PostHog Open Sourced
67 points
1 hour ago
| 14 comments
| github.com
| HN
madjam002
58 minutes ago
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Last time I checked, Posthog self hosted was basically unusable. They have a hobby deployment script which just pulls the latest build from master which varies from “somewhat works” to “completely broken”
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geekuillaume
53 minutes ago
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Agreed, I tried self-hosting it a couple of month ago and it was impossible. I spent the day on it but the setup process was broken because of a recent change which was made for their cloud offering. Managing both a codebase both adapted to a cloud deployment with a huge amount of users and to a self-hosted way small deployment is very hard and requires a lot of resources. It's hard to justify investing this much time and money in making it work well for a self-hosted setup, and it seems like they stopped doing so.

It's still great to make the code open, but it's not usable anymore for a self-hosted setup.

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zacksiri
4 minutes ago
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They want you to buy their hosted service, that's where the convenience is sold. If they give you a one liner script you can paste in or a docker compose that does everything from scratch they cannot sell their hosted services.
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osigurdson
2 minutes ago
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It seems like an odd thing to run locally with so many dependencies.
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cyanydeez
54 minutes ago
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we went from batteries not included to BYOAi
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sskates
28 minutes ago
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Would love for you to try Amplitude. We've put a lot of work into making sure the core is usable. We've also started to fix a lot of the most common complaints about our pricing.
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lta
13 minutes ago
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How is this relevant ? We're talking about open source analytics, and this looks like a shameless plus
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gagan2020
36 minutes ago
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Looks like they created mess with AI and then open sourced it. I remembered I had to shift from them to metabase because they closed sourced their deployments docker/kubernetes I guess it was 3 years back.

But now AI screwed them over so they come with their own open-source spaghetti.

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robbie-c
34 minutes ago
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PostHog has always been open source. I'm not sure why this has been shared on HN at all.
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opem
8 minutes ago
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Exactly, I was thinking this too!
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mooreds
16 minutes ago
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I thought the same thing. What changed, if anything?
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heyheyhouhou
26 minutes ago
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I used to like their product but now they too many modules and knobs that I find it difficult to understand and navigate.

I think is a bit of product slopification.

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paularmstrong
22 minutes ago
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They've been using AI to shove a lot of AI into their product and trying to force everyone to use AI. I really don't understand the why of any of it. The product was working great for what it needs to do. I don't need AI to make guesses about data for me and I especially do not want _yet another product_ trying to write features in my codebase (which is their latest push).
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timgl
22 minutes ago
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founder here, what specifically do you use posthog for that you now find hard to find?
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jnstrdm05
30 minutes ago
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I just recently switched to posthog self hosted and it works fine
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mlnj
56 seconds ago
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Spent a day trying to get it running 2-3 weeks back. Gave up after a day.
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nightpool
15 minutes ago
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Needs (2020) I guess?
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thatxliner
1 hour ago
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Does anyone know what the context for this is? Because https://github.com/PostHog/posthog exists as well
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lfittl
1 hour ago
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My assumption is that its based on that repo but with the "ee/" folder removed, per https://github.com/PostHog/posthog#open-source-vs-paid

Presumably so folks can be sure they're not accidentally pulling in proprietary code.

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eightysixfour
1 hour ago
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From the repo you linked:

> This repo is available under the MIT expat license, except for the ee directory (which has its license here) if applicable.

> Need absolutely 100% FOSS? Check out our posthog-foss repository, which is purged of all proprietary code and features.

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carimura
1 hour ago
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The PostHog Enterprise license (the “Enterprise License”)
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coloneltcb
41 minutes ago
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Open* is not Open
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mrcwinn
48 minutes ago
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It's hard for me to express how much I dislike their marketing website. Sometimes when you have a "cool idea" you should sit with it a moment and then pull back.
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sv123
36 minutes ago
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I'm a fan of the posthog product but agree with the site. I appreciate the retro styling and all but opening all the windows for everything is disorienting and kinda breaks web navigation that we have all gotten used to for the past 30 years.
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shshsjsj
27 minutes ago
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wait i don’t see this happening!
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drcongo
1 hour ago
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The sheer number of files in the root of that project is making my OCD itch like crazy. That would drive me insane.
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ramon156
48 minutes ago
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I have a weird memory of PostHog.

I remember applying sometime ago, not really knowing what they did. They then spammed me with marketing mail, now they're open-sourced and had received a (supposedly marketing) job posting?

Granted in this entire history I had no idea what their product was. Seems flakey, but I haven't used it.

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gavinray
34 minutes ago
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Why would you apply to a job for a company you don't even know what they do?
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lucyjojo
28 minutes ago
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money?
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xnorswap
1 hour ago
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The AGENTS.md is interesting, apparently the primary most important principle is, "Avoid em-dashes like the plague".

That's an odd request. I always use my own voice for certain things, such as posting to hacker news, or writing my thoughts on a proposal. But for other things such as writing up a bugfix, if I'm getting an AI to write it, I'd rather not hide the fact I've done so.

In fact I usually go out my way to mark it as AI written, to give a heads up to any human reader so they don't waste their time if they don't want to read it.

edit: I'm not sure why my comment is attracting downvotes, perhaps it's being interpreted as anti-AI. I'm not against AI writing, but there are contexts where people would like to know whether something is AI written or not. I would rather it was well identified than hidden, so people can make their own judgement whether to gain insight into a human writing or whether it's just process they can skim or feed through their own agent.

"Avoid em-dashes" just seems like a crude attempt to avoid AI writing coming across as such.

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bachittle
59 minutes ago
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...and then scroll down a few lines and you will find tons of em-dashes in the AGENTS.md
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mariusandra
38 minutes ago
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um... we've had this posthog-foss repo for years now. No idea why it made front page. This is not news.

Source: I was there

To clarify: PostHog has been MIT licensed since day 1, with the exception of the `ee/` folder. This `posthog-foss` repo is a mirror of the main `posthog` repo with the `ee/` folder removed. We've had it for ages.

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threatofrain
1 hour ago
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Very interesting but why would they do this?
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khurs
56 minutes ago
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So non-posthog employees contribute and they can move faster?
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jaffa2
40 minutes ago
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in the youtube video, by 'product' do they mean 'website' ?

I feel I'm missing some basics as to what this can do for me or what problem it solves.

edit so it's like google analytics .

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solarkraft
54 minutes ago
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Congratulations!
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