3 ms·
And the absence of telemetry data, he contends, makes it more difficult for project maintainers to understand what's important, what's working, and to prioritiz
by greatgib 4y ago
And the absence of telemetry data, he contends, makes it more difficult for project maintainers to understand what's important, what's working, and to prioritize changes, thereby making maintainer burnout more likely.
Very funny argument that is often used to attempt to justify telemetry; like if you couldn't just ask and listen to your users to get their feedback instead of spying them. In addition, for that kind of thing, telemetry will not tell you why you see some phenomenon and could lead to negative reinforcement.
- klyrs 4y ago"I'm stalking you for my mental health?"
- timsneath 4y agoThere are some good examples of why that's not sufficient in Russ' blog post, which is worth reading. They include performance regressions that may not be immediately visible, understanding cache utilization, and better optimizing the toolchain for real-world machine configurations. It's worth reading his article for a better understanding of the goals here: https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-intro https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-intro (Disclosure: I work on developer tools at Google.)
- verdverm 4y agoThe third post is much better for outlining the kinds of questions they hope to answer https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses
- Gigachad 4y agoBecause HN users tell you they want a brick phone with a 50,000mah battery and an Ethernet port, and when you release it, they buy the iPhone instead.
- stingraycharles 4y agoYes the age-old lesson that observing users’ behaviour tells a better story than asking them what they want.
- greatgib 4y agoI think that two things are confused here. You can't necessarily believe what people think they want with a consumer product, sure, but that does not imply that looking at what people do, you know what they need. That being said, we are speaking here about a population of developers as "free" users. They report bugs or issues that they are encountering. it is not like when you are trying to sell an useless new stuff to random persons...
- Gigachad 4y agoCompanies want to refine products to work best for the masses. The problem is the masses do not give feedback or tell you what went wrong. The extreme edge cases do however regularly make themselves heard. When you take your primary feedback from people who chose to give it, you will optimize for edge case users and usually against the desires of the masses.