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We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
126•ColinWright•1h ago•93 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
24•surprisetalk•1h ago•26 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
121•AlexeyBrin•7h ago•24 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
125•alephnerd•2h ago•81 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
62•vinhnx•5h ago•7 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
829•klaussilveira•21h ago•249 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
55•thelok•3h ago•8 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
110•1vuio0pswjnm7•8h ago•139 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
4•gnufx•41m ago•1 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1060•xnx•1d ago•611 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
76•onurkanbkrc•6h ago•5 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
484•theblazehen•2d ago•175 comments

I Write Games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
10•valyala•2h ago•1 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
210•jesperordrup•12h ago•70 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
9•valyala•2h ago•0 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
559•nar001•6h ago•257 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
223•alainrk•6h ago•343 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
37•rbanffy•4d ago•7 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
8•languid-photic•3d ago•1 comments

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

https://web.archive.org/web/20211030011207/https://thejhsshow.com/articles/history-and-timeline-o...
19•brudgers•5d ago•4 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
29•marklit•5d ago•2 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
114•videotopia•4d ago•31 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
76•speckx•4d ago•75 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
6•momciloo•2h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
273•isitcontent•22h ago•38 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
201•limoce•4d ago•111 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
22•sandGorgon•2d ago•11 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
286•dmpetrov•22h ago•154 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
71•mellosouls•4h ago•75 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: ART – a new open-source RL framework for training agents

https://github.com/OpenPipe/ART
116•kcorbitt•9mo ago
Hey HN, I wanted to share a new project we've been working on for the last couple of months called ART (https://github.com/OpenPipe/ART).

ART is a new open-source framework for training agents using reinforcement learning (RL). RL allows you to train an agent to perform better at any task whose outcome can be measured and quantified.

There are many excellent projects focused on training LLMs with RL, such as GRPOTrainer (https://huggingface.co/docs/trl/main/en/grpo_trainer) and verl (https://github.com/volcengine/verl). We've used these frameworks extensively for customer-facing projects at OpenPipe, but grew frustrated with some key limitations:

- Multi-turn workflows, where the agent calls a tool, gets a response, and calls another, are not well supported. This makes them a non-starter for any task that requires an agent to perform a sequence of actions.

- Other frameworks typically have low GPU efficiency. They may require multiple H100 GPUs just to train a small 7B parameter model, and aren't able to keep the GPUs busy consistently during both the "rollout" and "training" phases of the training loop.

- Existing frameworks are typically not a convenient shape for integrating with existing agentic codebases. Existing trainers expect you to call raw text completion endpoints, and don't automatically provide industry-standard chat completion APIs.

ART is designed to address these limitations and make it easy to train high-quality agents. We've also shared many details and practical lessons learned is in this post, which walks through a demo of training an email research agent that outperforms o3 (https://openpipe.ai/blog/art-e-mail-agent). You can also find out more about ART's architecture in our announcement post (https://openpipe.ai/blog/art-trainer-a-new-rl-trainer-for-ag...).

Happy to answer any questions you have!

Comments

kcorbitt•9mo ago
Figured now was a good time to post this since we recently got surprisingly good results on training an email research agent. Link is above, but will put it here as well since I think it's a good example of RL's promise: https://openpipe.ai/blog/art-e-mail-agent
bradhilton•9mo ago
Contributor here, we developed the Agent Reinforcement Trainer (ART) library to make it easy to train LLMs for anything.

No callbacks or straitjacket flows. Instead we serve an OpenAI API-compatible endpoint that you can use as a drop-in replacement for any proprietary APIs you may be hitting.

After collecting responses from the inference API, you can tune the model with your own custom rewards and repeat the process as long as you like, until performance converges. We believe this level of flexibility will make it easier for you to train state-of-the-art models for your own use cases, much like Kyle's new email agent[1].

Also happy to answer any questions you have about the framework.

[1] https://openpipe.ai/blog/art-e-mail-agent

tcdent•9mo ago
I really like this concept.

Do you have documentation for the API response from the `/_train_model` endpoint?

bradhilton•9mo ago
Hi, we don't have reliable documentation for the HTTP API endpoints yet, mostly as they are still subject to change.

However, to briefly provide some context, `/_train_model` returns a stream of line delimited JSON objects for each gradient step as the model trains on the provided trajectories so the client can monitor progress. The final version of this endpoint may provide the option for both streaming & non-streaming responses, and/or potentially return a "training job" that can be polled instead.

someguy101010•9mo ago
Thanks for sharing this! A couple of questions come to mind:

- How does training with RL differ from fine tuning?

- When would it make sense to fine tune instead of using RL?

kcorbitt•9mo ago
Ok good questions here.

By fine-tuning in this context I assume you mean "supervised fine-tuning", or SFT. SFT trains a model to produce a specific string of output tokens, given an input. With SFT, if you were trying to train an assistant to solve math problems using a code interpreter, you might train it on a dataset that looks like:

    input: 'What is 934+1208'  
    output: `print(934+1208)`

    input: 'how many "r"s in strawberry'
    output: `print(len([l for l in "strawberry" if l == 'r'])`
etc, etc.

RL, on the other hand, just means training a model not to produce a concrete string of output tokens, but rather to create an output that maximizes some reward function (you get to decide on the reward).

For the example above, you might create the following dataset for RL training:

    input: 'What is 934+1208'
    ground_truth: 2142

    input: 'how many "r"s in strawberry'
    ground_truth: 3
You would then train the model to write python code that produces the ground_truth output. Your training code would take the model's output, run the python it produced, and then check whether the output matches the expected ground_truth. Importantly, this doesn't require you actually writing the code to solve the problem (you don't even have to know if it's solvable, technically!). Over time, the training loop would make the model more likely to produce outputs that get high rewards, which hopefully means it gets better at producing valid and applicable python.

This is useful in lots of domains where it's easier to check the answer than actually produce it. In the blog post[1] linked above, we train the agent to effectively use keyword search to try to find the correct emails in an inbox. As the model trainer, I didn't actually know what the right strategy was to choose keywords that would most quickly find the relevant email, but through training with RL, the model was able to figure it out on its own!

[1]: https://openpipe.ai/blog/art-e-mail-agent?refresh=1746030513...

someguy101010•9mo ago
Thank you for the detailed response!
jeffchuber•9mo ago
the table with comparable models is a really great way to show off things here
pama•9mo ago
Was the name influenced by the ship in the murderbot diaries?
schainks•9mo ago
Seconded.
gitroom•9mo ago
Perfect, I've always wanted an easier way to mess with RL frameworks. Gonna mess around with this asap.
bradhilton•9mo ago
Awesome! If you run into any problems or have questions feel free to open an issue or drop by the discord [1] server.

[1] https://discord.gg/zbBHRUpwf4