Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

You’re amazing for doing such a details, OSS-first announcement — you do an honor to ycombinator and HN by living up to the old school ideals IMO. My only complaint: more whimsy and tell us what danswer means! Literally this whole time I was thinking “huh maybe it’s Docker… or just some dude named Dan…”. For the slow like me, it’s dance + answer

Will definitely be checking it out, Dan or no :)

  Optionally the system can be configured to go over each doc with multiple passes of different granularity to capture wide context vs fine details.

Just curious, is the granularity able to itself be controlled by LLMs, or does that refer to traditional content-blind sliding windows? I’m big on Minsky’s idea of Frames[1] which emphasize understanding the same input in multiple instrumental contexts/frameworks/backgrounds. Something you’ve thought of?

[1] https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html

The name was intended to be (1) Danswer -> Deep (learning) Answer and (2) Danswer -> Dancer (thus the logo). Although we've heard quite a ton of different interpretations (the "dude named Dan" is quite popular, as is "Danswer -> The Answer".

The granularity is currently hard-coded (e.g. 512 tokens default chunk size, augmented with passes of 128 tokens). I have not heard of the idea of Frames, but it's interesting. Thanks for sharing - I'll probably do a deep dive sometime this weekend.

lol great answer, thanks. I think it’s a powerful, simple idea that is too little used - for example, temporarily transforming a markdown document into an outline, an amateur summary, and a detailed outline, or transforming a source file into comments, explanations, code, specific classes/functions, etc.

I say this with a hint of irony, knowing that I’m just some kid and you’re launching an awesome AI product right now, but I highly recommend looking back at mainstream ai from before it all started actually working, namely the classic book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Just because they lacked the tools doesn’t mean there wasn’t serious, detailed thought put into what we should do in the technological situation we now find ourselves in. For that reason, this is (AFAIK) the main textbook taught in US grad schools for AI survey courses. Frames would be part of chapter 10, I’m guessing.

https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

Thanks so much for sharing! Excited to look into it!

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