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Products that do what I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire does
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…
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Chat and learn from the most influential historic figures
2023
- 4TC
2016 · the-codex.net
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2017 · paleocodex.com
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Hi, I designed and developed a spatial index that maps museum artefacts as connecting arcs/hyperlinks from their origin site to institutional location/sources. The Index specifically looks at western/euro-american institutions and maps their collection categorised by them under Islamic art, Asian/African art, ethnological collections, Middle East, South America etc. Started as my MA thesis in 2022, kept building since, mostly solo with a little funding. Fully open source, self-hosted, AGPL-3.0, Next.js + Deck.gl on the frontend, Strapi backend, Python ETL pulling from…
Jul 2026 · exsitu.app
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2015 · statisticalatlas.com
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I've been building a bunch of US geography tools/games/visualizations and thought folks on HN might like this one. There are also drive-time and bike-time tools available on the same page. For folks interested, all of the data comes from OpenStreetMap and the US Census at the moment - OSM for routing and points interest and the US Census for population data. Anonymous users can use it 5x/day. I put up a waitlist page to gauge interest in a paid version but there's no way for the public to make an account - feel free to bypass the limits in an incognito tab. The site is US-only…
Jul 2026 · blockatlas.com
- 10AG
Hi y'all, Made this game as a side-project a while back, figure some of you might enjoy it. Idea came while playing GeoGuessr (as you might have guessed). Artifacts are from the MET API, which is fantastic and well worth exploring for personal projects if you're into that sort of thing. I'm also working on adding 3D artifacts as in here: https://artifactguesser.com/artifacts/66880eb60da993fab0ffff... (warning, that page isn't super mobile friendly, but you'll get the idea). Shameless plug, if you think what I built is neat, I am a fullstack dev looking work, you can…
2025 · artifactguesser.com
- 11MF
Wrote a program in FreeBASIC to try and find out how Genetic Algorithms work. It's a quick hack that I wrote to try some theories with because the Wikipedia Article on GAs reads like greek to me. So I built it from the general principles i knew at the time. The "genome" per individual is an array of 9000 integers but I used only monochrome pictures with either black or white; An individual also has a fitness score. There are 1000 individuals in the population and only two are selected to reproduce. So that makes 9 million (yes, MEELION as El Reg would write) data points and the scoring…
2015
- 12AM
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,…
Feb 2026 · historical-moviemap.inneuro.ai
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Interactive Atlas to navigate the whole History of Humankind
Jul 2026 · phersu-atlas.com
- 15IB
The idea is simple: click any place on the map, propose a name, others vote, or it will be auto-accepted in ~5min. No account needed for fresh locations or name duel - only to challenge already-renamed places or vote to prevent abuse. 40k renames so far, and surprisingly people mostly behave. Some names are genuinely creative and I keep learning random geography facts just by watching the map (did you know someone mapped every single animal in a Taiwan Kaohsiung zoo on OpenStreetMap?) Non-commercial, just a side project. Stack is SvelteKit, MapLibre, 40GB vector map self-hosted on Cloudflare…
Feb 2026 · rename.world
- 16RIRyd.io▲9
Ryd.io As a capstone project for Galvanize's data science immersive I took another look at the NYC Taxi data set. A ton of analysis has been done on individual rides/cars and I was curious about what story would be told by looking at this data through the aggregate. Through the clustered map you can identify different 'personalities' of the city with a birds eye view. Check it out here http://ryd.io/cluster_map I've just spent past couple weeks working hard on this project and would love to talk to anyone about it if they are interested. After the conclusion of the…
2015
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I built Sculptor after repeatedly seeing founders try to hire data scientists for a task that ultimately boiled down to extracting structured data from unstructured text (customer records, social posts, websites, etc) using an LLM API. We ended up reinventing this pattern internally at least three times in the past year, so I published Sculptor as a streamlined, open-source solution: - Simple schema-based extraction, with parallelization and type validation. - Multi-step pipelines with filtering or transforms between steps. - Configure everything in YAML/JSON for easy reuse. It’s MIT…
2025 · github.com
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Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com
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Hey HN, the Common Crawl Foundation is trying to expand the coverage of our crawl to more languages, regions and cultures, and if you speak a language other than English (LOTE) you can help! By validating Language Identification data (LangID or LID): https://dynabench.org/tasks/text-language-identification By contributing urls for our seed crawl: https://github.com/commoncrawl/web-languages We're also organizing a Workshop on Multilingual Data Quality Signals (WMDQS) with MLCommons and EleutherAI where we have a call for papers open…
2025
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2024 · github.com
- 22IB
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
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2015 · stratigy.danielkerkow.de
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Hey HN I’ve been thinking a lot about barriers to civic participation. Most people don’t show up to town halls. They don’t respond to traditional surveys. And a lot of online political spaces feel loud, adversarial, or exhausting. So I started wondering what happens if you make participation radically lightweight. That’s where Civie comes in. Each day you answer one to three short civic questions. It takes under a minute. Responses are anonymous. Results are shown only in aggregate. Over time, those responses accumulate into an open dataset anyone can explore. This isn’t scientific polling,…
Feb 2026 · civie.org
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