I find it worrying that this was upvoted so much so quickly, and HN users are apparently unable to spot the glaring red flags about this article.
1. Let's start with where the post was published. Check what kind of content this blog publishes - huge volumes of random low-effort AI-boosting posts with AI-generated images. This isn't a blog about history or linguistics.
2. The author is anonymous.
3. The contents of the post itself: it's just raw AI output. There's no expert commentary. It just mentions that unnamed experts were unable to do the job.
This isn't to say that LLMs aren't useful for science; on the contrary. See for example Terence Tao's blog. Notice how different his work is from whatever this post is.
I'm especially suspicious of the handwriting analysis. It seems like the kind of thing a vLLM would be pretty bad at doing and very good at convincingly faking for non-experts.
Gemini 3 Pro, eg, fails very badly at reading the Braille in this image, confusing the English language text for the actual Braille. When you give it just the Braille, it still fails and confidently hallucinates a transcription badly enough that you don't even have to know Braille (I don't!) to see it's wrong.
That was said about reddit some years ago and now reddit is clearly riddled with astroturfing and other manipulations. We don't know how big the problem on hn already is and how bad it will get. But it would be naive to think, that it doesn't happen here.
True. Sometimes weird links with very few upvotes magically end up in the top 10. But the comments usually bring them back to earth!
The most real benefit of HN vs Reddit is commenters who are actually knowledgeable in that field, who leave a comment or vote up an actually useful comment.
1. Let's start with where the post was published. Check what kind of content this blog publishes - huge volumes of random low-effort AI-boosting posts with AI-generated images. This isn't a blog about history or linguistics.
2. The author is anonymous.
3. The contents of the post itself: it's just raw AI output. There's no expert commentary. It just mentions that unnamed experts were unable to do the job.
This isn't to say that LLMs aren't useful for science; on the contrary. See for example Terence Tao's blog. Notice how different his work is from whatever this post is.