1
Nobody knows how the whole system works
One of the surprising (at least to me) consequences of the fall of Twitter is the rise of LinkedIn as a social media site. I saw some interesting posts I wanted to call attention to: First, Simon W…
Surfing Complexity
Lorin Hochstein's ramblings about software, complex systems, and incidents.
- Popular posts
- 16
- Total points
- 2,812
- HN comments
- 1,458
- Rank
- #518 personal
Visit surfingcomplexity.blog → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2020 – Jul 2026
Software Engineering 12Career & Management 7Systems & Performance 5Tech Industry & Business 3AI & Machine Learning 2Tools & Productivity 1
2
Cache invalidation really is one of the hardest problems in computer science
My colleagues recently wrote a great post on the Netflix tech blog about a tough performance issue they wrestled with. They ultimately diagnosed the problem as false sharing, which is a performance…
3
The carefulness knob
A play in one act Dramatis personae EM, an engineering manager TL, the tech lead for the team X, an engineering manager from a different team Scene 1: A meeting room in an office. The walls are ado…
4
How did software get so reliable without proof?
In 1996, the Turing-award-winning computer scientist C.A.R. Hoare wrote a paper with the title How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? In this paper, Hoare grapples with the observation tha…
5
The illegible nature of software development talent
Here’s another blog post on gathering some common threads from reading recent posts. Today’s topic is about the unassuming nature of talented software engineers. The first thread was a …
6
Resilience requires helping each other out
A common failure mode in complex systems is that some part of the system hits a limit and falls over. In the software world, we call this phenomenon resource exhaustion, and a classic example of th…
7
The danger of hidden functional roles
There’s a collection of friends that I have a standing videochat with every couple of weeks. We had been meeting at 8am, but several people developed conflicts at that time, including me. I h…
8
You're missing your near misses
FAA data shows 30 near-misses at Reagan Airport – NPR, Jan 30, 2025 The amount of attention an incident gets is proportional to the severity of the incident: the greater the impact to the organizat…
9
Synthesis is harder than analysis
Over the years, mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists have developed various calculi. If you have a background in computer science, you’ve likely heard of the lambda calculus, a m…
10
The problem with invariants is that they change over time
Cliff L. Biffle blogged a great write-up of a debugging odyssey at Oxide with the title Who killed the network switch? Here’s the bit that jumped out at me: At the time that code was written…
11
Writing docs well: why should a software engineer care?
Recently I gave a guest lecture in a graduate level software engineering course on the value of technical writing for software engineers. This post is a sort of rough transcript of my talk. I live-…
12
The Ambiguity of Real Work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professo…