1984.
mrpollo 15y ago
I gotta admit this was a good read, I always wondered about this, I read the whole thing on my iPhone and it was a good experience
jamesrcole 15y ago
some feedback: - the text appears way too slowly. made it painful to read. - "In 1978, the world was a different place." ...well, that's not really saying much of interest, I'd consider removing or changing it. - "There was no Google yet. Or Yahoo. Or News.ycombinator, for that matter." umm, I get the feeling this site was written with younger people in mind, because to someone born in the 70s or earlier these things seem so new that it feels ridiculous to have to explicitly point out they didn't exist then. [Edited: formatting]
gnoupi 15y ago
I find that reading the Wikipedia page for the birth year is more complete and interesting. This effort is interesting, but the black background is painful to read on for so long time. I know, years ago, pages had awful backgrounds too. The general tone isn't really of my liking, being a bit condescending like "can you imagine this didn't exist!". Yes, I can, it didn't exist when I was younger either. That's the kind of thing which would benefit from some good narrator reading the text at the same time, though. But waiting for it to scroll like this, over the black background, is tiring. I didn't wait for the end, because of that.
beej71 15y ago
Very interesting presentation, I think! But it bums me out that I should be doing more!

12 points by sebkomianos 15y ago

I appreciate the effort that you must have put into this, but it was a little depressing watching the last 41 years slowly count down as the screen faded to black!

fferen 15y ago

Yeah, because no one watches movies in theaters or reads books on paper these days. We're not quite that far in the future yet.

srl 15y ago

Nicely done. It'd take considerably more effort, but it'd be nice if it wasn't so blatantly copied from wikipedia - it should be possible to perform minimal word-order changes without too high a risk of breaking things. (Also, forcing sentences into past tense would be nice too.)

AgentConundrum 15y ago

That was pretty painful to read. I'm a relatively slow reader, and that - when coupled with some other distractions around me - meant that I got behind the text crawl at times. When a picture would appear, and most of the text would get quickly pushed off screen, I would have to scroll up and try to catch what I missed while the page struggled to push me back down to the newest words. Eventually I just gave up and let it finish before reading. It would be nice if the page could detect when I scroll up and stop writing until I'm ready to resume.

mkr-hn 15y ago
Try to close it. You'll get a prompt.

mkr-hn 15y ago

All the cool stuff happened in 1984.

mrpollo 15y ago

I gotta admit this was a good read, I always wondered about this, I read the whole thing on my iPhone and it was a good experience

jamesrcole 15y ago

some feedback: - the text appears way too slowly. made it painful to read. - "In 1978, the world was a different place." ...well, that's not really saying much of interest, I'd consider removing or changing it. - "There was no Google yet. Or Yahoo. Or News.ycombinator, for that matter." umm, I get the feeling this site was written with younger people in mind, because to someone born in the 70s or earlier these things seem so new that it feels ridiculous to have to explicitly point out they didn't exist then. [Edited: formatting]

gnoupi 15y ago

I find that reading the Wikipedia page for the birth year is more complete and interesting. This effort is interesting, but the black background is painful to read on for so long time. I know, years ago, pages had awful backgrounds too. The general tone isn't really of my liking, being a bit condescending like "can you imagine this didn't exist!". Yes, I can, it didn't exist when I was younger either. That's the kind of thing which would benefit from some good narrator reading the text at the same time, though. But waiting for it to scroll like this, over the black background, is tiring. I didn't wait for the end, because of that.

beej71 15y ago

Very interesting presentation, I think! But it bums me out that I should be doing more!