Top all-time · #459
Honeycomb
Company blog · honeycomb.io/blogprogrammingsystems
Honeycomb is the company blog at honeycomb.io, writing about programming and systems. Since 2016, 121 different Hacker News readers have linked it 250 times, most often “Observations on ARM64 and AWS’s Amazon EC2 M6g Instances – Honeycomb”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Honeycomb's blog as a source on observability and engineering practice, including its Graviton/ARM cost tests, engineering-levels post, and testing in production. Most links are cited as evidence rather than judged.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Honeycomb is the observability platform built for AI-era software. Fast queries, unified telemetry, and LLM observability. Used by Slack, Intercom, and Dropbox.
Most-linked posts?
- Observations on ARM64 and AWS’s Amazon EC2 M6g Instances – Honeycomb6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-03-18
- Why observability requires a distributed column store5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-08-13
- /5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-07-30
- /5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-12-21
- Anything but Tech Debt4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-08-07
- Lies About Logs3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-04-12
- Why Observability Requires a Distributed Column Store3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-05
- Honeycomb Adds Employee Representative to Board of Directors3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-16
- Disposable Code Is Here to Stay, but Durable Code Is What Runs the World3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-07-30
- Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-02
What Hacker News says?
Honeycomb will hopefully (continue to) upend the "logs, metrics, and traces" world. https://honeycomb.io/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?”Submitted It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine) as a story · 301 points
HN discussionHow is it different from https://www.honeycomb.io/ ?
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?”Submitted Instrumentation: The First Four Things You Measure as a story · 239 points
HN discussionHoneycomb does this as well https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/employee-representative-board-...
Comment linking /blog/employee-representative-board-of-directors/
on “EVGA terminates Nvidia partnership [video]”Submitted I Don't Want to Be on Call Anymore as a story · 230 points
HN discussionNot necessarily? It's been the basis of one of the major ways people would query their data since 2023 on a product I worked on: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/introducing-query-assistant The difference is this feature explicitly isn't designed to do a whole lot, which is still the best way to build most LLM-based products and sandwich it between non-LLM stuff.
Comment linking /blog/introducing-query-assistant
on “Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents”Submitted How Time Series Databases Work, and Where They Don’t as a story · 228 points
HN discussionYou can go the https://www.honeycomb.io/ way and make structured logs your metrics. It will cost you a lot in storage, but simplifies a lot. Just throw properly structured logs into storage as long as you query them efficiently (which honeycomb provides)
Comment linking /
on “Monitoring demystified: A guide for logging, tracing, metrics”Submitted Tell Me More, Nginx (2017) as a story · 218 points
HN discussion> Why? …because seniority is about responsibility, and if all you do is write good code, you’re not accepting the responsibility for anyones effort but your own. Exactly. Ownership of a certain scope. This came out not long ago, and I love the graphic. https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/engineering-levels-at-honeycom...
Comment linking /blog/engineering-levels-at-honeycomb/
on “Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer (2019)”Submitted Scaling Kafka at Honeycomb as a story · 166 points
HN discussionThat's the "monitor from the customer's point of view" approach the OP alludes to. If you use tools like Honeycomb [1] that can easily and routinely answer questions like "show me the 95th percentile latencies for each of the 10 customers experiencing the worst latencies ", then situations like you're describing are a lot easier to discover. [1] https://honeycomb.io . Disclaimer: I used to work for them.
Comment linking /
on “Your nines are not my nines”Submitted Why observability requires a distributed column store as a story · 92 points
HN discussionHi, Hamel here. I'm one of the co-authors. I'm an independent consultant and not all clients allow me to talk about their work. However, I have two that do, which I've discussed in the article. These are two production use cases that I have supported (which again, are explicitly mentioned in the article): 1. https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/introducing-query-assistant 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_DMMlDuJB0 Othe…
Comment linking /blog/introducing-query-assistant
on “What we've learned from a year of building with LLMs”Submitted Lies About Logs as a story · 80 points
HN discussionHi, Hamel here. I'm one of the co-authors. I'm an independent consultant and not all clients allow me to talk about their work. However, I have two that do, which I've discussed in the article. These are two production use cases that I have supported (which again, are explicitly mentioned in the article): 1. https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/introducing-query-assistant 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_DMMlDuJB0 Othe…
Comment linking /blog/introducing-query-assistant
on “What we've learned from a year of building with LLMs”Submitted Heatmaps Make Ops Better as a story · 79 points
HN discussionYou should almost never stop testing in prod. https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/testing-in-production
Comment linking /blog/testing-in-production
on “Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18”Submitted Why intuitive troubleshooting has stopped working as a story · 71 points
HN discussionhttps://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-ama...
Comment linking /blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-amazon-ec2-m6g-instances/
on “A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM”Submitted Disposable Code Is Here to Stay, but Durable Code Is What Runs the World as a story · 50 points
HN discussionSome questions & comments: * Can you have multiple private keys (site specific?)? * Does the Android client support ed25519 keys or is it iOS only? * Please modify your curl statement to be something like how Honeycomb does it (that is include a checksum test). https://honeycomb.io/docs/connect/nginx/
Comment linking /docs/connect/nginx/
on “Show HN: Kryptonite – a new home for your SSH private key”Submitted Instrumentation: Measuring Capacity Through Utilization as a story · 41 points
HN discussionThese are such great comments, thanks for sharing your insights. For folks looking for other options, I'd also mention https://honeycomb.io , perhaps the most promising newcomer in this space. It's essentially Facebook's Scuba for the rest of us.
Comment linking /
on “Learning from a Year of Security Breaches”Submitted AI: Where in the Loop Should Humans Go? as a story · 33 points
HN discussionAWS has released Graviton2-based EC2 instances[0] with excellent performance[1]. It seems like a lot of workloads can be moved to ARM-based VMs with little fuss. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-m6g-ec2-instances-power... [1]: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-ama...
Comment linking /blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-amazon-ec2-m6g-instances/
on “Apple Plans to Announce Move to Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC”Submitted Instrumentation Is About Making People Awesome as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI got a lot of value from this post related to growth for ICs: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/engineering-levels-at-honeycom...
Comment linking /blog/engineering-levels-at-honeycomb
on “Ask HN: What are the best articles on managing people?”Submitted Instrumenting high volume services with sampling as a story · 20 points
HN discussion
