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.
What HN saysHN links it for analyses of major outages, such as the GCP incident and Southwest Airlines, and commenters point to it for interesting questions.
67HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
261stories submitted
3.1Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1You're missing your near misses4 people · 163 points · first shared 2025 · 51 comments on HN
- 2Contempt for the glue people4 people · 63 points · first shared 2023 · 40 comments on HN
- 3There is no "Three Mile Island" event coming for software4 people · 16 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 4What if everybody did everything right?4 people · 7 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 5I am dreading our LLM-written incident report future4 people · 7 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 6Not causal chains, but interactions and adaptations3 people · 19 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
- 7I have no idea what I’m doing3 people · 15 points · first shared 2021 · 3 comments on HN
- 8“How could they be so stupid?”3 people · 12 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 9LLMs Are Weird, Man3 people · 12 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Easy will always trump simple3 people · 11 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 11I don't like discussing action items during incident reviews3 people · 8 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 12Incident Writeup as Sociological Storytelling3 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Error budgets and the legacy of Herbert Heinrich3 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 14Naming Names in Incident Writeups3 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 15The carefulness knob2 people · 190 points · first shared 2024 · 130 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
throwaw12 · 2026-07-14
part of it
https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/
https://brooker.co.za/blog/
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/
Metalnem · 2025-06-16
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-publi…
_plg_ · 2022-12-29
Lorin Hochstein's take on it: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2022/12/28/southwest-airlines-a-case-st…