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> The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful. It does sort of hinge on the highly suspect assumption that usefu
by marginalia_nu 4y ago
> The idea of telemetry is being able to prioritize the work that will be most widely useful.
It does sort of hinge on the highly suspect assumption that usefulness is correlated with use. An obvious counter-example to this is something like a fire-extinguisher, which will in the ideal case just sit on a wall until it's use-by date passes and then it's discarded having never been used; or on the flip side, an incredibly byzantine workflow that could be reduced to something much simpler will appear important and useful.
Even without these edge cases, interpreting statistics is really hard. Like people with PhDs who have studied these things for years still get them wrong all the time.
What ends up happening more often than not is it's used as a tool to quiet the critics when pushing through unpopular changes.
- cube2222 4y agoAll this boils down to "an unskilled engineer will misinterpret data even if they have it". I'll assume the Go team knows what they're doing, based on their track record so far. There's a lot of very simple questions you can answer very reliably, too, like "what proportion of the users are still using a certain compatibility flag".
- marginalia_nu 4y agoMy point is that scientists whose job is to interpret data and construct experiments gets this wrong on a regular basis, despite years of training in constructing experiments and interpreting data, despite peer review, despite staking their career and reputation on not making these kinds of mistakes. They still happen! A lot! Interpreting data is very hard.
- masklinn 4y ago> I'll assume the Go team knows what they're doing, based on their track record so far. Funny, I’d assume the exact opposite. After all much of the understanding of privacy and statistics at scale was developed after 1980.
- philosopher1234 4y agoNormally Hacker News is ruthless with stupid comments like this, but some sort of unexamined feelings of inadequacy make Go devs a fair target. I hate this attitude.
- remram 4y agoGo is actually well known for dubious choices they reverted later, like not using libc, their weird major version scheme, or the absence of generics. There's a good record of charging ahead against the popular wisdom and being proven wrong.
- nine_k 4y agoMost software features are not like fire extinguishers. More than that, the interesting stats may be not even around user-visible features, but around internal mechanisms, like some cache hit rate, or how often is some branch in the compiler invoked. As long as stats are clearly inspectable, reasonably anonymized, and are opt-out, I'd be fine with sending them.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThe features that are like fire extinguishers are the ones most likely to be unjustly removed with the rationale of looking at telemetry. See for example Mozilla's bizarre decision to remove the ability to change the override the character encoding of a webpage with some half-baked detector.
- philosopher1234 4y agoWe cant solve this problem by carving out our eyes. We must adapt to having data about the world.
- stonogo 4y agoNobody wants you to carve out your eyes. They want you to stop shoving eyes into everything you touch. Meanwhile, I'll decide what I must or must not adapt to, thank you.
- philosopher1234 4y agoRead more carefully
- stonogo 4y agoWrite more clearly
- philosopher1234 4y ago