Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. F-Droid 2.0 (f-droid.org)
    253comments
  2. Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard (mitpit.com)
    58comments
  3. Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design (github.com/devdotfast)
    76comments
  4. Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative? (dynomight.substack.com)
    141comments
  5. 2DWillNeverDie (2dwillneverdie.com)
    7comments
  6. Fearless SIMD v1.0 (linebender.org)
    28comments
  7. Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video] (youtube.com)
    236comments
  8. My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps (ahmedhossamdev.com)
    82comments
  9. Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance (koi.rest)
    27comments
  10. Toyota is taking the Corolla electric (electrek.co)
    281comments
  11. Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless (economist.com)
    32comments
  12. Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters (resobscura.substack.com)
    9comments
  13. GitLab Outage (status.gitlab.com)
    12comments
  14. Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space (blog.google)
    177comments
  15. California is chasing wealth that has feet (landeconomics.org)
    311comments
  16. Sourcehut account takeover via build logs (XSS in ansi2html) (blog.arusekk.pl)
    9comments
  17. Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it? (ahelwer.ca)
    24comments
  18. Stable (YC W20) Is Hiring Product Engineers (usestable.com)
    —discuss
  19. The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014) (grantland.com)
    18comments
  20. Two-tier encryption in the UK (macanorak.com)
    363comments
  21. Motor Characterization for Small Running Robots (2016) (robot-daycare.com)
    —discuss
  22. Security auditing in the age of (good enough) AI (trailofbits.com)
    2comments
  23. The forgotten battle of East Lansing (eastlansinginfo.news)
    12comments
  24. Geothermal heat map of US hot springs (soakingsprings.com)
    32comments
  25. Forging 1024-bit RSA signatures in nearly SNFS time [pdf] (iacr.org)
    5comments
  26. Early rogue AI agent activity and attempts to hack found on urlquery.net (transluce.org)
    227comments
  27. WaveDigger: Dig into wireless signals to discover their physical locations (github.com/christianrowlands)
    14comments
  28. Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos (launchvideo.io)
    82comments
  29. Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead' (afr.com)
    119comments
  30. Nokia Design Archive (2025) (aalto.fi)
    115comments

A Million Agents Is a Distributed System Problem

28 pointsby 7h agoinstacloud.com
10 comments
5h agoHN ↗

This leaves me two questions 1. Will we ever reach (or have we already) where we can more empirically measure the cost of the adding the nth agent. Like the way businesses of different sizes can know when the nth employee add diminishes returns overall, can we measure the front with agents depending on task scope, resources, and other factors.

2. On the other end, can we see point where we can reduce how many agents are needed down the minimal set? For example many chains have reduced staff down to the minimal number of employees (note I do not agree with this) and still the balance sheet is in the black. I think in the hyper optimization and efficiency society we're in I think this will also happen, although the reality of "I can do 100 agents work with 10" might not be in providers and labs best interest economically.

4h agoHN ↗

Great point. It's not a distributed systems problem. It's a problem of many independent components trying to coordinate independently is the load bearing issue.

4h agoHN ↗

This was my first article where the AI-isms cancelled my reading attempt.

It's a pretty straightforward problem statement, they didn't really need to outsource the writing.

3h agoHN ↗

Interesting.

I wanted to test the veracity of this result so I tested some of my own 100% hand written pieces and what do you know? It came back 100% hand written.

This is a better ad for Pangram than for OP :D

3h agoHN ↗

Two agents is a distributed system problem

3h agoHN ↗

one agent is a special kind of distributed system. It's a distributed system that is undistributed.

1h agoHN ↗

Your comment inspired me to read the article.

1h agoHN ↗

I’ve got no problem with LLM copywriting but the LLMisms just drip off this thing, to the detriment of its clarity. Shame.