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Rob O'Leary
Personal blog · roboleary.netprogrammingproductivity
Rob O'Leary's personal blog at roboleary.net covers programming and productivity. Since 2020, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Rob O'Leary's posts as sources on how much telemetry VS Code collects and on built-in VS Code features that make extensions unnecessary.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Rob is a solution architect, fullstack developer, technical writer, and educator. He is travel-obsessed (one bug he cannot fix).
Most-linked posts?
- VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-08-23
- VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry? [2022]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-07
What Hacker News says?
According to Microsoft's own license terms for VS Code, you can't opt out of all telemetry; see Section 2a: https://code.visualstudio.com/license > You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation located at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di... . Also, each extension (including Microsoft's) may collect its own telemetry. The blog post https…
Comment linking /tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry
on “CLion Is Now Free for Non-Commercial Use”Submitted An unwanted update to your Google Account as a story · 279 points
HN discussionYou can’t really shut down all VSCode telemetry. Source: https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry....
Comment linking /tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry.html
on “JetBrains invites developers to join the Fleet Public Preview Program”Submitted VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry? as a story · 194 points
HN discussionHere's a sampling of stuff I've semi-recently encountered on Github that all spy on you by default. For some, it's undocumented, for others it's a minor subsection in the docs. (Some of them are source-available not free, I didn't keep track as I collected the URLs.) https://github.com/zed-industries/zed https://github.com/microsoft/vscode https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone https://github.com/meilisearch/meilise…
Comment linking /tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry.html
on “Mobifree – An open-source mobile ecosystem”Submitted VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry? [2022] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI rewrote this comment a couple times before posting, as getting through to your perspective rules out what I consider logical common sense. You're still asking the wrong questions because you don't get the process. VSCode could collect anything at all, but let's be hypothetical, yet specific so you understand the process. I'm going to use these two pages as reference [0]This RoboLeary blog post describes what VSCod…
Comment linking /tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry.html
on “Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture”Submitted VS Code: You don't need that extension as a story · 3 points
HN discussionTag Auto Rename is built in, enable it with: "editor.linkedEditing": true https://www.roboleary.net/vscode/2020/08/05/dont-need-extens...
Comment linking /vscode/2020/08/05/dont-need-extensions.html
on “VS Code extensions for web development in 2022”Submitted How to use VS Code as your Git editor, difftool, and merge-tool as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted VS Code: What's the deal with the telemetry? (2022) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Read Xkcd in the terminal with some bash magic as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The easy way to find the perfect font and theme combination as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
