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Mat Gienieczko
Personal blog · gienieczko.comprogrammingdata
Mat Gienieczko writes Sourcery, a personal blog at gienieczko.com about programming and data. Since 2025, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “AnyBlox: A Framework for Self-Decoding Datasets [pdf]”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-09-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mat Gienieczko's AnyBlox paper, which describes a columnar data file format with WebAssembly decoders attached, for self-decoding datasets. It is discussed alongside data file format threads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Mat Gienieczko's personal page and blog. Hosting a free, interactive, deep dive course into the C# language and the .NET platform.
Most-linked posts?
- AnyBlox: A Framework for Self-Decoding Datasets [pdf]5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-07-08
What Hacker News says?
Reminds me of Anyblox, which is a columnar data-store file with attached wasm for encode/decode. Super fun read, showed up in the comments for Spiral. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45212960#45214646 14 votes & no comments, 3 mo ago, for AnyBlox: A Framework for Self-Decoding Datasets [pdf] https://gienieczko.com/anyblox-paper https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44501743
Comment linking /anyblox-paper
on “F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]”Submitted AnyBlox: A Framework for Self-Decoding Datasets [pdf] as a story · 14 points
HN discussionThe AnyBlox paper from the folks at TUM, and linked to in the post, is a bit more interesting, imo, since it looks to solve the data systems x storage format problem in composable data architectures - https://gienieczko.com/anyblox-paper
Comment linking /anyblox-paper
on “Spiral”Submitted AnyBlox: Future-Proof Columnar Data Storage as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'll chime in (as a Vortex maintainer), that we are greatly indebted to Azim's work on FastLanes & ALP. Vortex heavily utilizes his work to get state-of-the-art performance. I would add that Vortex doesn't have standalone Clickbench results. Azim is presumably referring to the duckdb-vortex results, which were run on an older version of duckdb (1.2) than the duckdb-parquet ones (1.3). We'll get those updated shortly…
Comment linking /anyblox-paper
on “The FastLanes File Format [pdf]”Submitted Alphabet Does Not Go A to Z (2023) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe wasm decoder thing was also done in Anyblox. https://github.com/AnyBlox https://gienieczko.com/anyblox-paper Has nimble/velox had any better luck lately? I forget what stories someone shared, but, it seemed to have such big intent, then real trouble actually getting released. I want to say someone was saying the lawyers ended up not letting a lot of the work get released. Nimble is the one competitor benchmarked…
Comment linking /anyblox-paper
on “F3”