Hacker News: metiscus

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:05:46 +0000

And thank you to whomever flagged EDCS-31400647 and EDCS-21700214. The militia militia militia attribution was hilarious, wrong, and has been fixed.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:20:01 +0000

But yes, the runbook in the project gives the llm instructions on how to use the scripts and what to modify. I let Claude code read that and tell it to work on a province. It runs a small segment and analyzes the results until it hits 1-2% error with no systemic errors. If it can't get all the errors out then I have it switch to using gemini-flash-lite-latest instead of 2.5, which costs slightly more but performs much better. Basically Claude code runs a self governing loop with my oversight mutating the prompts and data inputs to extract all the names.

EDIT My instructions to the supervising LLM are in here https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/blob/feature/webapp-...

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:17:02 +0000

The short answer is yes. Successo-Terra has done a lot of work on the preroman history of Italy quite recently.

https://www.successoterra.net/en

The Vesuvius scrolls have been partially decoded with some interesting results. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/three-students-dec...

The Vindolanda tablets are constantly being worked on as well https://www.heritagedaily.com/2017/07/roman-tablets-unearthe...

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:08:34 +0000

I also used EDH as ground truth but not directly as a source and link out to it and other sources when I have those links available.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:04:02 +0000

The actual code is here https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/ and it is licensed under MIT, while the datasets are slightly more restrictive, and mentioned in the repo.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:02:43 +0000

Yeah, I thought about that. The issue is that the date density is poor already and the ranges are pretty broad. Someday I'll give it a try, but the search interface can limit you to date ranges for now, so the infrastructure is all there.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:01:22 +0000

So most inscriptions are somewhat formulary, and I provide examples to the llm to assist it to find the names. I also have a postprocess blacklist that removes some known cases where things slip through. It's never going to be 100% perfect but to my untrained eye, it seems to do okayish. Waiting on some professionals to cross check my data. If that is you, you can search and export the data in csv via the browse button.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:53:56 +0000

so there should be some links when I have the information available. If you link me the entries I'll see what is going on.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:52:03 +0000

Somehow despite writing an essay above, I forgot to mention that the whole codebase and web frontend is on GitHub.

For reasons the main dev right now is on a branch, also the browse feature is live allowing a better search ability.

https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:47:06 +0000

I've contacted a Professor in Europe who was doing research in this area and pointed him to the page. What I genuinely need is someone to spot check a few of the attributions. I can send you a list of the ones I think are the most likely to be good.

  1. Laepoca / Laepocus — Piquentum, Venetia et Histria (1–50 AD)
  Three family members: two women (Laepoca Regilia, Laepoca Tuia) and a man (Metellus Laepocus). The nomen appears in both feminine and masculine forms in the same inscription, pointing to a
  genuine local gentilicium, likely of Istrian or Liburnian origin.
  https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-04200530

It looks like my auto-translation and summarization layer is hallucinating on this entry, but the extraction appears correct. I'll flag it for the next run.

  2. Tocernius — Eraclea Veneta, Venetia et Histria (3rd c. AD)
  Father (C. Tocernius Hermeros) and son (C. Tocernius Maximianus), the latter a soldier of Legio II Italica. Probably a Venetic name surviving into the imperial period.
  https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-04200461

Here, the auto-translate and summary worked as intended. It does garble the dedication into the status.

  3. Laulenia — Thibilis, Numidia
  Two sisters, Laulenia Matrona and Laulenia Naxina, daughters of the same Marcus. The name looks Berber/Numidian in origin. (I should note that our pipeline transcribed the nomen as
  Lauzenia — the raw EDCS text reads Laulenia, which is probably the correct form.)
  https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-13500401

The auto-translate and summary layers do not make this error, only the name extraction layer does. I have flagged the entry and am diagnosing it.

  4. Kanulanius / Nansinia — Flavia Solva, Noricum
  Father (C. Kanulanius Eumitus) and son (C. Kanulanius Nepos, a soldier of Ala III Thracum). The K-spelling may reflect local Celtic orthographic convention. The wife's nomen, Nansinia,
  also appears unattested in standard sources and may be a second find in the same inscription.
  https://new.roman-names.com/#edcs_id=EDCS-14500644

Here there is an issue where I think in the processing for the web I am feeding interpreted text into the raw extraction field as my displayed raw text seems to be expanded from EDCS. Mine: Caius Kanulanius Eumitus vivus fecit sibi et Nansiniae Verecundae coniugi et Caio Kanulanio Nepoti filio militi alae III Thracum annorum XXV stipendiorum VI loco et impensa Anni Festi

EDCS:

C(aius) Kanulani/us Eumitus / v(ivus) f(ecit) sibi et / Nansiniae / Verecundae con(iugi) / et C(aio) Kanulanio / Nepoti f(ilio) mil(iti) alae III / Thrac(um) an(norum) XXV stip(endiorum) VI / loco et impensa / Anni Festi

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:43:25 +0000

So the points are georeferenced when the underlying source data is otherwise I georeference them back to the findspot, which tends to cluster many at one point.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:42:15 +0000

Full code and data available at https://github.com/metiscus/roman-names/

The running version on new. is the webapp branch. Eventually I will get it all fixed up.

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:40:49 +0000

The map tiles themselves come from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Which you can find here.

https://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/

New comment by metiscus in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

metiscus — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:49:41 +0000

I am hoping to push a few fixes to the new web interface later today, so if you looked at this and saw anything off, hopefully by COB today I will have the known issues fixed.

Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire

metiscus — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:28:49 +0000

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 specific regions, Trismegistos https://www.trismegistos.org/ and Latin Inscriptions of the Roman Empire (LIRE) https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/latin-inscriptions... are two major efforts I found. But there doesn't seem to be a project that did what I set out to do, although I have read in some places that it was believed to be possible.

I am not a classicist or a web developer, but I have Claude and Gemini and I can sort of read basic Latin - so I set to work. I used LIRE and another database as ground truth and built a pipeline to extract and process the inscriptions to recover the names. The process I developed uses a high end LLM like Sonnet or Gemini Pro to supervise the extraction and tuning process on a regional basis until the obvious error rate is reasonable. For this, so far, reasonable to me means less than 1-2% in the smaller initial samples of 100-500 and no observed systemic issues. The different regions often need different prompts, so this basically became an exercise in letting the higher level AI tune the prompt for the lower level AI. The extraction when measured against LIRE produces an F1 score between 0.64 and 0.87, but take this with a grain of salt.

Once I had done a few regions, I wanted to see the work, so I threw together a pretty crude website but as I am not a web developer, it was crude in how it accessed its data. It does look cool and I also added summarization, and machine translation to each entry. I wanted to eventually get feedback from an actual team of classicists and make the website work better, so I am rewriting it as we speak but it is broadly functional now with a few extra bugs but substantially improved performance compared to the old one. All entries link back to the proper sources, and the old web app linked to several additional sources where the data was present, but I haven't gotten that working again just yet on the new one. (The old web interface is still available at https://roman-names.com, but I will warn you it is clunky and not mobile friendly at all)

Key findings so far:

AI supervised AI extraction saved me time. I was manually tuning things for a while and then the runbook became an idea that I feed my instructions in and let the big AI go with sparse oversight from me.

The extraction improved significantly (by about 10 F1 points) when I fed the model the raw text including the markers, vs a cleaned up version of the text.

I just thought it was a cool little project and wanted to share. If you happen to work in any adjacent space and there is something I could do better etc let me know.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481400

Points: 200

# Comments: 45

New comment by metiscus in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

metiscus — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:18:01 +0000

It looks like devicenative "accidentally" deleted their documentation page that was linked from that article. Fortunately someone archived it beforehand. Oops.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260526042018/https://docs.devi...

Also, as of some hours ago Motorola has stopped the activity but didn't say anything about how it started in the first place. https://9to5google.com/2026/05/27/motorola-amazon-app-uninte...

New comment by metiscus in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"

metiscus — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:30:56 +0000

At least in the states, the postman is almost assuredly doing the end delivery of the mail, and is often given a stack of advert materials to mix into the delivery for a certain delivery area. The use of a mailbox by anyone who isn't a USPS employee delivering paid mail is prohibited by law. https://about.usps.com/news/state-releases/tx/2010/tx_2010_0...

New comment by metiscus in "USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought"

metiscus — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:54:10 +0000

Fertilizer is pretty fungible and is a global market, so even if the US is primarily supplied by Canada, and overall global demand remained constant, prices would go up since there will be supply reduction due to the Hormuz strait being closed.

New comment by metiscus in "Spirit Airlines canceled all flights and is going out of business"

metiscus — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:20:18 +0000

Spirit dying is going to mean prices go up substantially across industry. They provided a price floor above which other airlines couldnt raise prices without risking losing business to spirit. Usually the difference was pretty small, basically a market calculated fee for not wanting to deal with Spirit. But since their bankruptcies, in areas where they have pulled out, the other airlines have been seen to raise prices by something like 12-15%. I would expect similar or worse now that they're gone for good.

New comment by metiscus in "Android introduces $2-4 install fee and 10–20% cut for US external content links"

metiscus — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:51:43 +0000

They're also killing this off next year and you'll have to install via adb, unless something changed and I didn't hear about it.