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tmach32

99 karma · joined May 22, 2026

telemetrymachine.com
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tmach32··on OpenJev
Interestingly, the Jev founder just posted on Twitter that they see themselves as more of a _data_ company.

I think one difference between OpenJev and Jev would be, then, is what it's trained on.

Jev is, on the surface, cheap enough for me not to seek self-hosted alternatives. On the other hand, I wish the free/open weight alternatives to Pangram were better.

tmach32··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
https://telemetrymachine.com

I wonder if anyone reads these? If you do, if you want to complain to me about observability, please shoot me an email at hello@telemetrymachine.com!

We have worked in the observability industry for a combined 15 years and we are trying to right the wrongs we have seen in the industry. It seems like the existing companies are more interested in extracting more and more money from giant customers than actually helping people run their software well.

I won't bury the lede: what we've built is OTel native, wide events native, and works well with agents. We are also, shamelessly, cheaper than everyone else. One of the reasons observability is struggling with adoption is because it's too damn expensive.

So that's what we're building at telemetrymachine.com: an observability product focused on helping you actually track your software (starting with OTel traces and logs). We are really inspired by Observability 2.0/wide events, which really just is an invitation to stuff as many attributes, with as much cardinality as you want, into your spans/logs.

One thing we are also doing differently is trying to be as lean as efficient as possible. We are just two people now, and we are going to be very careful about hiring anyone. Most importantly, what we need to do is avoid a giant salesforce as much as possible. I wrote about this in a blog post[1] but the reason observability is so expensive is actually the giant sales force these companies tend to have.

We also put a lot of work into actual infra efficiency – ie we run on bare metal, and wrote a state of the art[2] storage engine. All of this is to help get prices down while still building a sustainable business.

We are very keen to engage with observability users, so if you do, or do NOT, use observability in your services, please reach out and we'd love to hear your problems and thoughts!

[1] https://telemetrymachine.com/blog/observability-doesnt-have-... [2] https://telemetrymachine.com/blog/the-new-state-of-the-art-i...

tmach32··on “Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky
I remember Bucky Fuller writing how seeing an airplane fly overhead used to be rare.

In my own childhood, seeing a satellite fly overhead used to be rare.

Now I see one every 2 minutes.

tmach32··on Superpowers 6
I used Superpowers for a few weeks. I ran into a couple issues:

* I wish I could turn it on selectively. Many of my requests do not require the "verification before completion" and TDD ceremony. For example, agents using stock Superpowers will go so far as to grep a file every time you ask to add something to them to verify that the edit really landed.

* While I like speccing out/designing a project before implementation (nothing new in that regard), I don't like how precisely superpowers plans out the implementation in the /writing-plans skill. It tells future agents exactly what files to edit. There are two big issues with this:

  * We need to manage context rot. If one LLM session is responsible for writing out the entire plan, we aren't solving context rot. Not only is the "smart window" of context exhausted by the time the agent is planning, eg, step 7 out of 15, but it's also dragging forward all the possibly bad ideas it had earlier. It would be better if steps were planned independently.

  * Implementation is an iterative process. You find things out as you go. Your assumptions turned out to be wrong, you realize APIs don't behave the way you thought you did, etc. This is why writing out a precise plan ahead of time is an issue – it's written without this iteration.
IMO, the strongest part of Superpowers is /subagent-driven-development. Yes, it's SUPER slow. For a laugh, you can ask it to make a change you know can be done in one line. It'll do it in one line, but it take literally an hour with all the verification. But that's sort of the point. It is _very_ deliberate. For each step, it reviews the step for both compliance and code quality, then has another agent implement the fixes, _and then it reviews the fixes again_. It does this for every step (not at the end of the project). While this might seem like overkill, it leads to code which complies with the spec far better.

Instead of writing a super detailed spec, I think I'd like /writing-plans to come up with appropriate "units" of work (sometimes called slices) and to brainstorm with the user regarding implementation, but to leave it looser than "edit this exact file in this exact way". That should leave a lot more leeway to implementation agents but still give the review agents something to check compliance against.

tmach32··on Show HN: ZeroFS – A log-structured filesystem for S3
See also: JuiceFS, S3FS, and quite a few others.

We have done loads of research into using object storage wherever we can (given how cheap it is compared to SSDs), and so far it seems like making your application object store-aware is a far surer bet than abstracting S3 behind the file system. The behavior is just too different.

I'm more interested in applications that cleverly use object storage, e.g. AutoMQ, which is quite compatible with Kafka APIs but needs no HDDs.

tmach32··on My favorite keyboards
This opinion is so quaint that it makes me smile.

For me, the #1 feature of the Advantage2 is ortho. Everything else is a distant second. I don't understand how anyone can use anything but ortho.

Yes, another layout would make your fingers travel even less, but ortho lets you reduce a lot of seeking/travel without learning anything new.

tmach32··on CursorBench 3.1
Why would anyone take this benchmark seriously? Cursor is obviously biased here. They can design it and its presentation however they want to tell the story they want to tell.
tmach32··on GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks
I think one thing people are missing about this article is that they are arguing that the harness can make a bigger difference than the model. They aren't merely hyping GLM 5.2.
tmach32··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
They didn’t support Czech?! Until what year?
tmach32··on A man was gifted his dream car by Kevin Mitnick, who he helped put in prison
I'm not talking about scrutiny. I'm talking about crass.
tmach32··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
Well, iOS swipe keyboard is not that bad. I would not call it “permanent suffering”. I tried gboard and swiftkey and they aren’t a giant improvement over the stock keyboard these days. They used to be.

Wrt the “occasional bug”, what happens is that sometimes (enough to make it bad) the keyboard doesn’t render at all!

tmach32··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
For us sad iOS people, what's your favorite swiping keyboard? I just use the stock Apple one because custom keyboards can still be a little buggy (eg not loading occasionally).
tmach32··on A man was gifted his dream car by Kevin Mitnick, who he helped put in prison
Yeah, I am shocked a little, because he wasn't a monster or something. Critique is valid, but speaking with obvious resentment and disrespect about someone who died is pretty gross. Again, unless they're, like, a _monster_.
tmach32··on HPV vaccine cuts risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30
I don’t think one can sensationalise the HPV vaccine enough. Cervical cancer is too common and it’s crazy that a vaccine can greatly reduce it.

If you know any women (which is obviously not a given for HN) then you know multiple women who have had cervical cancer scares or worse.

tmach32··on Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior
I've been practicing coherent breathing (6 breaths/min, equal inhalation and exhalation) to help with anxiety. I'm mostly going off a study[1] where participants who practiced coherent breathing 20 mins a day reported significantly improved outcomes weeks later.

Does anyone have advice about HRV specifically within the context of anxiety?

I've been measuring my SDNN using a Polar strap, and it hasn't really budged. However, I'm not taking that too seriously. I think my HRV is already fairly good because I bike. Anecdotally, I think the coherent breathing helps, especially if I _remember to do it in stressful moments_, not just in the morning.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10719279/

tmach32··on Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics
Wait, haven’t they already owned them for years? Edit: right, they’re just buying the remaining 9%.
tmach32··on As the Job Market Stutters, Simulated Work Is Surging
Always wanted to play one of these. What are people’s favorites?

I liked the progression in the truck simulator games.