5 ms·

This over-assuming-of-shared-context is one of my pet peeves on this site. Based on the average post you see on Hackernews, it's a virtual certainty he means "s

This over-assuming-of-shared-context is one of my pet peeves on this site. Based on the average post you see on Hackernews, it's a virtual certainty he means "snooping on users of a program". I can't explain why, but it just bothers me that this would be considered so obvious as to escape mention. "Telemetry" means something, and it meant something to aerospace engineers for a long time before somebody at google started using it to refer to something incredibly narrow. Of course, I'm also annoyed that some computer science PhD apparently googled around for a cooler name for multi-dimensional arrays and ruined the term "Tensor" forevermore.

sofixa 6y ago
> Based on the average post you see on Hackernews, it's a virtual certainty he means "snooping on users of a program". I can't explain why, but it just bothers me that this would be considered so obvious as to escape mention. "Telemetry" means something, and it meant something to aerospace engineers for a long time before somebody at google started using it to refer to something incredibly narrow. Did you even read the post? It's obvious OP works at Datadog ( they mention it and mention the work is for their employer), so telemetry as in OpenTelemetry ( the new standard around metrics, traces and logs).
- sebastos 6y ago
  Well, I started to read the article, thinking that it might refer to sending, you know, telemetry. The hackernews link was titled like this: >Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry so I thought I had a shot of reading something relevant to me. So I opened up the article: >Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Protobuf messages cannot be written contiguously into a stream without significant buffering. The post doesn’t argue to never use Protobuf, but that the trade-off made by the wire-format itself, as opposed to any existing implementation, is unlikely to work for lightweight message senders. My field is related to robotics, where we actually send, you know, telemetry. Like, over a radio. What I'm complaining about is that this is arguably the "main" usage of this word, but people in the web space assume that like protobuf, the concept of telemetry needs no introduction: it means sending back statistics, metrics and logs about your web services. When he says "a good telemetry library" needs to be lightweight, there's zero preamble here to get me oriented. You saying "did you even read the post" is exactly missing the point. Yes, I read through the post, and through context clues, discerned that this post isn't relevant to my interests. I just notice that people writing about cloud service technology never feel compelled to warn you that's what they're going to be talking about. They make grand proclamations, and you have to play detective to find out whether their claims apply to you. "Microservices are the future!" "Okay, does he mean like... for all of software? Or for SaaS companies?" Imagine if the world was a different place, and the average programmer worked at a robotics company instead of a web tech company. And then you saw an article titled "gRPC is dead - DDS is the future". And then it jumped in and started talking about all these throughput metrics, and it took you 6 paragraphs to figure out that the reason they're done with gRPC is that they're shipping around 4K images at 60fps to dozens of microservices that all run on the same computer. And you'd go oh, well that's... irrelevant. That's how it feels, all the time.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    To be fair, if you don’t want to read grand proclamations about opinions which make zero sense except for people in roles tightly related to surveillance capitalism, perhaps this isn’t the site for you. (Us...)
  - mLuby 6y ago
    The practice of naming software or start-ups after real, useful terms from other industries is super annoying to me. And it's especially unconscionable for web devs, who should be more wary than most about global namespace collision (looking at you, browser window). At least have the decency to change the word slightly.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > What I'm complaining about is that this is arguably the "main" usage of this word Telemetry is getting remote metrics. You can have telemetry in robotics, you can have telemetry for app performance, you can have telemetry for environment sensors, etc. They're all valid - I'm not sure why you say your field's usage is the "main" one.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Yes. Just recently I discovered that some web types refer to generating HTML from some other representation as "rendering". To graphics people, and artists, rendering is taking a description of something and turning it into a directly viewable picture. HTML is a long, long way from displayed pixels. Come on. There's a big industry out there working to push game and entertainment content through the GPU and onto the screen. That's rendering.
    - sagarm 6y ago
      Rendering is what happens when fat is cooked slowly over low heat and becomes a liquid, rather than crisping up. What pixels have to do with that, I have no idea.
  - VikingCoder 6y ago
    Software is now literally everywhere, doing everything. Picture if there was a website dedicated to Math News. Some articles talk about how amazing Tangents are. Some talk about Bayesian inference. It would be a mess. Yes, Hacker News is a mess. That's pretty unavoidable. All conversations take place within a domain - a culture, a set of shared assumptions. And if you start talking with someone new, yes, it will take you quite a while to find out what assumptions they have that are different from yours. Like, I wander in to an economics class, and they put the independent axis in the wrong direction. I open up a computer graphics library, and it's using the left-hand rule. One textbook says negative charge goes this way, and the textbook for a different course says it goes the other way. Yes, people don't even understand that others MIGHT not understand their domain. Yes, that is the world.
- bigiain 6y ago
  I read the whole post, and had to do a mid-post brain state reshuffle to get out of my assumed “pump in the field” context to his ”snooping on users” context. This for me, is because I’m playing with an ESP32 based project which uses protobufs, and I clocked into it from that mind set. The intended use of “telemetry” was not obvious for me, until some way until reading the piece. Even the first mention of Datadog didn’t raise any suspicions to me, it was the use of Java that first had me wondering, then down around the 6th para the lightbulb went off when he said “a diagnostic agent which tells you what your application is doing” that I stopped and re oriented my brain.

sofixa 6y ago

> Based on the average post you see on Hackernews, it's a virtual certainty he means "snooping on users of a program". I can't explain why, but it just bothers me that this would be considered so obvious as to escape mention. "Telemetry" means something, and it meant something to aerospace engineers for a long time before somebody at google started using it to refer to something incredibly narrow. Did you even read the post? It's obvious OP works at Datadog ( they mention it and mention the work is for their employer), so telemetry as in OpenTelemetry ( the new standard around metrics, traces and logs).

sebastos 6y ago
Well, I started to read the article, thinking that it might refer to sending, you know, telemetry. The hackernews link was titled like this: >Don't Use Protobuf for Telemetry so I thought I had a shot of reading something relevant to me. So I opened up the article: >Protobuf needs no introduction, but this post argues that you shouldn’t use it for telemetry. The basic premise of this post is that a good telemetry library needs to be lightweight to avoid perturbing the application; inefficient diagnostic tools are self-defeating. Unlike other formats, nested Protobuf messages cannot be written contiguously into a stream without significant buffering. The post doesn’t argue to never use Protobuf, but that the trade-off made by the wire-format itself, as opposed to any existing implementation, is unlikely to work for lightweight message senders. My field is related to robotics, where we actually send, you know, telemetry. Like, over a radio. What I'm complaining about is that this is arguably the "main" usage of this word, but people in the web space assume that like protobuf, the concept of telemetry needs no introduction: it means sending back statistics, metrics and logs about your web services. When he says "a good telemetry library" needs to be lightweight, there's zero preamble here to get me oriented. You saying "did you even read the post" is exactly missing the point. Yes, I read through the post, and through context clues, discerned that this post isn't relevant to my interests. I just notice that people writing about cloud service technology never feel compelled to warn you that's what they're going to be talking about. They make grand proclamations, and you have to play detective to find out whether their claims apply to you. "Microservices are the future!" "Okay, does he mean like... for all of software? Or for SaaS companies?" Imagine if the world was a different place, and the average programmer worked at a robotics company instead of a web tech company. And then you saw an article titled "gRPC is dead - DDS is the future". And then it jumped in and started talking about all these throughput metrics, and it took you 6 paragraphs to figure out that the reason they're done with gRPC is that they're shipping around 4K images at 60fps to dozens of microservices that all run on the same computer. And you'd go oh, well that's... irrelevant. That's how it feels, all the time.
- bigiain 6y ago
  To be fair, if you don’t want to read grand proclamations about opinions which make zero sense except for people in roles tightly related to surveillance capitalism, perhaps this isn’t the site for you. (Us...)
- mLuby 6y ago
  The practice of naming software or start-ups after real, useful terms from other industries is super annoying to me. And it's especially unconscionable for web devs, who should be more wary than most about global namespace collision (looking at you, browser window). At least have the decency to change the word slightly.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > What I'm complaining about is that this is arguably the "main" usage of this word Telemetry is getting remote metrics. You can have telemetry in robotics, you can have telemetry for app performance, you can have telemetry for environment sensors, etc. They're all valid - I'm not sure why you say your field's usage is the "main" one.
- Animats 6y ago
  Yes. Just recently I discovered that some web types refer to generating HTML from some other representation as "rendering". To graphics people, and artists, rendering is taking a description of something and turning it into a directly viewable picture. HTML is a long, long way from displayed pixels. Come on. There's a big industry out there working to push game and entertainment content through the GPU and onto the screen. That's rendering.
  - sagarm 6y ago
    Rendering is what happens when fat is cooked slowly over low heat and becomes a liquid, rather than crisping up. What pixels have to do with that, I have no idea.
- VikingCoder 6y ago
  Software is now literally everywhere, doing everything. Picture if there was a website dedicated to Math News. Some articles talk about how amazing Tangents are. Some talk about Bayesian inference. It would be a mess. Yes, Hacker News is a mess. That's pretty unavoidable. All conversations take place within a domain - a culture, a set of shared assumptions. And if you start talking with someone new, yes, it will take you quite a while to find out what assumptions they have that are different from yours. Like, I wander in to an economics class, and they put the independent axis in the wrong direction. I open up a computer graphics library, and it's using the left-hand rule. One textbook says negative charge goes this way, and the textbook for a different course says it goes the other way. Yes, people don't even understand that others MIGHT not understand their domain. Yes, that is the world.
bigiain 6y ago
I read the whole post, and had to do a mid-post brain state reshuffle to get out of my assumed “pump in the field” context to his ”snooping on users” context. This for me, is because I’m playing with an ESP32 based project which uses protobufs, and I clocked into it from that mind set. The intended use of “telemetry” was not obvious for me, until some way until reading the piece. Even the first mention of Datadog didn’t raise any suspicions to me, it was the use of Java that first had me wondering, then down around the 6th para the lightbulb went off when he said “a diagnostic agent which tells you what your application is doing” that I stopped and re oriented my brain.