Top all-time · #1090
Polars
Company blog · pola.rs/postsprogrammingdata
Polars is the company blog at pola.rs, writing about programming and data. Since 2021, 63 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “Polars: Fast DataFrame library for Rust and Python”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Polars (pola.rs), a Rust-based DataFrame library, as a faster pandas alternative. Linked posts cover benchmarks, the 1.0 and 2.0 releases, GPU work and company news.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Polars is a high-performance DataFrame library for Python and Rust. Built on Apache Arrow, it's the fastest way to work with tabular data at any scale.
Most-linked posts?
- Polars: Fast DataFrame library for Rust and Python16 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2021-10-27
- Polars11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2022-12-27
- /benchmarks.html5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-07-07
- Why Polars rewrote its Arrow string data type5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-01-30
- Bringing GPU acceleration to Polars DataFrames in the near future3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-04
- Polars raises $4M seed round3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-03
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-08
- Pre-Release of Polars 2.02 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-02
- GPU Acceleration with Polars and Nvidia Rapids2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-17
- Polars Cloud: The Distributed Cloud Architecture to Run Polars Anywhere2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-12
What Hacker News says?
Meh. Another VC 'open-source' company. > Polars will remain MIT-licensed and the company will sponsor and accelerate the open-source development of Polars. I bet that they will change to a custom business source available license sooner or later. From the about page: [0] > We successfully closed a seed round of approximately 4M$, which was lead by Bain Capital Ventures. Waiting for the day that a seperate closed-sou…
Comment linking /posts/company-announcement/
on “Polars”Submitted Polars as a story · 981 points
HN discussionIan, what are your thoughts on https://www.pola.rs/ ? I've used it for a few CSV tasks and I really liked the API
Comment linking /
on “Python 3.11.0 final”Submitted Polars 2.0 as a story · 472 points
HN discussionThis study uses polars [0][1] -- a new Data Science library written in Rust (core) with bindings to Python and Javascript. Perfect replacement for pandas. Polars' claims to fame are speed (faster than pretty much anything out there [2][3]), low memory pressure (very visible when comparing to pandas) and consistent API across Rust, Python, JS. [0] https://www.pola.rs/ [1] https://github.com/pola-rs/polars [2] https:/…
Comment linking /benchmarks.html
on “I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to”Submitted Pre-Release of Polars 2.0 as a story · 403 points
HN discussionIf you are unhappy with pandas, give a try to polars[0] it's so fast! [0] -- https://www.pola.rs/
Comment linking /
on “The computers are fast, but you don't know it”Submitted Polars Cloud: The Distributed Cloud Architecture to Run Polars Anywhere as a story · 261 points
HN discussionis this https://pola.rs/ ?
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)”Submitted Polars: Fast DataFrame library for Rust and Python as a story · 238 points
HN discussionI think there's a new and healthy rivalry between Ruby, Python, and JS for web backends! - Ruby and Rails now has all of the things mentioned above and more. I do have concerns that Rails will evolve in directions where bundled frontends have less official support, with the continued centralization of 37signals/DHH [0] and their controversial removal of Typescript from Turbo [1] (and bundling in general for Hey), bu…
Comment linking /
on “What's New in Ruby on Rails 8”Submitted Why Polars rewrote its Arrow string data type as a story · 226 points
HN discussion> What about Python and e.g. Pandas or https://www.pola.rs/ ? I think it is safe to assume that only Microsoft Excel is allowed. The features they listed are all built in features. Kaggle speed runs as a sport would be interesting.
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on “The World Excel Championship is being broadcast on ESPN”Submitted A bird's eye view of Polars as a story · 197 points
HN discussionTIL about Excel e-Sports. From https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/ : > No finance, just Excel and logical thinking skills. Use IFS, XLOOKUP, SUM, VBA, Power Query: anything is allowed, and the strategy is up to you. It says VBA, so presumably named variables are allowed in the Excel spreadsheet competition. What about Python and e.g. Pandas or https://www.pola.rs/ ? > Some events are invitational, some are ope…
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on “The World Excel Championship is being broadcast on ESPN”Submitted Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available as a story · 183 points
HN discussionWell... once my recent work on out-of-core lands the batch could be on disk when we run out of memory budget ;) But no, that's not what I meant. I meant that the batch is meant to be of a size that fits in your CPU cache. This can be a huge throughput improvement as each bit of data stays in cache as it moves from data source to sink. Compare this to column-at-a-time execution: by the time you start the next operati…
Comment linking /posts/talk-polars-meetup-1-streaming-engine/
on “Pre-Release of Polars 2.0”Submitted Bringing GPU acceleration to Polars DataFrames in the near future as a story · 80 points
HN discussion*COMPANY*: [polars]( https://pola.rs/ ) *TYPE*: full-time *LOCATION*: Amsterdam *REMOTE*: Optional, Based in the Netherlands is preferred *VISA*: No *DESCRIPTION*: Polars is the company founded from the Polars OSS project. The company is building a distributed query engine and managed data platform that can run the full polars API with different scaling strategies. (Almost) Our whole tech stack is in Rust and we are…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2024)”Submitted Announcing Polars 1.0 (Blog Post) as a story · 34 points
HN discussionI'd go digging into this - https://pola.rs/posts/polars-on-gpu/
Comment linking /posts/polars-on-gpu/
on “CuPy: NumPy and SciPy for GPU”Submitted Polars raises $4M seed round as a story · 25 points
HN discussionRe #2: I prefer https://pola.rs over Pandas
Comment linking /
on “Pipe Syntax in SQL”Submitted GPU Acceleration with Polars and Nvidia Rapids as a story · 9 points
HN discussionPolars | Rust engineers | DevOps | FrontEnd | Hybrid Polars is built on the foundation of a vibrant and active open-source community, and we embrace that philosophy in how we run our company. We trust talented people to do their best work without unnecessary constraints. Collaboration is key, but we keep meetings to a minimum to maintain focus. As Polars and Polars Cloud continue to set a new standard in Python data…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)”Submitted Pre-Release of Polars 2.0 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI switched from pandas to polars[0] . I'm happy with the performance gain. You still need to use Spark/dask on "big" data, but polars give you more room before reaching to these solutions. [0] -- https://www.pola.rs/
Comment linking /
on “Python for Data Analysis, 3rd Edition”Submitted GPU Acceleration with Polars as a story · 8 points
HN discussionHave you used the Polars ( https://www.pola.rs/ ) package? It does what Pandas does with a fraction of the RAM and twice the speed
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on “Comparing SQLite, DuckDB and Arrow with UN trade data”Submitted We have rewritten the string data type as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
