Top all-time · #1320
Matthew Rocklin
Personal blog · matthewrocklin.com/blogprogrammingdatacareer
Matthew Rocklin's personal blog at matthewrocklin.com covers programming, data and career. Since 2013, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 67 times, most often “Biased Benchmarks – honesty is hard (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matthew Rocklin's blog, the work of the Dask maintainer, as a reference on parallel and out-of-memory computing, scaling, benchmarking and code style.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called a favourite solo developer blog; code-style post 'summarizes' the creator's preference 'nicely'; a section on dropping Python 'might be interesting'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I work in the Python data ecosystem, building tools like Dask and Coiled. I write about the technical and human aspects of this work.
Most-linked posts?
- Biased Benchmarks – honesty is hard (2017)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-16
- Streaming Pandas Dataframes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-16
- Pandas on HDFS with Dask Dataframes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-22
- Pangeo: JupyterHub, Dask, and XArray on the Cloud (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-16
- Dask distributed2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-17
- Credit Models in Python with Dask2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-02-10
- Craft Minimal Bug Reports (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-21
- Claude Chic2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-26
- GitHub taught me to micromanage2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-12
- AI Zealotry2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-05
What Hacker News says?
I love Matthew Rocklin’s (the maintainer of Dask) blog https://matthewrocklin.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?”Submitted Avoid Indirection in Code as a story · 263 points
HN discussionFWIW the scientific computing community (who often deal with petabytes of geodata) has been thinking of ideas like this for a while, e.g. techniques around file formats that are easy to lazily and partially parse, (ab)using FUSE to do partial reads using http RANGE requests, some combination thereof, etc: http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2018/02/06/hdf-in-the-cl...
Comment linking /blog/work/2018/02/06/hdf-in-the-cloud
on “Hosting SQLite Databases on GitHub Pages”Submitted Write Dumb Code (2018) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionBUT WHY Your performance is going to be complete and utter crap because you're paying for serialization on every single data element. Dask is higher performance and more pythonic: http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2016/02/22/dask-distribu...
Comment linking /blog/work/2016/02/22/dask-distributed-part-2
on “Lesser-Known Python Data Analysis Libraries”Submitted Write dumb code as a story · 81 points
HN discussionI work on Dask now and the creator summarizes his preferred code style nicely in this post: https://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2018/01/27/write-dumb-c... . I like working on simple codebases like this. The only Typelevel library I've used is frameless, which I blogged about here: https://mungingdata.com/apache-spark/frameless-typed-dataset... . Don't think the lib is really usable. Typelevel stuff is not what I'm…
Comment linking /blog/work/2018/01/27/write-dumb-code
on “Scala at scale at Databricks”Submitted GitHub taught me to micromanage as a story · 69 points
HN discussionThanks for your honesty re the web stuff. I agree multi dispatch is awesome, and python has some implementations of it as well. http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2014/02/25/Multiple-Disp...
Comment linking /blog/work/2014/02/25/Multiple-Dispatch/
on “Julia Computing Granted $600k by Moore Foundation”Submitted Efficient Tabular Storage as a story · 62 points
HN discussionHDF5 is a clunky file format and dependency. There's a whole host of usual complaints, many of which have already been mentioned: http://cyrille.rossant.net/moving-away-hdf5/ My biggest personal annoyance is that HDF5 isn't thread safe^, so it only supports parallel reading and writing via multiple processes. This makes parallel computing a pain. This is especially annoying when using HDF5's built-in compression, wh…
Comment linking /blog/work/2015/12/29/data-bandwidth
on “Feather: A Fast On-Disk Format for Data Frames for R and Python”Submitted Distributed NumPy Arrays as a story · 45 points
HN discussionVery promising IMO. Lots of new stuff going on in their 'distributed' project: - https://github.com/dask/distributed - http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2016/02/17/dask-distribu...
Comment linking /blog/work/2016/02/17/dask-distributed-part1
on “Apache Storm 1.0 released”Submitted Admirable Traits of Tech Leads as a story · 16 points
HN discussionYup. Cytoolz. Some notes on performance of Cytoolz: http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2014/05/01/Introducing-C...
Comment linking /blog/work/2014/05/01/Introducing-CyToolz/
on “Making Cython as easy as Python”Submitted Pickle isn't slow, it's a protocol as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI appreciate where you are coming from, but on many of these projects you are just misinformed. The entire point of dask is to enable parallel and bigger than memory computations that are not be possible with NumPy arrays. It uses an internal graph representation for deferred computation because deferred computation is basically the only sensible way to do these computations. But in fact, a major point of dask is th…
Comment linking /blog/work/2015/03/10/PyData-GIL/
on “Making Cython as easy as Python”Submitted Python, Clojure & Julia - a contest of text and grouping as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYou forgot python, with package: (similar in that R needs parallel packages): http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2015/06/26/Complex-Graph...
Comment linking /blog/work/2015/06/26/Complex-Graphs/
on “R at Microsoft”Submitted Pandas on HDFS with Dask Dataframes as a story · 6 points
HN discussionDask is already this! They have a dataframe replacement, a numpy array replacement, and some lower level primitives like dask.delayed too. Plus, the nice thing is that it's already being used with large amounts of data, and the warts (which were plentiful two years ago) are rapidly reducing. http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2018/06/26/dask-scaling-...
Comment linking /blog/work/2018/06/26/dask-scaling-limits
on “Pandas on Ray – Early Lessons from Parallelizing Pandas”Submitted GitHub Taught Me to Micromanage as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHi Peter, good to run into you again :) I agree, formulating open benchmarks is great work, and there's nothing suspicious about performing well on benchmarks you write. It's just worth keeping in mind: https://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2017/03/09/biased-bench... My initial remarks were a little careless and overly provocative! I don't doubt that there are cases where a true "array database" provides value. I do…
Comment linking /blog/work/2017/03/09/biased-benchmarks
on “Array Databases: Concepts, Standards, Implementations [pdf]”Submitted Credit Models in Python with Dask as a story · 5 points
HN discussionDistributed [1] is very new and seems to have similar core architectural goals as TensorFlow. But perhaps I'm being too politically correct: both make use of very course-grain parallelism relative to a typical distributed-memory linear algebra library (e.g., the current communication mechanisms of both are likely to be too course-grain to efficiently support distributed dense matrix inversion or eigensolvers; not th…
Comment linking /blog/work/2015/06/23/Distributed/
on “Elemental: C++ library for distributed-memory linear algebra and optimization”Submitted Streaming Pandas Dataframes as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIf you read on in the post you might be interested in the section titled Drop Python: Use Rust and Typescript https://matthewrocklin.com/ai-zealotry/#big-idea-drop-python...
Comment linking /ai-zealotry/
on “AI Zealotry”Submitted AI Zealotry as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis https://docs.dask.org/en/stable/spark.html notes "However, Dask is able to easily represent far more complex algorithms and expose the creation of these algorithms to normal users [compared to spark]" linking to: http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2015/06/26/Complex-Graph...
Comment linking /blog/work/2015/06/26/Complex-Graphs
on “Modern Polars: an extensive side-by-side comparison of Polars and Pandas”Submitted Biased Benchmarks – honesty is hard (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
