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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Have you asked core developers of those languages how they feel about this? I'd bet that you'd have near unanimous agreement that this class of information would be useful for informing support decisions.

Where I'd expect difference is precisely over the question of whether it's worth the cost & trust issues. That makes me wonder whether there might be some middle-ground here where some third-party like the Linux Foundation could run a telemetry service which is highly public in both its design and collected data, and whether that would be enough that many people would be comfortable with this kind of service without Google's business reputation entering into the equation.

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> useful for informing support decisions

Useful does not equal ethical or legal. A lot of things would be useful to me.

Please enumerate. Go on.

Hence the second paragraph in the comment you're replying to. There's no question that this could be implemented legally but the ethical considerations are legitimate and warrant extensive discussion for an open source community. I think that the Go proposal has been derailed by a lot of hot takes based on scenarios far in excess of what's actually described, but I also think it's quite likely that many languages' core developers would look at that and agree that they don't want that information badly enough to spend time trying to negotiate those hazards.

What if your plumber installed a camera in your bathroom for informed support decisions? Sure would be useful for him to see where you put those "biodegradable" baby wipes after the deed.

A more apt analogy would be a sensor which anonymously reports if a pipe starts leaking so the manufacturer has a sense of their failure rate.

Do you really think that's anything like the scenario being proposed?

Here's what I think would be a closer analogy to what's actually being proposed: the water company installs a smart meter allowing them to read usage data more frequently. They randomly sample 2% of customers' data and prepare a histogram showing the top daily usage hours and total usage over a monthly period.

The water company already has a connection to you (the pipe) and the smart meater measures that connection. The smart meter does not collect information how you use that water inside your house. This analogy would match a website collecting anonymous usage statistics for connections but would not match an otherwise offline program making connections to collect data.

Yes, that’s why I think it’s a close fit for what Russ proposed rather than the more outlandish conspiracies circulating in social media.

I always wondered how much intelligence they gather from the Go playground.

Probably the data is too wild to make any use of, but then all the folks who have a clue using the playground as a kind of proof-of-concept play area... would be great for analysis.

Anyways, I'm not sure how well it would work, regardless of if it should be a thing at all. The majority of stuff I do, and the folks at work, we all have build pipelines that control internet access, use cache systems, etc... so I'm not sure it even matters.

I was actually wondering how much this would affect many build pipelines — if you're doing your builds in a container, the 7 day threshold would never even be reached unless you enabled caching for that file.

The main thing I think this would do is help them flesh out the non-mainstream configurations. For example, I've used Go on AIX but I'd be surprised if bug reports on that platform didn't hit basically every maintainer by surprise since statistically nobody tests on it regularly or even has access to do so. I'd think most of the value of systems like this would be finding out that the change they tested exhaustively on everything Google normally uses is also going to break 100% of some niche community.

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