Top all-time · #11237
R
Rakam
Company blog · rakam.io/blogdataprogramming
Rakam is the company blog at rakam.io, writing about data and programming. Since 2016, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “Understand and collect the data in one place.(cloud or on-premise)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
25mentions?
7HN people?
2016–2023first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters mention Rakam as a tool or company: a custom event analytics platform on top of the user's own infrastructure, often cited as an open-source LookML-style alternative. No comment judges the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Define your data as code and enable your non-technical teams to get insights from your data without SQL.
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-09-08
- Understand and collect the data in one place.(cloud or on-premise)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-02-21
- Show HN: Build powerful custom analytics platform on your cloud2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-14
What Hacker News says?
Rakam (www.rakam.io) | San Francisco, CA | Full Time Rakam provides a custom event analytics platform on top of your infrastructure of choice (AWS, on prem, Azure, etc.) and allows you to customize your data model and collection criteria across web, mobile, IoT and more. Some companies are using us to fill in the blanks from their existing solution while others are building powerful recommendation engines and AI on…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2017)”Submitted Composing Cohort Queries in BigQuery Using HyperLogLog++ as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe main reason is that it took tens of years to build Google Analytics as it is and Google has the advantage to be able to provide more information about the user such as demographic data (gender, age, etc) since they have all the data in-place. Having said that, there is no need to create an exact copy of Google Analytics because most of the people probably use only 20% of the features anyway. Each business has it…
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on “GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data”Submitted Free Product Analytics with Firebase, BigQuery, and Rakam as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWe use Segment for event tracking, Postgresql for transactional data and a number of spreadsheets and third-party integrations with Stitchdata. Since our data is relatively small, we use PG as a data-warehouse and heavily use DBT for ETL. The people who are familiar with SQL just use DataGrip, for the UI we use our tool https://rakam.io . Shameless plug: It's basically similar to Looker but it plays well with the pr…
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on “Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?”Submitted Understand and collect the data in one place.(cloud or on-premise) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat's the path many data-driven companies take lately. Most companies start with plug-and-play solutions such as GA or Mixpanel but as they start to dig into their customer data, they either hire data engineers or use ETL solutions to collect their raw event data into a data warehouse and BI tools in order to track their own metrics. That way, you will have more control and be able to ask any question you want. We…
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on “Migrating from Google Analytics”Submitted Show HN: Build powerful custom analytics platform on your cloud as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's cool to see an open-source product analytics tool in YC! I'm the co-founder of a company that had a similar value proposition back in 2017. We got invited to the interview at the YC office but couldn't convince people because of a number of reasons: 1. GDPR was not huge back in 2017 so the idea of creating an open-source alternative was not attractive enough. 2. We were targeting the companies that want to buil…
Comment linking /product
on “Launch HN: PostHog (YC W20) – open-source product analytics”Submitted Recipes: Open-source data models for third party integrations as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSegment is great for early-stage startups as it takes care of data pipeline for you so that you don't need to hire data engineers or waste time downloading reports from marketing tools and analyzing data offline using a BI solution or Excel. Since it doesn't provide any user interface that allows you to get insights from Segment data, you need to use a BI tool in order to be able to make use of this data which also…
Comment linking /integration/segment/
on “Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups”Submitted Analyzing Liquor Sales in Iowa Using BigQuery Public Datasets as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou may try https://rakam.io Shameless plug: I'm the maintainer.
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on “Piwik 3.0.0”We actually have pretty similar architecture and use Presto for ad-hoc analysis, Avro is used for hot data and ORC is used as columnar storage at https://rakam.io . Similar to Slack, we have append-only schema (stored on Mysql instead of Hive), since Avro has field ordering the parser uses the latest schema and if it gets EOF in the middle of the buffer, fills the unread columns as null. We modified the Presto engin…
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on “Data Wrangling at Slack”That's correct but there is also an alternative approach. You can track your user event data into your database using an open-source solution such as Rakam API ( https://github.com/rakam-io/rakam ) or Snowplow ( https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow ) and use a product analytics tool such as Rakam ( https://rakam.io/product ) that provides a set of prebuilt reports & ad-hoc reporting interface for the data on top of…
Comment linking /product
on “Using GoAccess for self-hosted web analytics”Materialized view is already supported by Postgresql but it requires full table re-write: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/sql-createmateria... We're also experimenting incremental materialized view with PrestoDB. If you have a incremental column in a append-only table or a server_time column for each row. ( https://rakam.io/doc/buremba/rakam-wiki/master/Analyze-Data#... ) One possible way to implement inc…
Comment linking /doc/buremba/rakam-wiki/master/Analyze-Data
on “Real-time event aggregation at scale using Postgres with Citus”We use Swagger specification (automatically generated using annotations in Java) and generate Slate documentation from Swagger specification for API documentation. ( https://api.rakam.io/ ). We also use markdown for generic (tutorials, technical etc.) documentation and render the markdown files fetched from Github in documentation page using JS. Since everything is dynamic, we don't need to worry about updating the…
Comment linking /doc/
on “Ask HN: How does your team write documentation? What tools do you use?”Done! https://rakam.io/integrate?part=website
Comment linking /integrate?part=website
on “Show HN: EmbedBox, an Open-Source UI to Get Your Embed Code Installed”Thanks! That’s amazing. :) Let us know if you run into any trouble. Oh also, once you’ve finished implementing it, we’d be happy to add https://rakam.io to our list of companies using EmbedBox.
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on “Show HN: EmbedBox, an Open-Source UI to Get Your Embed Code Installed”Well done! I was looking for an open source LookML a while back and found Rakam[0]. It seems they added the dbt layer after the fact while you started with that concept. Lightdash looks slick, good luck! By the way, what happened with Hubble? 0 - https://rakam.io/
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on “Show HN: Lightdash – An open source Looker alternative”http://rakam.io / unified - full stack analytics.
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on “Ask HN: Have you received a response for YC Winter 2018 application?”We do not use Snowplow here at Rakam but we have seen companies using Snowplow for tens of billions of events per month. Most of these companies are usually in the media industry. Shameless plug: We basically provide Mixpanel-like user interface for Snowplow users. https://rakam.io/integration/snowplow
Comment linking /integration/snowplow
on “Ask HN: Anybody Using Snowplow Analytics at Scale?”While the cohort tables seems easy to understand, it’s not actually easy to write SQL queries that generates those graphs because of the way SQL works. That’s probably the main reason why most of the companies continue to use the tools such as Mixpanel and Amplitude. If you don’t have the raw event data, it’s probably easier to use one of those tools. That being said, we’re actually focusing exactly that use-case at…
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on “Ask HN: What analytics tools do you use to do retention / cohort analysis ?”I read the weekly https://betalist.com/ newsletter. There's no shortage on "ah nice!" moments (visually). From an idea point of view I can only remember bookmarking http://rakam.io/ ( https://betalist.com/startups/rakam ). I'm a developer so B2D tool excite me most. And their base solution is open-source and on-premise.
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on “Ask HN: Has anyone seen some really good startup websites lately?”Very cool, is Next support planned? I haven't tried onboarding yours, but I like your focus on easy setup. Datadog has become more difficult to setup over time. Sentry, PostHog, and SigNoz were fast to setup but I could never get metrics from my app to be received by any of them. Maybe I was rate limited or maybe it was a config problem, but never got them to work. How much traffic can it handle and what's the prici…
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on “Show HN: Monitor your webapp with minimal setup”
