Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Lorin Hochstein

Jordan Isaacs @snowytrees.dev · 3d

Google blacklisted the iCloud private relay ip addresses. Been broken for ages while now. On iOS safari you need to press the “show ip address” option and then try searching again and it works.

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 2d

It was the private relay. When I disable it (show IP address), Google Scholar works. When I re-enable it (hide IP address), I immediately get the error message again.

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 2d

This was it! It works!!! Thank you!

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 3d

Nope, Google search works fine. I only get it on Google Scholar. No idea how my phone got flagged as a bot.

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 3d

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 3d

I can't access Google Scholar over my phone (it gives me an error when I try to search or click a link on a paper), and I have no idea why.

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 3d

New blog post, some thought experiments about learning from incident write-ups: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/10/04/t...

Two thought experiments

Here’s a thought experiment that John Allspaw related to me, in paraphrased form (John tells me that he will eventually capture this in a blog post of his own, at which time I’ll put a …

surfingcomplexity.blog

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 10d

New blog post that's nominally about statistics, based on various things I've been reading lately: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/28/a...

A statistic is as a statistic does

(With apologies to the screenwriters of Forrest Gump) I’m going to use this post to pull together some related threads from different sources I’ve been reading lately. Rationalization a…

surfingcomplexity.blog

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 18d

New blog post on the problem of fixation during incident response: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/20/f...

Fixation: the ever-present risk during incident handling

Recent U.S. headlines have been dominated by school shootings. The bulk of the stories have been about the assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University and the correspondin…

surfingcomplexity.blog

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 25d

See also: "The new feature was (intentionally) gradually enabled via configuration rather than a distinct deployment. While this is intended as safety, it also made it harder to immediately connect the outage to the change". www.pagerduty.com/eng/august-2...

August 28 Kafka Outages – What Happened and How We’re Improving

At 3:53 UTC on August 28, 2025 a failure on one of PagerDuty’s message queuing systems (Kafka) triggered cascading issues that disrupted or delayed the...

www.pagerduty.com

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 25d

More generally: beware of approaches that make easy incidents easier but hard incidents harder. The trade-off might still be worth it, but acknowledge the downside risk!

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 25d

New blog post on the trade-offs of fine-grained progressive rollouts

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/13/t...

The hidden trade-offs of fine-grained progressive rollouts

A progressive rollout refers to the act of rolling out some new functionality gradually rather than all at once. This means that, when you initially deploy it, the change only impacts a fraction of…

surfingcomplexity.blog

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Sep 7

New blog post: Nothing fails like a history of success.

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/07/n...

Nothing fails like a history of success

The Axiom of Experience: the future will be like the past, because, in the past, the future was like the past. – Gerald M. Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking Last Friday, the San…

surfingcomplexity.blog

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Sep 2

Pitchbot wept

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Sep 1

Similar. I didn’t associate the failure mode with flow rate at all. Instead, it was a dep bump that looked low risk that to a surprising behavior change.

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Sep 1

Good public incident write-up from UptimeLabs. Quick notes:

* A patch-level dependency update unexpectedly changed behavior.
* Failure mode: saturation
* The role of health checks (a tool to improve availability!) in enabling this incident.

uptimelabs.io/when-fast-fl...

When Fast Flow Delivers A Real Blow: A PIR - Uptime Labs

An honest Post Incident Review: how fast flow and continuous delivery caused an outage, and why progress over perfection drives resilience.

uptimelabs.io

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Reposted by Lorin Hochstein

Uncle Duke @uncleduke1969.bsky.social · Aug 27

and he would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling kids

Picture of cemetery with headline reading “Man fined for pretending to be ghost in Portsmouth cemetery.”

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Aug 29

I would not have gotten my PhD if this rule was in effect when I was a student. (I started off in an EE PhD program at Boston University, decided I wanted to do CS instead, and left BU with an MSEE for U. Maryland, where I got my PhD. That was six years on my student visa).

Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · Aug 29

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew
Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

Trump Deals A New Immigration Blow To International Students

Trump officials have proposed a new rule limiting international students to fixed periods of entry, making a U.S. education more precarious.

www.forbes.com

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Aug 24

prophlegmatic, on the other hand…

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Aug 24

New blog post: My favorite developer productivity research method that nobody uses

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/08/24/m...

My favorite developer productivity research method that nobody uses

You’ve undoubtedly heard of the psychological concept called flow state. This is the feeling you get when you’re in the zone, where you’re doing some sort of task, and you’r…

surfingcomplexity.blog

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Reposted by Lorin Hochstein

Uncle Duke @uncleduke1969.bsky.social · Aug 24

pretty sure the fire pigeons aren’t gonna care about your silly little sign

A posted sign with a silhouette of a pigeon with what looks like fire behind it, with a red circle around it and line through it, and the word “No” below.

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Aug 24

The basement monster!

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Aug 23

New blog post: the problems that accountability can't fix.

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/08/23/t...

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Aug 23

Full report linked here: www.news.uscg.mil/Press-Releas...

www.news.uscg.mil

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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · Aug 23

“When the following Director of Engineering was asked about the relationship between OceanGate’s engineering and operations teams, he described it as severely dysfunctional, stating, ‘They didn't talk. They hated each other.’” – from U.S. Coast Guard the Marine Board Investigation report

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