Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This one is a bit different, but great as well https://www.literaryclock.com/

Give it a minute or so to see what happens...



If we're showing our favorite novel clock implementations, here's a mechanical seven-segment display clock [0] that is just entrancing to watch.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2022/10/09/flip-segment-digital-clock-i...


Brilliant, the physical version seems like a good gift: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195310640/author-clock...


This reminds me of https://pointerpointer.com/ which finds pictures with the right pointer instead of quotes with the right time.


Also a great source of early 2010s nostalgic party pics and their specific aesthetic!


Reminds me of an artwork that compiled shots of clocks and watches from movies into a 24 hour cycle. The journalist reporting on it was so entranced they kept visiting at different times of day/night



I just happened to use it at 7:41 and there's no quotes for that time according to the JSON files in the other comment. It instead gave me a quote that indicated it was 2:34


Does anyone know if there is an api or local library for it? I’d love to make my own physical version of this like that kick starter.


All the quotes and times are available here:

https://github.com/JohannesNE/literature-clock/tree/master/d...


Great! Looks like you could load all of that into a SQLite DB.


Inspired by this I tried using chatGPT

Here's another excerpt, this time from the novel "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway, that mentions the time 07:30:

"I woke up late in the morning. The sun was hot on my face, and I had a headache. I had been drunk the night before, but I remembered everything that had happened. I lay in bed for a while and listened to the sounds outside. There were birds singing in the trees and the sound of people walking on the street. I looked at my watch. It was 7:30. I got up and went to the window. The sky was blue and cloudless. It was going to be a hot day."


I tried this

Prompt: Using literary references. State a quote that mentions the current time 9:54pm.

Answer: One literary reference that mentions the current time of 9:54 pm is from the novel "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In Chapter 3, Nick Carraway, the narrator, says, "I looked at my watch and it was four o'clock. Gatsby's house was still empty when I left - the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine own and the air was thick with the sounds of the summer. By 9:54 pm, when the guests began to arrive, the air was alive with chatter and laughter, and the lights from Gatsby's mansion spilled out onto the lawn, illuminating the darkness with a warm glow."

That quote doesn't exist in this version https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/the-great-gatsby.pdf or this https://www.wsfcs.k12.nc.us/cms/lib/NC01001395/Centricity/Do... (I just googled great gatsby pdfs).

Am I missing it? Or is the quote made up?


ChatGPT just isn't the right tool for the job to find concrete information. LLMs hallucinate too readily. They have no knowledge, they're just running probabilities on what's the most likely response, and the most likely answer in its experience is rarely "uh idk."


Made up. Or, at least, synthesized from parts of the book.

The second sentence is lifted from the beginning of one of the most famous last pages in all of literature.


`wget https://www.literaryclock.com` gets you a structure containing all the strings indexed by time, so that's almost an API.


The favicon for that site is the Zimbabwean flag. Interesting...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: