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    Surfing Complexity

    surfingcomplexity.blog · Personal blog · on HN since 2020

    Lorin Hochstein writes about incidents, resilience engineering, complex systems, and how software organizations handle failure.

    Visit blogRSSHN submissions
    DevOps & CloudManagementSystems & Performance
    What HN says

    HN links it for analyses of major outages, such as the GCP incident and Southwest Airlines, and commenters point to it for interesting questions.

    Stats for nerds
    67HN people shared it
    261linked in comments
    3.1Kstory points
    Jul 2026last shared
    2022people per year2026

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      The carefulness knob
      2 people · 190 points · first shared 2024 · 130 comments on HN
    2. 2
      How did software get so reliable without proof?
      1 person · 185 points · first shared 2020 · 130 comments on HN
    3. 3
      The illegible nature of software development talent
      1 person · 181 points · first shared 2025 · 130 comments on HN
    4. 4
      The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience
      1 person · 172 points · first shared 2025 · 48 comments on HN
    5. 5
      The danger of hidden functional roles
      2 people · 169 points · first shared 2021 · 72 comments on HN
    6. 6
      You're missing your near misses
      4 people · 163 points · first shared 2025 · 51 comments on HN
    7. 7
      AI at Amazon: A case study of brittleness
      1 person · 142 points · first shared 2025 · 70 comments on HN
    8. 8
      The problem with invariants is that they change over time
      2 people · 118 points · first shared 2024 · 72 comments on HN
    9. 9
      Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up
      2 people · 109 points · first shared 2024 · 69 comments on HN
    10. 10
      The Ambiguity of Real Work
      1 person · 103 points · first shared 2021 · 9 comments on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • MetalnemJun 2025

      This article doesn't add much beyond the official incident report, so it's better to just read that directly. Or read this analysis, which at least raises some interesting questions:

      https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/14/quick-takes-on-the-gcp-public-incident-write-up/

    • throwaw12Jul 2026

      part of it

      https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

      https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/

      https://brooker.co.za/blog/

      https://surfingcomplexity.blog/

    • _plg_Dec 2022

      Lorin Hochstein's take on it: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2022/12/28/southwest-airlines-a-case-study-in-brittleness/

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