MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: ART – a new open-source RL framework for training agents
by kcorbitt | 2025-04-30 15:35:00+00:00
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!
by mjr00 | 2025-04-30 15:35:06+00:00
> I’ve been around long enough to see resistance to things like the Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs, automated tests, etc. Not every advancement is welcomed by everybody. An awful lot of people are very set in their ways and will refuse to change unless given a firm push.

There was never any widespread resistance to "the Internet", let's be real here.

In any case, adoption of all those things was bottom-up rather than top-down. CEOs were not mandating that tech teams use version control or ORMs or automated testing. It was tech leadership, with a lot of support from ICs in their department.

Tech people in particular are excited about trying new things. I never heard CEOs mandating top-down that teams use Kubernetes and adding people's Kubernetes usage into their performance reviews, yet Kubernetes spread like wildfire--to the point where many software companies which had no business using something as complicated as Kubernetes started using it. Same with other flavor-of-the-month tools and approaches like event sourcing, NoSQL/MongoDB, etc.

If anything, as a leader you need to slow down adoption of new technology rather than force it upon people. The idea that senior leadership needs to push to get AI used is highly unusual, to say the least.
by 47282847 | 2025-04-30 15:35:16+00:00
> The free internet is built on ads. I still believe in the free internet.

The internet I remember had free content because mostly individuals wanted to share something. Commercial offers were rare. I would be very happy to go back to that network, with 90% content gone and the remaining 10% provided without an ads driven model. In fact, if it was for me, one could widely ban most advertising also off-net. It is manipulative cancer. At least ban any sort of user tracking and analysis. Yes, this will kill a wide spectrum of offers. I am totally fine with that trade-off. We don’t need it for a well-functioning society. And yeah, look around, we do all sorts of interference with so-called free markets, because history has shown time and time again how horrible it gets when you allow capitalism to roam freely.
by Incipient | 2025-04-30 15:35:19+00:00
This is our local Australian one, and the build price is an absolute joke which pretty much everyone puts down to incompetence, is 12bn. It's 5x the cost of the above linked battery for 120x the capacity (350GWh vs 2GWh). And this should be in operation for a lot longer than batteries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_2.0_Pumped_Storage_Pow...
by fifteen1506 | 2025-04-30 15:35:26+00:00
Funniest thing I found out recently: the whole debacle of beta vs alphas was based on studies on wolfs on stressful conditions (i.e., cages).

Second funniest thing I found out not so recently: the whole debacle, which I believed and hurt me personally, in hindsight, is the whole study about "kids who wait for candies instead of eating it right away fare better in life" failed to take into account kids' social-economical status.

This, plus the no doubt institutionalization of Scientific Studies (tm) (e.g., salt causes cardio problems, as a way to steer focus away from sugar), makes me apply 50% in the doubt scale for every study less than 50 years old.

Additionally, I'm told the waterfall model was never prescribed as a good method, but it was the most prominent picture of a old study which affirmed waterfall as very flawed, and people failed to properly read the text.

PS: on topic, everyone believes that of the opposite team; I found very enlightening an article which said "Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter (...). Find threads of connection and work from there", by a Remain person.

Let's hope that may break the cycle of default (a few times undeserved) mistrust.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-04-30 15:35:44+00:00
The fact that this comment is even showing up on HN is a testament to how far gone the U.S. populace is lol.

U.S. economy had the best standing of any other economy thanks directly to the policies set forth by the fed-res, yet this guy thinks they were trying to engineer the exact opposite outcome that happened.

Like a doctor giving a patient medicine, the patient being cured, and the patient then claiming "I didn't need the medicine you were just trying to kill me all along!"

Truly incredible.

We are not a serious country anymore, if we ever were.
by WorldMaker | 2025-04-30 15:35:59+00:00
Or Trump University or Trump Taj Mahal or Trump Castle Hotel & Casino or Trump Plaza Casino or Trump Plaza Hotel or…

(How do you even possibly bankrupt a casino, much less multiple casinos a decade? Is it money laundering or is it being so terrible at running a business that you can't even run a business with the House Advantage of a casino?)
by deredede | 2025-04-30 15:36:10+00:00
This looks interesting, it's great to see more machine learning efforts in typed languages.

I'm a bit surprised to see no mention of Owl (https://github.com/owlbarn/owl an older project for scientific computing in OCaml that was resurrected recently), I wonder how they compare.

The Raven README mentions:

> We prioritize developer experience and seamless integration.

so maybe that's one difference — I used Owl on a course project about a decade ago, and while it got the job done, I remember the experience being rather painful compared to Numpy (even though I was more experienced with OCaml than with Python at the time).
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-30 15:36:47+00:00
"did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack?"

In fact I remember very distinctly the Google TGIF All-Hands where Larry and Sergey stood up and told SWEs they should be trying to do development on tablets, because, y'know, mobile was ascendant, they were afraid of being left behind in mobile, and wanted to develop for "mobile first" (which ended up being on the whole "mobile only" but I'll put that aside for now).

It frankly had the same aura of ... not getting it... lack of vision pretending to be visionionary.

In the end, the job of upper management is not to dictate the tools to engineers to drive them to efficiency. We frankly already have that motivation ourselves. If engineers are skeptical of "AI", it's mostly because we've already been engaged with it and understand many of its limitations, not because we're being "luddites"

One sign of a healthy internal engineering culture is when engineers who are actually doing the work work together to pick their tools to do the work, rather than have them hoisted on them.

When management sends memos out demanding people use AI, what they're actually reflecting is their own fear of being left behind in the buzzword cycle. Few of us doing the work have that fear. I've seen more projects damaged by excessive novelty and forced "innovation" than the other way around.
by Centigonal | 2025-04-30 15:36:49+00:00
Such a sane, nuanced take on new technologies. I wish more people were outspoken about holding these types of opinions.

It feels like the AI discourse is often dominated by irrationally exuberant AI boosters and people with an overwhelming, knee-jerk hatred of the technology, and I often feel like reading tech news is like watching two people who are both wrong argue with one another.
by roughly | 2025-04-30 15:36:57+00:00
There’s a couple factors - one is the payoff time and risk levels make basic research difficult for even businesses with long time horizons to engage with, and American businesses are notoriously short term. The other is that there’s a large public benefit to making the fruits of that research widely available by way of risk mitigation - it’s commercial companies that take the research over the line, but making the research public allows multiple companies to take a shot at commercializing the results,

In general, considering the government and public money to not be part of “the economy” will make your internal models less performant - the public is an actor in the economy and so is the government, and both make decisions on the basis of their needs, values, and resourcing. Those entities seeing higher rates of return for their investment than other actors like private companies is absolutely consistent with, for example, different companies seeing different rates of return for the same investment dependent on their needs, resourcing, and constraints.
by monkmartinez | 2025-04-30 15:37:21+00:00
ollama pull hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_K_M and the modelfile comes with it. It may have errors in the template or parameters this way. It has to be converted to GGUF/GGML prior to using it this way. You can, of course, convert and create the specific ollama model from bf16 safetensors as well.
by hbsbsbsndk | 2025-04-30 15:37:23+00:00
Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe. Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for the sake of his image among his peers.

My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like "Olympic athlete".
Show HN: The $300K DevinAI Secret is Now Open Source
by sashimikun | 2025-04-30 15:37:40+00:00
You’ve probably heard of DevinAI’s new release, DeepWiki-a tool that analyzes GitHub repos and generates AI-powered documentation. The catch? It reportedly cost $300K in compute and is locked behind a paywall.

I thought: why not make this accessible to everyone?

Introducing Open DeepWiki: An open-source, self-hosted alternative that turns any GitHub repo into a comprehensive wiki with AI-generated docs, architecture diagrams, and code explanations. No cloud lock-in, no paywalls, just local, private analysis.

Features:

AI-generated documentation (supports GPT, Gemini, and local models)

Visual diagrams (using Mermaid.js)

Codebase Q&A with RAG-powered AI

Works with private repos, runs entirely on your machine

Repo: https://github.com/AsyncFuncAI/deepwiki-open
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-04-30 15:37:57+00:00
I have friends that work in scientific agencies (NIH, etc), as well as for government contractors doing science stuff.

Am I correct to be worried for the sector? The best that can be hoped for is that the sector is simply ignored. The budget for it isn't even very large compared to DoD, but it is very hard to draw a line from R&D to profit. But we've seen with other agencies the violence is the point, and I don't expect them to treat Big Science any differently.
by johngai | 2025-04-30 15:38:17+00:00
Hey HN,

I run a mid-sized e-commerce business, and like many here, I’ve struggled with clunky ERPs (NetSuite, SAP) and CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce). They’re expensive, inflexible, and require endless customization.

Six months ago, I switched to Barawave, an AI-native ERP+CRM hybrid, and it’s been transformative. Here’s why:

1. It Works Like a Teammate, Not Just Software Instead of manually tagging leads or reconciling invoices, Barawave’s AI autonomously handles it (e.g., it flagged 15% of our "cold" leads as high-potential based on email tone/behavior).

Natural language queries like “Show me POs delayed by suppliers” or “Which clients have unresolved complaints?” return answers in seconds—no SQL or report-building needed.

2. Zero-Code Automation That Actually Works We automated our entire order-to-cash workflow by just describing it in plain English (e.g., “When an order is paid, update inventory, notify logistics, and tag the customer for upsell.”).

Surprise: It even caught edge cases we’d missed (like partial refunds).

3. Real-Time Sync Between Ops and Sales Our sales team finally has live inventory/fulfillment data in the CRM. No more “I’ll email the warehouse” delays.

The AI predicts stockouts/cash flow gaps weeks in advance by analyzing trends most tools ignore (e.g., supplier delays + seasonal demand).

The Caveats It’s not for tiny businesses (yet)—you need enough data for the AI to add value.

Some legacy integrations (like our old QuickBooks setup) required API tweaks.

Try It?

They offer a free pilot where they’ll analyze your existing data and build a demo workflow. Worth a look if you’re drowning in spreadsheets or SaaS sprawl.

https://barawave.com
by ericmay | 2025-04-30 15:38:26+00:00
Tariffs are just a policy tool we can use. Every major economic power uses them to some extent, including the European Union.

Trump’s tariffs I think are bad because he is “going after everyone” versus Biden’s approach which was to build a coalition of friendly nations and revamp supply chains to reduce dependency on China who is adamant about being a foe to the United States, European Union, and others. Tariffs are not a bad tool to leverage here against China, but the way this administration is going about it seems like a less prudent approach.

To the OP’s point - I completely agree. If Americans can’t go a day without a flood of cheap, disposable junk (yes this is different than your iPhone or other advanced electronics), our civilization is going to face serious challenges on the global stage and further reductions in quality of life and access to resources.

What so many seem to forget is that there actually isn’t enough to go around. And we have to enact policies and utilize military force to protect our nation(s). Ideally we can do this in a peaceful way that brings everyone up as much as possible but this is only going to occur so long as the great nations of the world see eye to eye on that. We can and should enlarge the pie. But it requires everyone agreeing to doing so. That consensus is failing.

Many seem to think “China will just sell their stuff to the EU and the EU will get cheaper prices!” But that just places the EU in the same intolerable position the United States is finding itself. You must manufacture goods and provide services. You must have industries capable of creating products at all levels. Allowing too much of that manufacturing power to reside in one country, and one that does not like your liberal values, is beyond foolish.

The fact that Americans can’t go a day without TikTok or cheap Temu junk, or stomach paying more for your iPhone and keeping it a little longer should be viewed as seriously and deathly concerning. And going without such things or paying more for them isn’t even in the conversation of national sacrifice or “hard times”.

To add, it seems to me that “we don’t have the ability to build that here” when it comes to something like an iPhone is a serious problem. We have hollowed out our manufacturing capacity.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-30 15:38:28+00:00
Daily life is very skewed away from understanding how everything works. Supply chains, power grids, the Internet, large-scale farming - these are all complete mysteries to most people. They see the results but they have no idea how the sausage is made. (Or shipped.)

It's one reason why this is happening at all. People not only don't know what makes a lightbulb turn on, they can't imagine the complexity of a power grid and how it's stabilised.

They don't have the first idea how a phone works, or how much science, engineering, and fundamental research went into making it work.

When they don't know any of this, they can't imagine any of it having a serious problem.
by fullshark | 2025-04-30 15:38:33+00:00
Seems like a loaded question. I think they'll figure it out, messaging is part of the problem, especially cause a lot of culture war stuff and secular/urban elitism that drives messaging is truly detested by the working class, but not the entire problem. "We have hand outs for them, why don't they love us?" maybe is the place to start but maybe people want more than that from the people driving policy? They want a seat the table in building the country and not just a life free from unbearable poverty? Just some ideas, it's not my problem.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/the-democr...
by psunavy03 | 2025-04-30 15:38:34+00:00
This is not every voter. For sure, there is the "4th generation Republican" or the "vote blue no matter who" crowd. But ~40 percent of the electorate considers themselves independent. I can speak from experience having folks who were registered GOP up until 2016, and then who started voting Democrat or third-party out of utter disgust with Trump.

That will only intensify if his policies go and tube the economy; the reason he got re-elected was because enough people wanted the 2019 economy back and thought his policies would do it better than Harris's.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-30 15:38:42+00:00
> The first version is more readable

Disagree

> faster for small n (which is the common case)

How can you know that? And for smaller n, the choice hardly matters.

> can not run out of memory due to the hash table

If n gets large enough that hash table size becomes a problem, n is large enough that you need the hash table or some other structure that reduces the complexity down from O(n^2).

> compiles to less code

This is just nonsense. Any codebase of significant size already has a hashtable setup and unless you are using a language like C++, the code size of using a hash table anywhere is constant. The cost is already paid.

The actual amount of compiled code from the switch is identical.

> does not need item to be hashable

True.

There would be reasons not to choose option 2, but it should be default until it's been proven to be a problem. And even then, the next step is almost certainly not going to be option 1.

But then this could also be language and application specific. I deal primarily with backend services/Java where memory is plentiful, and allocation is fast. Algorithmic complexity is for my applications very often the better indicator of what good code should be.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-30 15:38:48+00:00
"can't be taken away" here means "can't be taken away by parents."

Different countries fall in different places on the scale between "a child is strictly a property of the parent, with which the parent may do as they wish", and "a child is a human being which the parent has been given an obligation to protect from harm, but not to control." The US is a lot closer to the former, most European countries, and especially the nordics, are much closer to the latter.

The former enables parents to send their kids to a private school with a decent curriculum if the state school forces propaganda on them, but it also enables parents to send their kids to a school where they teach creationism or prohibit being gay. The latter prohibits teachers from taking away children's rights to get a tattoo or use nail polish, but it also doesn't give schools the right to punish children for infractions or take away phones.

Those are extremes of course, and most countries fall somewhere in the middle, but that point is different in different countries.
by nkrisc | 2025-04-30 15:38:54+00:00
I would say we might have worked at the same company, but there were so many companies trying that at the time we may very well not have.

Where I worked, it was an open secret that the CEO had an alter ego he used on the site. I have no idea if he knew that we all knew who that really was (I have to assume he did), but every played along.

By the time I had worked there it had been around for a few years already and once a quarter the head of our group set time aside for everyone to "engage" with it for an hour so that no one would be dinged on their performance review.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-30 15:38:56+00:00
It was really, really bad if you were in tech or finance.

Like, I worked for a few companies (I live in Ireland) who had moved their roles from the UK to Ireland because of it.

More generally, it's just made life much harder for UK exporters, as they now have way more customs declarations and tariffs on both sides.

The big thing for me (and lots of Irish people) was that we now avoid ordering from UK sites as it's likely to take longer and cost more.

Overall, it's been bad and kneecapping your productive industries on the promise (not fulfilled) of reducing immigration seems to be a bad idea.

That being said, the UK is still there, still a big market so it's more that they get less investment from multinationals than they otherwise would have, and their companies face much higher barriers to export.

And the worst part was that the EU introduced checks on agriculture immediately, while the UK didn't which basically meant that EU farmers were much more competitive in the UK than UK farmers could be outside it.

To be clear, Brexit could have been managed much better, but it was a bad idea executed poorly.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-30 15:39:05+00:00
Compilers and optimizers are great tools for some use cases, but not all.

Just to name a few limitations:

- Many rely heavily on the CPython runtime, meaning garbage collection, interoperability, and object semantics are still governed by CPython’s model.

- They’re rarely designed with embedded or real-time use cases in mind: large binaries, non-deterministic execution (due to the underlying architecture or GC behavior), and limited control over timing.

If these solutions were truly turnkey and broadly capable, CPython wouldn't still dominate—and there’d be no reason for MicroPython to exist either.
by lif | 2025-04-30 15:39:31+00:00
Unlike you, I do not have access to that playbook you mention, however I do wonder about:

why are there are a great many democratic nations with (many) more than two parties, even with new parties arising and old parties diminishing. (I have firsthand experience with some of them. I highly recommend the experience.)

Is it wrong to 'intuit' that those nations may have a more vibrant democracy than a system of two parties that are both beholden to corporate capture?

Of course I will not be surprised at how asking this on HN will affect the scrip - oops I meant to say karma of course! - of such an inquirer as myself.