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hail-is
hail
Python2016–2024
hail-is / hail

hail

Cloud-native genomic dataframes and batch computing

5Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Cloud-native genomic dataframes and batch computing

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-09-02 18:30:36 UTC to 2024-10-03 01:50:58 UTC.

0122016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
E9 Genomics | Founding Software Engineer / Founding Data Engineer | Cambridge, MA (ONSITE 2-3 days/week) E9 Genomics (https://e9genomics.com) is hiring a few great engineers to join us on a mission to organize the world's biological information and make the complex, enormous world of biological data feel small and accessible. We're not building data infrastructure or workflow orchestrators, we're building a search engine for all biology. We're looking for: - a founding software engineer, a product-minded generalist with experience working across the stack who thrives building technology that surfaces new scientific insights. (https://e9genomics.notion.site/Founding-Software-Engineer-c5...) - a founding data engineer, who lives in the middle of data science, software engineering, and ML engineering, and is excited to build and use new tech
Read the rest
nologies (including LLMs) to accelerate biological data curation by two orders of magnitude. (https://e9genomics.notion.site/Founding-Data-Engineer-6975fc...) At the Broad, I built new compilers and query optimizers[1] to make petabyte-scale population genomics possible, and my co-founder led product for the Genome Aggregation Database[2], the largest public database of human genetic variation (which has contributed to over 6 million rare disease diagnoses!). We've seen firsthand how the ability to explore biological data in real time doesn't just let scientists answer the same questions faster, but rather leads to fundamentally different questions and a new level of understanding. We also know from experience that the tools from the tech industry often don't translate well to biology, and that we need to be fearless in adapting or rebuilding whatever is necessary to get the job done. We're backed by an incredible set of investors and angels, including Jeff Dean, and we're excited to have the chance to build some awesome & impactful technology with some awesome people. Email me to learn more: tim@ [1] https://github.com/hail-is/hail [2] https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2024)
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 a 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. W
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ork is more interesting when so many disciplines conspire towards the end of improved human health.
In Consider working on genomics
Hail at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard | Software Engineer | Boston, MA | ONSITE, https://hail.is, https://broadinstitute.org The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was launched in 2004 to improve human health by using genomics to advance our understanding of the biology and treatment of human disease, and to help lay the groundwork for a new generation of therapies. The Hail team's mission is to build tools to enable rapid analysis and exploration of biological datasets (100s of TB and tripling yearly). We are committed to open science and everything we do is open source. We currently develop in Python, Scala/Java, and C/C++ and use Spark, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and AWS, but will use any tools we need to get the job done. Come help us build the future of big scientific data analysis. We have two positions: Update
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: The Site Reliability Engineer position has been filled. We also have a front-end/designer position that will be posted shortly. Email below, get in touch if you're interested. You don't need experience in biology or our particular technologies. We work in a highly multi-disciplinary environment (with software engineers, biologists, bioinformaticians, doctors, operations, statisticians, etc.) Self-improvement is a fundamental part of our culture. You must be excited to be challenged and learn new things. I'm the hiring manager. Get in touch with me directly if you have any questions: cseed@broadinstitute.org. You can learn more about the project here: https://hail.is, https://github.com/hail-is/hail We are one of several software engineer groups at the Broad that are hiring. You can find more positions here: https://broadinstitute.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/broad_institute
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2020)
Tried this on our project, GitHub.com/hail-is/hail. Sphinx is a persistent thorn in our side, but we've made it work. A couple things I had to do to get this working: - something thinks a filename with dots (e.g. example.8bits.bgen) means there is a python module that needs to be imported (e.g. example), and fails when that does not exist; we have files like this in a data directory - I could not quickly figure out how to ignore files, so I had to delete a Sphinx conf.py file. - Sphinx resolves the _templates folder relative to where it is called, not relative to the doc string's source file, so I had to add several symlinks (rather than manually edit every doc string). --- OK docs are generating. Quite slow, maybe a couple minutes. Looks like one core is at 100% during this process. We've got ~400 files. Maybe its parsing some data files
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? The whole directory is 318 MB. --- Now I'm looking at the docs. First thing I notice is that Python type hint forward references break everything. Consider: class GroupedMatrixTable( parent: 'MatrixTable', ... The generated doc page is missing the class name and the entire class definition is inlined as a preformatted block (with highlighting :shrug:). All my python function def's seem to be missing the function name? No arg functions look really weird def ( ) So all our docs are in ReST (thanks Sphinx :|). This means they're not valid Markdown. It seems that invalid markdown in a class doc string can break the formatting of all the methods (presenting them again as one reformatted block). --- On the bright side, the mobile version looks great and the search works better than my experience with Sphinx. EDIT: formatting
In Show HN: Zero-Config Documentation Websites for Python
Yes! I was just thinking about this, actually. We're building scalable tools for analyzing genetic data on Spark: https://hail.is https://github.com/hail-is/hail It's tricky because we need someone who can write, has technical knowledge (python, Apache big data stack) and some knowledge of bioinformatics and statistical genetics. There might be an option for some paid work. What's the going rate for technical writing?
In Ask HN: Any open-source project in need of a Technical Writer?
Hail Github: https://github.com/hail-is/hail dev gitter: https://gitter.im/hail-is/hail-dev Starter issues (a bit sparse right now): https://github.com/hail-is/hail/labels/starter Hail is a scalable framework for massive data analysis. It's written in Scala and built on Spark and the Hadoop ecosystem. I'm a software engineer/mathematician, but we're embedded in a world-class genetics research lab. The first paper using Hail was put out recently: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/06/050195 with more in the pipeline. Hail is being used to analyze some of the largest genetic datasets out there (hundreds of thousands of exomes and tens of thousands of whole genomes). There's tons to do. Jump in or email me (see my profile) if you'd like to get involved. If you tell me what you're interested in, I will try to tailor a task for you. N
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o bio knowledge needed. License: MIT P.S. We found one other contributor and our last hire through HN. So, thanks, HN!
In Ask HN: Who needs contributors?

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