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metiscuson Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?

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.

metiscuson I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband

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.

metiscuson Ju Ju Tsu A book about jj / jujutstu

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.

metiscuson Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

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

metiscuson Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%

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.

metiscuson Largest wildlife overpass in North America reduced wildlife collision by 91%

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%.

metiscuson 2 people arrested after Waymo alerted San Francisco police about loaded rifle

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".

metiscuson US Military disables ad trackers on troops' phones

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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-...

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

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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/

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

https://imperium.ahlfeldt.se/

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

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.

metiscuson Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes

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...

metiscuson California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash

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...

metiscuson USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought

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.

metiscuson Spirit Airlines canceled all flights and is going out of business

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.

metiscuson Android introduces $2-4 install fee and 10–20% cut for US external content links

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.

metiscuson Android introduces $2-4 install fee and 10–20% cut for US external content links

This is probably why they killed installs that dont have attribution, specifically to undercut f-droid.

metiscuson Microsoft doesn't understand the dislike for Windows' new direction

Google is basically killing side loading for all practical purposes. I get your point but the race for the bottom should be televised.