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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.
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Visit surfingcomplexity.blog → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2020 – Jul 2026
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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
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…
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The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience
Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mod…
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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…