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BookTalk: A Reading Companion That Captures Your Voice

https://github.com/bramses/BookTalk
1•_bramses•37s ago•0 comments

Is AI "good" yet? – tracking HN's sentiment on AI coding

https://www.is-ai-good-yet.com/#home
1•ilyaizen•1m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Amdb – Tree-sitter based memory for AI agents (Rust)

https://github.com/BETAER-08/amdb
1•try_betaer•2m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw Partners with VirusTotal for Skill Security

https://openclaw.ai/blog/virustotal-partnership
1•anhxuan•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Seedance 2.0 Release

https://seedancy2.com/
1•funnycoding•2m ago•0 comments

Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
1•thelok•2m ago•0 comments

Towards Self-Driving Codebases

https://cursor.com/blog/self-driving-codebases
1•edwinarbus•3m ago•0 comments

VCF West: Whirlwind Software Restoration – Guy Fedorkow [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLoXodz1N9A
1•stmw•4m ago•1 comments

Show HN: COGext – A minimalist, open-source system monitor for Chrome (<550KB)

https://github.com/tchoa91/cog-ext
1•tchoa91•4m ago•1 comments

FOSDEM 26 – My Hallway Track Takeaways

https://sluongng.substack.com/p/fosdem-26-my-hallway-track-takeaways
1•birdculture•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Env-shelf – Open-source desktop app to manage .env files

https://env-shelf.vercel.app/
1•ivanglpz•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Almostnode – Run Node.js, Next.js, and Express in the Browser

https://almostnode.dev/
1•PetrBrzyBrzek•9m ago•0 comments

Dell support (and hardware) is so bad, I almost sued them

https://blog.joshattic.us/posts/2026-02-07-dell-support-lawsuit
1•radeeyate•10m ago•0 comments

Project Pterodactyl: Incremental Architecture

https://www.jonmsterling.com/01K7/
1•matt_d•10m ago•0 comments

Styling: Search-Text and Other Highlight-Y Pseudo-Elements

https://css-tricks.com/how-to-style-the-new-search-text-and-other-highlight-pseudo-elements/
1•blenderob•12m ago•0 comments

Crypto firm accidentally sends $40B in Bitcoin to users

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-firm-accidentally-sends-40-055054321.html
1•CommonGuy•12m ago•0 comments

Magnetic fields can change carbon diffusion in steel

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260125083427.htm
1•fanf2•13m ago•0 comments

Fantasy football that celebrates great games

https://www.silvestar.codes/articles/ultigamemate/
1•blenderob•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Animalese

https://animalese.barcoloudly.com/
1•noreplica•13m ago•0 comments

StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
2•simonw•14m ago•0 comments

John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds

https://blog.plover.com/tech/gpt/micro-worlds.html
1•blenderob•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Velocity - Free/Cheaper Linear Clone but with MCP for agents

https://velocity.quest
2•kevinelliott•15m ago•2 comments

Corning Invented a New Fiber-Optic Cable for AI and Landed a $6B Meta Deal [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3KLbc5DlRs
1•ksec•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: XAPIs.dev – Twitter API Alternative at 90% Lower Cost

https://xapis.dev
2•nmfccodes•17m ago•1 comments

Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable with Psychedelics

https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/near-instantly-aborting-the-worst
2•eatitraw•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Nginx-defender – realtime abuse blocking for Nginx

https://github.com/Anipaleja/nginx-defender
2•anipaleja•23m ago•0 comments

The Super Sharp Blade

https://netzhansa.com/the-super-sharp-blade/
1•robin_reala•25m ago•0 comments

Smart Homes Are Terrible

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/smart-homes-technology/685867/
2•tusslewake•26m ago•0 comments

What I haven't figured out

https://macwright.com/2026/01/29/what-i-havent-figured-out
1•stevekrouse•27m ago•0 comments

KPMG pressed its auditor to pass on AI cost savings

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/02/06/kpmg-pressed-its-auditor-to-pass-on-ai-cost-savings/
1•cainxinth•27m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The Continual Learning Problem

https://jessylin.com/2025/10/20/continual-learning/
68•kiyanwang•3mo ago

Comments

mynti•3mo ago
Super interesting blogpost. I just wonder how this is actually different to LORA, since LORA also adds some parameters and freezes the rest of the model. This seems like a sparse, memory efficient LORA with a couple of extra steps, since it uses attention again to make the sparsity work. All while making it a lot more effective compared to LORA (performance drop of only 11% compared to 71%).
sva_•3mo ago
> LORA

I think you meant LoRA (not to be confused with LoRa)

alyxya•3mo ago
I think the solution to continual learning is as simple as using context distillation. We know that models are good at in-context learning, so we just want an efficient way to distill context into the weights. I suspect context rot may come from how the softmax in attention gets diluted with a longer context, so this wouldn't be an issue with context distillation.
killerstorm•3mo ago
Perhaps it can work through multiple stages: ICL -> prompt/context optimization (*) -> prefix tuning / KV distillation -> context distillation.

*: it is possible to measure how much part of a prompt helps with a task e.g. measuring change in entropy

imtringued•3mo ago
The problem with continual learning is that stochastic gradient descent is already an online algorithm applied incrementally on a shuffled dataset. If you add new data, you can't train on just the new data, because you will be running what amounts to a completely different training sequence. Further training requires the old data and the new data to be shuffled together.

With reinforcement learning, specifically actor critic, the actor is not training against a dataset. It's training against the critic. The critic is supposed to approximate the value function, which contains the current cost for a given action and the predicted future cost, assuming that you choose the optimal action at every step, including its impact on future actions. If you have a simple supervised cost function, what happens is that the critic acts as an averaging of loss functions. You could say that the critic is a compressed copy of the training data. When you train the actor, you're essentially taking not only the new data, but also the old data into account.

So, in a way, catastrophic forgetting is sort of solved, but not really. If you add new data, you run into the problem that your critic will slowly drift to the new data distribution. This means the problem wasn't solved, but you certainly managed to delay it. Delaying the problem is good though. What if you can delay it even more? What if you can delay it forever?

Here is my stupid and simple unproven idea: Nest the reinforcement learning algorithm. Each critic will add one more level of delay, thereby acting as a low pass filter on the supervised reward function. Since you have two critics now, you can essentially implement a hybrid pre-training + continual learning architecture. The most interesting aspect here is that you can continue training the inner-most critic without changing the outer critic, which now acts as a learned loss function.