I think it's weird that what was submitted to HN was a blog post on what claims to be a web site about vaccines, but has no contact information.
Is this the new thing? Have AI rewrite a news article and spam news aggregators to get inbound links from places like HN to boost your domain's profile and then sell it?
Note that the actual paper does not make the claim from the title, and that they "recovered and sequenced ancient DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers" (one molar each) from one site only, which means other origins cannot be discarded, especially since these pathogens could only be found in 5 of 13.
It's not weird, just random, like most things that seem weird (at least on HN).
It seems like a good-enough blog post and doesn't sound AI-written to me. But I agree that the wapo article is probably better, so we'll re-up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45699285 and merge the comments thither.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45699285.
Link to the actual report: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...
I think it's weird that what was submitted to HN was a blog post on what claims to be a web site about vaccines, but has no contact information.
Is this the new thing? Have AI rewrite a news article and spam news aggregators to get inbound links from places like HN to boost your domain's profile and then sell it?
Actual news article (submitted 16 hours earlier): https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/10/24/napoleons-...
Note that the actual paper does not make the claim from the title, and that they "recovered and sequenced ancient DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers" (one molar each) from one site only, which means other origins cannot be discarded, especially since these pathogens could only be found in 5 of 13.
It's not weird, just random, like most things that seem weird (at least on HN).
It seems like a good-enough blog post and doesn't sound AI-written to me. But I agree that the wapo article is probably better, so we'll re-up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45699285 and merge the comments thither.