Google killed my hope and my dreams | Hacker News Reader

Google killed my hope and my dreams

6 pointsstefanos828 comments

For years I would struggle to find the toolset that just clicks with me and make me productive.

I have tried various languages but still none of them resonated with my end-goal...until I have found Go language.

Go made me feel excitement I once had as a university student and to feel again this nostalgic sense, it lifted my spirits and gave me purpose; purpose to create, to build, to share.

It gave me HOPE and I dreamed big!

So many things to build for companies and for myself...then one person with authority around Go's core development came and demolished everything in a blink of an eye.

You see, before the suggestion to include a telemetry mechanism in Go's tookit, I didn't feel the slightest agitation while thinking of my next project, while working on a current demo for testing purposes.

As soon as they announced the necessity of telemetry for Go toolkit, it hit me and it hit me hard.

I felt like witnessing a deadly car crash while being unable to offer any help or even react.

This whole situation verified my concern that products that come directly from large companies or corporations are not worth the hassle, unless you are yourself a big company that pays for such product or service, for professional support.

I cannot stop feeling sadness in my heart for the damage they did to the whole community.

No matter what I do, the pain won't go away and I feel betrayed from my own self for allowing such thing to happen.

Go development team, if you are reading this, thank you; thank you for the pain you have caused to a number of people that got somehow emotionally attached to such an incredible tool, like Go language.

I would also like to thank you for making me realize it's not worth it to get so attached to technology and that other things are far more important than this.

Take care and keep on demolishing people's dreams, purpose, and hope.

You seem way too invested into

1. a programming language

2. the telemetry proposal

I like Go, I would never use the words "hopes and dreams" to refer to it (or any other language). And the telemetry proposal isn't as apocalyptic as you're making it out to be either.

Why the drama. This seems more like a personal emotional regulation problem than anything else.

While I agree that the reaction is overstated, I can't help but feel that the core dissatisfaction is valid.

Introducing telemetry is not (contrary to the claims of Google) naturally part of open source development. Perhaps it is naturally part of anything Google develops (most of which I believe they misinterpret as justification for cancelling hundreds of projects).

Apparently it is not enough that my phone, tv, workstation, and car monitor me day in day out and that I have to take active steps to (try to?) stop many of my other appliances and just about every "app" from doing the same. Now I need to throw in my IDE and my compiler?

Though overstated, I can't help but empathize with their point of view.

I don't like the telemetry. I don't think they should add it, I will be disabling it, and recommending the rest of my team disable it.

However

> Introducing telemetry is not (contrary to the claims of Google) naturally part of open source development.

Google is not wrong here. Many large "open source" projects include either forced-choice or opt-out telemetry. This includes "consumer" software like Ubuntu and Firefox, development tools like Arduino, and "backend" software like OPA. It's reasonable not to like it, but it's not reasonable to single out Google here. It is a long-term cost of turning so much development over to corporations and foundations.

The quote from Cox is "open-source software projects need to explore new telemetry designs that help developers get the information they need to work efficiently and effectively" which does not mention project size.

https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409

I'm guessing he implicitly means "larger open source projects" but his statement reads like an imperative that naturally asserts that telemetry be part of any open source project.

It was not long ago that people here had kittens because MS was adding telemetry to VSCode. My personal belief is we are far to subject to tracking as it is and there seems to be little justification to adding it to the go command line tools. At least in my opinion.

> It was not long ago that people here had kittens because MS was adding telemetry to VSCode.

As far as I know VS Code never didn't have telemetry, and it was always opt-out. (E.g. comment from December 15th about the telemetry - https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-1... - VS Code was only 8 months old.) Atom had forced-choice telemetry (unsure of the default) also since first release.

It sucks a lot! But you won't have any luck pushing back on it by appealing to norms.

wait, this post isn't satire??

I mean, I wasn’t really surprised here, with this being Google always finding ways to collect data on just about anything to make money.

Remember, cooperations don’t give a crap about you at all when it comes to profits and headcount, so it isn’t worth signing up and investing a huge amount of your ‘dreams’ to ‘get into a corporation’ all to get exploited and used in the end.

Go team, Kubernetes Team or any team or product by a corporation is all motivated by profit and a good image and nothing else.

I am sure engineers these days are smart enough to see patterns in data, puzzles or solving problems by creating algorithms, they must be also smart enough not to be naïve to think that companies care about them.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/10/googles_go_programmin... https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409

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