Ask HN: 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/ )

6 points | by adityaathalye 3 hours ago

6 comments

  • gysakai 23 minutes ago
    I hadn't sat down to watch a concert on TV in a long time. It was Mozart and Vivaldi, performed in the courtyard of the Louvre. For a while, I kept wondering, "Where is the conductor?"

    Then I noticed that one of the violinists was leading the other musicians while playing, through eye contact, body movement, and the music itself. Only after looking him up later did I learn that it was Julien Chauvin's ensemble, and that this was simply how they performed.

    I ended up watching Julien Chauvin and his ensemble for a full hour. It went by in no time.

  • nicbou 2 hours ago
    I am reading Letters from Birmingham Jail, and I'm stunned by how good Dr. King's writing is. I want to read more and learn how he managed to do it. I'm fascinated by the metaphors he uses and how vivid they are in my mind.

    I am curious about impressionist paintings. It's my favourite art style but I struggle to replicate it on canvas. I'm glad that there are so many helpful YouTube art teachers now.

    I have made elderflower cordial from harvested flowers, and it both got me into cocktails/mocktails, and tracking what else I can harvest throughout the year. Having garden flowers in the house and wild blackberry cakes is such a nice way to observe the passage of time.

  • a_tartaruga 1 hour ago
    The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets.

    The book Virtual Barrels by Ilia Bouchouev.

    The details and mechanics of financial option pricing.

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    • kwakubiney 1 hour ago
      >The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets.

      Any specific resources you're using?

  • david927 3 hours ago
    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?
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    • adityaathalye 3 hours ago
      Oh, that will be neat! I am a frequent reader of, and (very) infrequent contributor to that Ask HN :) Thanks for keeping it going. It always surfaces cool projects.

      Speaking for myself, I have far many more active topics I'm curious about, than I can possibly do anything about. Curiosity just because is fulfilling in its own way.

      No expectations of course. If you later decide this angle will add noise and/or too many tangents to your Ask HN, please drop it forthwith.

      Thanks for the offer... cheers!

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      • david927 1 hour ago
        It was always supposed to be part of the question -- not just what cool projects you might be working on but also ideas that you might be thinking about. It fits nicely! Consider it done.
  • cmcollier 3 hours ago
    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.
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    • devmando 2 hours ago
      this is a good question, and I wonder if its even open to the public. My limited knowledge knows that Anthropic settled a lawsuit of I believe ~1.3billion for scanned textbooks if I'm not mistaken.
  • ex-aws-dude 2 hours ago
    I randomly read an old book by John von Neumann I found in a thrift shop called “The Computer and The Brain”

    It’s only like 70 pages and it’s basically just him comparing how computers and neurons work and speculating on some stuff.

    The general takeaway seemed to be that the brain looks digital at first glance (binary activation of neurons) but is actually a lot more complicated and more like a mix of analog/digital.

    Now I’m really curious if there are any other modern books that do this comparison more in depth, basically exploring how a brain works but the author has a CS or EE background

    This book is from the 50s so I’m sure a lot has changed since then.

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