HACKER Q&A
📣 adityaathalye

What have you been curious about?


If you are anything like me, you will have about five answers at any given point in time for "What are you curious about?".

Arguably, a more interesting, revealing, and kinder question is; "What have you been curious about?".

I feel a looking-back-to-curiosity exercise has power to shed light on where to look ahead (and why to do it). More so, I feel it has power to grant permission to that "insatiably curious thirteen year old self" to step out and play. Because it probably already has been up to something, while your attention was elsewhere.

So, here is a prompt (see what I just did there? ;-))

Um... Except for LLM stuff, if you please. Just for this thread. Because these days the plurality of HN discussion appears to be about the curiosities of LLMs.

(cf. More about this in a blog post I published a while back https://www.evalapply.org/posts/what-have-you-been-curious-about/ )


  👤 david927 Accepted Answer ✓
Each second Sunday of the month, I post an "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread. I can add this to that, since the idea is the same. What do you think?

👤 cmcollier
I'm curious to know what proportion of the training data at frontier model shops is composed of their scanned book text vs the internet.