Hail VS PostHog

I don't have any funding to hire right now, but I'm always happy to chat about the industry and my experience building Hail (https://hail.is, https://github.com/hail-is/hail), a tool widely used by folks with large collections of human sequences.

The other posters are not wrong about compensation. Total compensation is off by a factor of two to three.

However, it is absolutely possible to work with a group of top-notch engineers on serious distributed systems & compilers in service of an excellent scientific-user experience. I know because I do. We are lucky to have a PI who respects and hires and diversity of expertise within his lab.

I enjoy being deeply embedded with our users. I do not have to guess what they need or want because I help them do it every day.

I also enjoy enmeshing engineering with statistics, mathematics, and biology. Work is more interesting when so many disciplines conspire towards the end of improved human health.

I think this post is identifying scientific computing with simulation studies and legacy workflows, to a fault. Scientific computing includes those things, but it also includes interactive analysis of very large datasets as well as workflows designed around cloud computing.

Interactive analysis of large datasets (e.g. genome & exome sequencing studies with 100s of 1000s of samples) is well suited to low-latency, server-less, & horizontally scalable systems (like Dremel/BigQuery, or Hail [1], which we build and is inspired by Dremel, among other systems). The load profile is unpredictable because after a scientist runs an analysis they need an unpredictable amount of time to think about their next step.

As for productionized workflows, if we redesign the tools used within these workflows to directly read and write data to cloud storage as well as to tolerate VM-preemption, then we can exploit the ~1/5 cost of preemptible/spot instances.

One last point: for the subset of scientific computing I highlighted above, speed is key. I want the scientist to stay in a flow state, receiving feedback from their experiments as fast as possible, ideally within 300 ms. The only way to achieve that on huge datasets is through rapid and substantial scale-out followed by equally rapid and substantial scale-in (to control cost).

[1] https://hail.is

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard | Cambridge, MA | Associate Software Engineer | Onsite

We are seeking an associate software engineer interested in contributing to an open-source data visualization library for analyzing the biological impact human genetic variation. You will contribute to projects like gnomAD (https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org), the world's largest catalogue of human genetic variation used by hundreds of thousands of researchers and help us scale towards millions of genomes in the coming years. We are also developing next-generation tools for enabling genetic analyses of large biobanks across richly phenotyped individuals (https://genebass.org). In this role you will gain experience developing data-intensive web applications with Typescript, React, Python, Terraform, Google Cloud Platform, and will make use of the scalable data analysis library Hail (https://hail.is). Key to our success is growing a strong team with a diverse membership who foster a culture of continual learning, and who support the growth and success of one another. Towards this end, we are committed to seeking applications from women and from underrepresented groups. We know that many excellent candidates choose not to apply despite their capabilities; please allow us to enthusiastically counter this tendency.

Please provide a CV and links previous work or projects, ideally with contributions visible on Github.

email: [email protected]

It would be a shame not to mention PostHog as the telemetry provider we are using, since it turned out to be extremely useful. Because it is hard to find people who will talk with you about your product, gathering statistics gave us a much greater insight into our users.

6- PostHog

Hi HN, PostHog employee here. I'm working on our Web Analytics product, which is currently in beta. It's fun to see us mentioned here :)

I should mention that we have a ton of SDKs (see https://posthog.com/docs/libraries) for back end frameworks and languages, so if you wanted to use PostHog without any client-side JS you could send pageviews and other events manually, but for the vast majority of people it makes more sense to use our JS snippet.

Hijacking this comment to share the roadmap for web analytics https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/18547. It's very much in the launch-early-and-be-embarassed phase, but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions that people have, particularly if you're already a PostHog user.

how's this different than https://posthog.com/ ?

PostHog - Open Source Alternative to Mixpanel

Don't insert the logs/events/analytics into your Application DB. Usually, you send those to specialist datastores (OLAP etc) that process such high volume of data. You can use something like clickhouse [0] for example or use 3rd party SAAS solutions like posthog [1] etc that are built on top of clickhouse

[0] https://clickhouse.com

[1] https://posthog.com

I may use Flask-Admin initially to offload the "CRUD" operations to have an initial prototype fast but then drop it ASAP because I don't want to write a "flask-admin application" to fight against later on. If the application is mainly "CRUD", then Flask-Admin is suitable.

Now...

Would you do a breakdown/list of all the jobs you've done by sector/vertical and by function/role and by application functionality?

- [0]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com

- [1]: https://flask-admin.readthedocs.io/en/latest

- [2]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.3.x/patterns/celery

- [3]: https://sentry.io

- [4]: https://posthog.com

- [5]: https://www.docker.com

PostHog | Remote (US/Europe timezones) | Full stack engineer, technical ex-founder, tech lead | https://posthog.com

PostHog is the only open-source Product OS, combining product analytics, session recordings, feature flags, cdp and a data warehouse in one.

We have a culture of written async communication (see our handbook [0]), lots of individual responsibility and an opportunity to make a huge impact. Being fully remote means we're able to create a team that is truly diverse. We're based all over the world, and the team includes former YC founders, CTOs turned developers and recent grads.

To apply see https://posthog.com/careers or email us [email protected]

[0] https://posthog.com/handbook/

There seems to be posthog.com analytics and AB or feature flag functionality that is blocked by adblockers. Probably that?