Hacker News: metiscus

New comment by metiscus in "US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028"

metiscus — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:57:34 +0000

The primary was being inspected and the secondary failed, there were redundant systems.

New comment by metiscus in "US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028"

metiscus — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:54:59 +0000

Rules and regulations in aviation are written in blood. Moving fast is not a virtue when the industry is already as safe as it is. Even if the change is to something objectively better with no drawbacks, the act of change itself creates risk for accidents.

Basically when accident rates are already very low, even a small amount of transitional risk can add up to offset years of marginal improvements. So the burden of proof rests heavily on the proposer of change to a system that already is working reliably.

New comment by metiscus in "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"

metiscus — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:50:49 +0000

I host my server for the translations of latin inscriptions https://new.roman-names.com on one and it does a fine job. It even held up to HN traffic a few weeks back thru cloudflare.

New comment by metiscus in "I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband"

metiscus — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:07:11 +0000

My best guess is something like this:

The Soviets gave the Germans a free hand to begin the war by splitting Poland via the Molotov pact. Without that agreement, and without the preceding years of Soviet resource shipments and technical exchanges, it is unclear if the European war would have happened.

New comment by metiscus in "Ju Ju Tsu A book about jj / jujutstu"

metiscus — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:48:56 +0000

Here I was thinking it was a book about Jujutsu. I don't use the noncombat version but for what it's worth, this seems well written. So kudos to the author.

New comment by metiscus in "Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices"

metiscus — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:56:50 +0000

To be fair, in an emergency one does not usually get to choose the hospital they are taken to by the ambulance company.

New comment by metiscus in "Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%"

metiscus — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:16:07 +0000

Cost plus have been disfavored in the FAR for a long time. That doesn't stop contract officers from writing them. The biggest thing, imo, is that congress needs to improve its oversight of ACAT I and ACAT II programs and stop waiting for them to be a hundred million overrun before yanking them.

New comment by metiscus in "Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%"

metiscus — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:14:07 +0000

You have to realize that it isn't just about saving deer. If you hit a deer at speed, it is going to do massive damage to your vehicle and potentially cause significant injury to the passengers, up to and including death. Overt fatalities are reportedly rare, like 0.1% or something, but the injury rate is closer to 5%.

New comment by metiscus in "2 people arrested after Waymo alerted San Francisco police about loaded rifle"

metiscus — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:43:27 +0000

Someone very likely 3d printed an AR lower (unserialized, therefore a "ghost gun"), unlikely it had an autosear. The news and police typically call disfavored semi-auto weapons "assault rifles" and things that are fully automatic "machine guns".

New comment by metiscus in "US Military disables ad trackers on troops' phones"

metiscus — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:42:46 +0000

Most of what goes on on most bases is as unsecret as it gets. The rooms where sensitive things happen have security measures in place and they keep you from bringing your phone in there. Usually a little locker is provided where you store your phone while you are inside the protected area. In some very sensitive places there may be additional active and passive measures but usually people with access to those areas police themselves.

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

metiscus — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:28:11 +0000

That is largely an artifact of the source data, sadly. I place the dots where they were found, if the dataset has that information, otherwise I georef them back to the "findsite" in the data, which aggregates many finds at one place. A lot of these were found in the 1800s and just dont have good find lla data.

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/