Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A map of historical movies by narrative location and time period
A year ago I watched The Count of Monte Cristo, got curious about post-revolution France, and wondered which other movies depicted France in the same period. I was disappointed to find no easy way to answer that question - the only information of this kind I could find was scattered on Wikipedia, unstructured and hard to find. I thought that this would be a perfect use for LLMs. One year and a lot of tinkering later I'm proud to present to you the results - hoping you'll find it as entertaining as I do to wade through time, geography, and stories. (P.S.: If you find me a more creative,…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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MapScroll▲109Hi HN, I built this after getting frustrated trying to map out things like “Ancient mayan ruins” or “James Bond movie locations” on Google "My" Maps. You basically have to drop pins manually, hunt down photos, copy links, it’s slow and never feels like an actual story. With MapScroll, you just type something like “Marco Polo’s route” or “forgotten WWII sites in France”, and it geocodes, grabs images + articles, and plots everything into a shareable story map. Each marker comes with a little gallery and sources tied to your prompt. You can also refine the first draft which AI creates before…
2025 · mapscroll.ai · its alternatives →
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TimeMap▲325Interactive Map of History: millions of people, events, maps
2024 · oldmapsonline.org · its alternatives →
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"On what slender threads do life and fortune hang"
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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A meditation on exploring time, travel, and technology
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 5IA
Driving home from work one day, I wanted to know how many people we knew the names of who lived during the Roman era. Searching around, I found lists of Consuls and officials, but nothing that covered ordinary people or even most people like freedmen and slaves. So I ended up building a pipeline to process the more than 500k Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby https://edcs.hist.uzh.ch/en/ and extract the names of people (and attempt to cluster them, but this is a work in progress). There are databases where Classicists have done this manually for…
Jun 2026 · new.roman-names.com · its alternatives →
- 6AI
Hello HN! In a recent "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread, I mentioned I was working on OCRing a large book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971614 The post generated some interest so I thought I would keep HN posted. The book is Saint-Simon’s Memoirs -- an invaluable historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, full of wit, sharp observations, and of incredible literary value. I'm OCRing the edition of reference made between 1879-1930, that contains a lot of comments and footnotes: 45 volumes, ~27,000 pages. Here's a link to a blog post that describes…
2024 · blog.medusis.com · its alternatives →
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Web Rewind▲98An interactive journey through 30 years of the web
Mar 2026 · web-rewind.com · its alternatives →
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histories▲226Explore history of places through audio stories & fun facts
2024 · pardoesoudewater.nl · its alternatives →
- 10LW
Hi HN, I made a web game to practice country locations a while ago and HN liked it, so I thought I'd post my updated version as well. As for how the game works and feels, I'd really recommend you checking it out for yourself, it's free, no signup, no ads. The tech stack is Vue + ts + Tailwind/Daisy for the looks. The learning algorithm is a slight modification of the ts version of FSRS. If you have anything to add, it's open source as well (https://github.com/koljapluemer/learn-worldmap), although not well documented yet. In the end it's just a little sideproject,…
2025 · map.koljapluemer.com · its alternatives →
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Edmund White's travelogue of his time in Paris
2015 · amazon.co.uk · its alternatives →
- 12
Why a group of well-meaning leaders stumbled into war
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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Investigates the myriad board games around the world
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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The path to war and the gripping first clashes
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 18
I built Chronoscope, a project to explore the world through time. I've been wanting to do this for a while, after being inspired by Ollie Bye's "History of the World" video several years ago. I'm not the first person to have done this - resources like OpenHistoricalMaps are amazing. But, I noticed there were a few disparate datasets / academic databases online, so I combined them together as best as I could (I've linked all sources in the app). To make it more interesting, I also included: - Notable events from the time period (geolocated where possible), sourced from wikidata - Ancient…
Mar 2026 · shiphappens.xyz · its alternatives →
- 19
Engaging survey of incredible stories from 1095 - 1453 CE
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Food, architecture, history, art & human stories
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Profound study on how WW1 created our ironic, modern world
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 22
During WW1 a few random men made the modern Middle East
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 23
A mind-bending exploration of time travel in fiction
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →