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Lorin Hochstein
Personal blog · surfingcomplexity.blogprogrammingsystems
Lorin Hochstein writes Surfing Complexity, a personal blog at surfingcomplexity.blog about programming and systems. Since 2020, 69 different Hacker News readers have linked it 272 times, most often “There is no "Three Mile Island" event coming for software”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Lorin Hochstein's ramblings about software, complex systems, and incidents.
Most-linked posts?
- There is no "Three Mile Island" event coming for software4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-10-08
- You're missing your near misses4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-02-02
- I am dreading our LLM-written incident report future4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-06-20
- What if everybody did everything right?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-02-18
- Contempt for the glue people4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-03-26
- “How could they be so stupid?”3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-07-21
- Incident Writeup as Sociological Storytelling3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-06-12
- Error budgets and the legacy of Herbert Heinrich3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-11
- Naming Names in Incident Writeups3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-23
- I have no idea what I’m doing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-29
What Hacker News says?
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...
Comment linking /2025/06/14/quick-takes-on-the-gcp-public-incident-write-up/
on “Google caused outage by ignoring its quality protections”Submitted The carefulness knob as a story · 186 points
HN discussionpart of it https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/ https://brooker.co.za/blog/ https://surfingcomplexity.blog/
Comment linking /
on “Understanding the Go Runtime: Profiling”Submitted How did software get so reliable without proof? as a story · 185 points
HN discussionLorin Hochstein's take on it: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2022/12/28/southwest-airlines...
Comment linking /2022/12/28/southwest-airlines-a-case-study-in-brittleness/
on “Ask HN: What's Happening at Southwest?”Submitted The illegible nature of software development talent as a story · 181 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience as a story · 172 points
HN discussionSubmitted The danger of hidden functional roles as a story · 168 points
HN discussionSubmitted You're missing your near misses as a story · 154 points
HN discussionSubmitted AI at Amazon: A case study of brittleness as a story · 138 points
HN discussionSubmitted The problem with invariants is that they change over time as a story · 117 points
HN discussionSubmitted Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up as a story · 108 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Ambiguity of Real Work as a story · 103 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care? as a story · 94 points
HN discussionSubmitted TLA+ is hard to learn (2018) as a story · 94 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Liveness Example in TLA+ as a story · 78 points
HN discussionSubmitted Root cause of failure, root cause of success as a story · 76 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bitrot as a story · 67 points
HN discussionSubmitted Locks, leases, fencing tokens, FizzBee as a story · 57 points
HN discussionSubmitted Formal specs as sets of behaviors as a story · 56 points
HN discussionSubmitted Consistency as a story · 55 points
HN discussionSubmitted Contempt for the glue people as a story · 54 points
HN discussionSubmitted The problems that accountability can't fix as a story · 51 points
HN discussionSubmitted Imagine there’s no human error as a story · 45 points
HN discussionSubmitted Futexes in TLA+ as a story · 43 points
HN discussionSubmitted Whither Dashboard Design? as a story · 37 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Power of Framing a Problem as a story · 31 points
HN discussionSubmitted Formal specs as sets of behaviors as a story · 29 points
HN discussionSubmitted Linearizability Refinement Prophecy as a story · 29 points
HN discussionSubmitted Battleshorts, exaptations, and the limits of STAMP as a story · 26 points
HN discussion
