Top all-time · #7148
We are experts in trouble.
Company blog · adaptivecapacitylabs.com/blogsystems
We are experts in trouble. is the company blog at adaptivecapacitylabs.com, writing about systems. Since 2019, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Richard Cook: A Life in Many Acts”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link this site for resilience and safety engineering writing, including a 2022 post on Richard I. Cook's career and impact, cited in threads on 'How Complex Systems Fail'. No comment judges the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Richard Cook: A Life in Many Acts4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-09-13
- Complex Systems Fail [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-09
What Hacker News says?
Most of these techniques are co-developed in industry applications, and are seeping out from military research into business. In tech, John Allspaw has done a huge amount to take these training methods and skill-extraction techniques and adopted/applied it to resilience engineering. ( https://twitter.com/allspaw and https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/ ) Not paying attention to research with military provenance see…
Comment linking /
on “The Problems with Deliberate Practice (2020)”Submitted There is more to code review than (automatable) detection as a story · 166 points
HN discussionIt's not intended to be rigorous. The context here is that Richard I. Cook, one of the main figures in safety and resilience engineering, who's published many, many papers on these topics died recently. The "How Complex Systems Fail" paper is intended to be a bit pithy and light; more an attempt at summarizing years of wisdom. See: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/blog/2022/09/12/richard...
Comment linking /blog/2022/09/12/richard-cook-a-life-in-many-acts/
on “How Complex Systems Fail (1998)”Submitted The Negotiability of “Severity” Levels as a story · 52 points
HN discussionThe Career, Accomplishments, and Impact of Richard I. Cook: A Life in Many Acts (September 12, 2022) https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/blog/2022/09/12/richard...
Comment linking /blog/2022/09/12/richard-cook-a-life-in-many-acts/
on “How Complex Systems Fail (1998)”Submitted John Allspaw: Revisiting what we think we know as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Some Observations on the Messy Realities of Incident Reviews as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted What makes public posts about incidents different from analysis write-ups (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Richard Cook: A Life in Many Acts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Complex Systems Fail [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Learning Is Different Than Fixing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What makes public posts about incidents different from analysis write-ups (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Career, Accomplishments, and Impact of Richard I. Cook:A Life in Many Acts as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted “Findings from the Field” – Learning from Incidents as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Resilience of Bone and Resilience Engineering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hindsight and Sacrifice Decisions as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
