Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

I am a PhD student and for a while now I'm designing and developing a distributed network protocol that enables dynamic resource allocation across heterogeneous nodes, to which I called Rank. It's designed to handle computational, network, and temporal resources in fully distributed environments without central controllers, but that could also handle a centralized environment. Rank implements four core functions: discovery (finding paths between nodes), estimation (evaluating resource availability), allocation (reserving resources), and sharing (allowing multiple services to use the same resources). What I think it makes it unique is its ability to operate in completely decentralized environments with heterogeneous nodes, making it particularly valuable for edge computing, cloud gaming, distributed content delivery, vehicular communications, and grid computing scenarios. The protocol uses a bidding system where nodes evaluate their capability to fulfill resource requests on a scale from 0-1, enabling dynamic path selection based on current resource availability. I've implemented it in C++ and then also created a testing framework to validate its performance across different network topologies. This is still a work-in-progress and I am eager to publish results someday!

This sounds promising. Keep us posted! If there's anywhere we can track progress, please link :)

Orleans would be good to checkout

That sounds really interesting and I would also like a social media link or somewhere we can be kept abreast of updates.

Thank you so must for your interest! I am working on publishing results and trying to create a proper webpage to reference Rank and all the documentation. My goal is to open this project as an open-source project as soon as I can so that everyone is able to build their solutions out of it and also contribute to the project. I'll keep you posted on that!

Thanks! Actually I was not aware of Orleans as I never got close to .NET environments, but thank you for noticing it to me.

Hopefully it comes across as helpful and not condescending.

You're probably looking for "showing it to me" or "making me aware of it" rather than "noticing it to me" as noticing is usually used like "I noticed thing x" or "You have been noticed"

Oh, you're right, I am sorry! Yes, I meant "for showing it to me" or "making me aware of it"... I am not an English native speaker, and it was too early in the morning, I guess :)

This sounds interesting. If you want to discuss it or just want a proofreader, please email me. I have done research in both distributed algorithms and economics. hackernews@mike.nahasmail.com

If you don’t know about these already, read about “self stabilizing algorithms”. They are fault-tolerant (to a certain definition) which is important in large distributed algorithms. I used one to build virtual networks with 10,000 nodes.