{"generated_at":"2026-11-12T18:49:23.351Z","source":{"name":"Hacker News public API","url":"https://github.com/HackerNews/API","attribution":"Stories and comments are public Hacker News submissions by their respective authors. HackerHub is an independent reader, not affiliated with Y Combinator.","content_is_untrusted":true},"story_id":50452455,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50452455","total_comments":385,"returned":20,"scope":"Up to the requested number of top-level comments in Hacker News ranked order. Deleted comments are omitted. Nested replies are not fetched; this is not the complete thread.","comments":[{"id":50453616,"author":"LordOmlette","created_at":"2026-11-11T14:08:57.000Z","text":"The site in question was found earlier: https://bsky.app/profile/indyfromspace.bsky.social/post/3n22...\nThe Mexican govt may not have had the right records, but you can see what the site looked like at the time it was first found here: https://bsky.app/profile/indyfromspace.bsky.social/post/3n22...","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":21,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453616"},{"id":50453012,"author":"TSiege","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:13:21.000Z","text":"This story is very cool, and it’s exciting to see how much progress AI will bring to every field. One thing to temper everyone from wanting to lidar the whole world is human capacity. Finding discoveries like this is essentially as hard as doing the lidar mapping. Now the issue will be getting archaeologist there in time before someone else does.\nThe best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest. Treasure hunters and looters don’t care about stratigraphy and the processes involved for doing research. Maybe the cat is out of the bag on this one, but good for thought.\nEdit: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people use AI to do this or that no bad actor will. This comment is in response to the sentiment I am seeing in the comments that we should lidar the whole world and have AI find any anomalous structures it can. There is no way for archeologists to excavate and protect all those places in that scenario","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":8,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453012"},{"id":50455000,"author":"hanoz","created_at":"2026-11-11T16:05:42.000Z","text":"I created the first online lidar map of the UK (well, England and Wales), as announced here many years ago! (now at https://lidarmap.uk) and delightfully there have been dozens of finds of previously unknown sites of archaeological significance found using it that I'm aware of. Roman villas, forts, henges, all sorts of earthworks. New discoveries are being reported using this and similar tools almost weekly, on forums like https://www.reddit.com/r/LiDARdiscoveryUK/. Britain really is littered with this stuff.\nAlthough it does feel the finds are getting increasingly hard to spot, every now and then you get a how did everyone miss that moment. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the remaining impressive finds tend to be in woodland, using the Digital Terrain Model data which can peer beneath the forest canopy, like this Mexican one today, or are within newly released coverage which is promptly pounced on by armchair archeologists.\nNot sure what my point is here except... to me this story still feels like a function of the amazing recent progress in lidar coverage and data availability (not to mention the incredible technology behind it), rather than an AI one, although I don't doubt that pointing a capable model and a healthy token budget in this direction might well be able to sweep up a few of the remaining discoveries.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":2,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50455000"},{"id":50452940,"author":"chirau","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:05:37.000Z","text":"Interesting. I don't want to sound like a hater or anything, but I will personally wait for an expert archaeologist's verification on this. I have dealt with agents making up stuff that sounds fantastic and ground-breaking but completely falters on further review. And I doubt the folks you contacted have the audacity to question a Google engineer and his 48 agents. Even if he is not archaelogist. Do you think it would have gone the same way if it was another random person who had done the exact same thing and reached out to them? The one day feedback part also has me questioning what they actually did.\nAnyway, I can hear myself beginning to sound like a hater now, so I will stop here. I hope it turns out to be right, and in that case, congrats on your wonderful discovery.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":7,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50452940"},{"id":50455574,"author":"miotts","created_at":"2026-11-11T16:53:16.000Z","text":"author here. Update: the site had already been discovered. It appears in a 2025 paper by Estrada-Belli, Canuto, Šprajc & Fernandez-Diaz (page 14) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105288. The agents missed it, I missed it, and it wasn't in INAH's register yet (National Institute of Anthropology and History). The rest of the story still holds, and there's still a lot left to discover with vibe-archeology. I hope this brought some extra excitement to archaeology.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":3,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50455574"},{"id":50453199,"author":"danesparza","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:31:36.000Z","text":"\"This is by far the best time ever to be alive.\"\nI appreciate the enthusiasm. I'm not sure I agree. Especially since this was a SWE and not an archeologist / anthropologist announcing this (especially if the goal is to understand and preserve history -- not get headlines for AI).","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":5,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453199"},{"id":50452973,"author":"civvv","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:09:30.000Z","text":"Amazing, the perfect application of AI Agents. Find patterns/answers in massive amounts of data. It is becoming more clear everyday that this is the primary driver behind an AI's \"intelligence\". Finding the solution to mathematical problems that have decades of documented attempts by mathematicians, creating software based on exisitng code and now, discovering Maya pyramids within enourmous amounts of lidar-data.\nThe final barrier for super intelligence, or perhaps even just \"human intelligence\": can it materialize \"new fields/ideas\" without large datasets of human made and curated existing attempts?","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":6,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50452973"},{"id":50454227,"author":"octocop","created_at":"2026-11-11T14:57:16.000Z","text":"This post turned out to be a perfect example of the blind faith in LLM agents. Their outputs are not to be trusted and must be rigorously checked.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":6,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50454227"},{"id":50454717,"author":"strix_varius","created_at":"2026-11-11T15:41:02.000Z","text":"Given that we can all see the mapped pyramid in the previously published paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2..., the title of this seems incorrect (\"finds unmapped Maya pyramid\").","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50454717"},{"id":50454388,"author":"zingerlio","created_at":"2026-11-11T15:12:33.000Z","text":"What kind of harness setup that would allow me to fire off a prompt, go to sleep, and wake up to see such a comprehensive and intricate infra setup (48 agents, orchestrated, image storage, continuous execution), and just say “damn”? I paid my for peasant $20 bucks a month plan and works in the CLI (Codex), I never know how to scale work on number of agents, non-interrupted workflow, or multiple models (he mentioned he consulted multiple models, I assume not just copy pasting questions in different chats). Is there a harness that I’m missing out on?","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":3,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50454388"},{"id":50453520,"author":"agnosticmantis","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:59:42.000Z","text":"The title reads as if the 48 agents took 72 hours to find this. The text doesn't exactly say that:\n> \"It took less than 72 hours to go from a random thought while traveling to an official reply from the Mexican government.\"\n> \"That night, I asked the agents to analyze it and went to bed.\" ... \"I woke up and checked the agents' reports. 'DAMN!'\"\n> \"Me: OK, please do the report. And I went to bed.\"\n(The actual agents-on-the-job time and compute seems much less than 48 agents * 72hours from the report.)","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453520"},{"id":50453334,"author":"pu_pe","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:43:50.000Z","text":"I think we are about to see a whole new age of \"citizen scientists\", enabled by AI. This particular example was solved fast with a lot of compute, but it seems that this approach would have been possible with less equipment too.\nThe bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":4,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453334"},{"id":50453039,"author":"pingou","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:15:31.000Z","text":"Wasn't it extremely expensive to analyse so many images?\nEdit: I asked gemini and it's only 834 1200x1200 images for 1,200 km2 at standard lidar resolution.\nCan that be used to detect illegal mining operations in South America?","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":2,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453039"},{"id":50455039,"author":"frevib","created_at":"2026-11-11T16:09:18.000Z","text":"> This is by far the best time ever to be alive.\nPlease just stop the hype now.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50455039"},{"id":50455085,"author":"pelzatessa","created_at":"2026-11-11T16:13:14.000Z","text":"> Me: OK, how do I contact INAH? How does the reporting process work?\n> Agent: …instructions for the report… + email addresses\n> Me: OK, please do the report.\nI don't want to sound offtopic nitpicky, because the content of the article is quite cool, but I just hope the author didn't just straight up generate the report with AI and sent it right to the email address. If I were in this situation, I'd most certainly write myself something along the lines of \"Hey, I'm not anyone professional but just wanted to inquire about these coordinates because it seems that this site has not been yet catalogued and it's likely to contain something interesting based on my research. Please take a look.\". Or better yet, send it to some actual archelogist who would already be versed in these kind of communications, and let him handle it professionally.\nAt this moment probably everyone has had to deal with sudden influx of ai-generated emails, I hear about it all the time from my friends who work in customer service and such. Much has already been said on the internet about this kind of conduct, but I just think that using an AI agent to pretend you are familiar with the topic should be discouraged. Just be honest and write your own words, if the recipient needs some professional expertise from AI, they can just paste your message into their own model.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":1,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50455085"},{"id":50460343,"author":"nwilkens","created_at":"2026-11-11T23:17:15.000Z","text":"I spent about an hour today exploring NASA datasets with Claude, mostly out of curiosity, inspired by this post.\nIt identified what appeared to be a previously unknown asteroid pair: 2018 NC15 and 2026 LD1.\nTurns out the pair had already been discovered earlier this year, but that almost made the experience more interesting.\nI'm a software engineer, not an astronomer. Being able to explore an entirely different field and independently arrive at an existing discovery was pretty remarkable.\nHere's the writeup:\nhttps://wilkens.io/research/nea-pair-2018-nc15-2026-ld1/","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50460343"},{"id":50458597,"author":"aarjaneiro","created_at":"2026-11-11T21:00:29.000Z","text":"With the development that this was already discovered prior, this now feels a lot like the issue where an LLM \"finds\" a new bug only for it to turn out that it had been discussed and disregarded years earlier.\nTo me, the scary thing is that an LLM typically does a good job of convincing it's handler (or others) that its (re)discovery is of significance. Whether it's of undue significance or not determines if this new wave LLM research is just creating more work for us humans, be they maintainers of projects or archeologists.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50458597"},{"id":50455477,"author":"zkmon","created_at":"2026-11-11T16:45:43.000Z","text":"Philosophically speaking, the human quest for discovering things from past, from far away, from depths of oceans, from the depths of atoms and microcosms - has no bounds and targets. That means it will be never be completed. There will always be an unsung, unknown warrior who fought for his people, or some higher-level of intelligence and knowledge to be achieved. The insatiable quest for such awareness, knowledge and discoveries imbalance the priorities of the human progress. We are doing this at the cost of climate change, natural resources and human detachment from the nature.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50455477"},{"id":50453263,"author":"reedf1","created_at":"2026-11-11T13:37:22.000Z","text":"Seriously though, why 48 AI Agents? I'm curious, presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis so its not raw parallelism? Do the agents share work? This kind of agent scale is outside of my budget, I would love to know the details.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":2,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453263"},{"id":50457244,"author":"sporkland","created_at":"2026-11-11T19:13:32.000Z","text":"One thing I haven't seen research on with these agent swarms is if an equivalent amount of compute dedicated to a single agent (sequential vs parallel longer wall clock time) would lead to similar outcomes or if something around agents working in parallel with model temperatures how they are leads to more exhaustive searching and less path dependence.","parent_id":50452455,"replies_count":0,"hn_url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50457244"}]}