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SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
86•valyala•4h ago•16 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...
23•gnufx•2h ago•15 comments

The F Word

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/friction.html
35•zdw•3d ago•4 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
89•mellosouls•6h ago•168 comments

I write games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
132•valyala•4h ago•99 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
47•surprisetalk•3h ago•52 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
143•AlexeyBrin•9h ago•26 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
96•vinhnx•7h ago•13 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
850•klaussilveira•23h ago•256 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
66•samasblack•6h ago•51 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1092•xnx•1d ago•618 comments

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

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
64•thelok•5h ago•9 comments

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

https://www.bitsnbites.eu/a-spatial-domain-variable-block-size-luma-dependent-chroma-compression-...
4•mbitsnbites•3d ago•0 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
233•jesperordrup•14h ago•80 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
516•theblazehen•3d ago•191 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
93•onurkanbkrc•8h ago•5 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
13•languid-photic•3d ago•4 comments

We mourn our craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
334•ColinWright•3h ago•401 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
254•alainrk•8h ago•412 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
182•1vuio0pswjnm7•10h ago•252 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
611•nar001•8h ago•269 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
35•marklit•5d ago•6 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
27•momciloo•4h ago•5 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
47•rbanffy•4d ago•9 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
124•videotopia•4d ago•39 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
96•speckx•4d ago•109 comments

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

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

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
211•limoce•4d ago•117 comments

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

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
32•sandGorgon•2d ago•15 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
287•isitcontent•1d ago•38 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.