Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire
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…
This tool extracts and maps names of people from over 500,000 Latin inscriptions in the Epigraphic Database Clauss-Slaby to create a comprehensive record of individuals who lived during the Roman Empire. It targets… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1
Person search APIfree▲790Hi HN! We’re Abhilash Chowdhary, Chris Pisarski and Manmohit Grewal. We built Crustdata (YC F24). Today we’re launching our web search API for AI agents, which not only returns the most relevant documents from the web but also maps them to the correct entity (person, company or event). Demo video here https://youtu.be/IouWW97hBN8 If you run agents at scale, tokens become a line item. The web data is the worst input: long pages, repeated content, mixed entities, stale claims. The usual web search -> scrape -> summarize + structure forces the agent to spend tokens doing…
2025 · crustdata.com · its alternatives →
- 2US
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Here's Paul Graham:…
2022 · stylometry.net · its alternatives →
- 3IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 4IM
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…
2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →
- 5
TimeMap▲325Interactive Map of History: millions of people, events, maps
2024 · oldmapsonline.org · its alternatives →
- 6
SNEWPapers▲126Hello HN, over the past 7 months I've spent nearly 3,000 hours on building SNEWPAPERS, the first historical newpaper archive with full-text extractions, nearly perfect OCR, a vast categorization taxonomy and of course with semantic and agentic search capabilities. Problem: I wanted to search through newspaper archives, but when I tried every service only lets you search for keywords and dates, and gives you back raw images of the papers, and too many of them with no context. A sea of noise. Solution: I taught machines how to read the newspapers and so far I've extracted the content from >…
Apr 2026 · snewpapers.com · its alternatives →
- 7
- 8AI
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 →
- 9
2024 · barneyhill.com · its alternatives →
- 10OF
Hi HN! Today I'm launching OpenTimes, a free database of roughly 150 billion pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between United States Census geographies. In addition to letting you visualize travel isochrones on the homepage, OpenTimes also lets you download massive amounts of travel time data for free and with no limits. The primary goal here is to enable research and fill a gap I noticed in the open-source spatial ecosystem. Researchers (social scientists, economists, etc.) use large travel time matrices to quantify things like access to healthcare, but they often end up paying…
2025 · opentimes.org · its alternatives →
- 11
Massive internet datasets, embedded, open-sourced and free
2023 · alex.macrocosm.so · its alternatives →
- 12
Phersu Atlas▲68Interactive historical atlas - daily data and 4M statistics
2023 · phersu-atlas.com · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
Upload DNA data and learn more about your ancient ancestors
2020 · genomelink.io · its alternatives →
- 15
Construisons ensemble un tableau de bord de données neutres et vérifiables
2022 · lafrance.enchiffres.fr · its alternatives →
- 16MW
This was more of a sandbox to play with Raphael and Flot than anything else but I think there are some interesting statistics in there. It'd be awesome to do this over time but I really don't have the spare time required.
2011 · burntbrunch.github.com · its alternatives →
- 17ES
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 · its alternatives →
- 18
Chronas▲8History map app with millions of interconnected datapoints
2019 · chronas.org · its alternatives →
- 19
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
This is niche, I'll admit. I needed to look through the latest census data, but it was exported as multiple multi-gigabyte bespoke latin1-encoded CSV files. Pandas, Polars, and SQLite's CSV import tool weren't much help, so I shelved the project until recently, when I started taking a SQLite course online. I picked it up again, normalized the data, and now there's a database that can be queried through a SQL view that matches the headings in the original CSVs. I'm proud of the script I created to export the data, as well as automatically compress the artifact, make the diagrams and…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
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 · its alternatives →
- 22
Chronogram▲15Solve mysteries, collect artifacts, be a treasure hunter
2023 · chronogram.ai · its alternatives →
- 23
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 · its alternatives →
- 24AM
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 · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →