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l: A new runtime for k and q

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Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#11

Post by cassepipe »

bikeshaving wrote: post #2

As someone who does not know what k4, qSQL, or q are, reading through the landing page of this website was giving me mild schizophrenia. And then I tried to search for these things in the old way, and received incredibly dry technical sites that still don’t tell me what it is, and all these names are wildly SEO unfriendly. So I had Claude give me context and it’s apparently the database Wall Street uses for tick data…

I believe k and q are member of the "array programming"/APL family of languages who are exceptionally terse/information-dense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_programming

EDIT: Did someone downvoted this because it is wrong or is someone I am arguing with rage-downvoted this ?

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#12

Post by beng-nl »

refulgentis wrote: post #3

Flagged, lots of unexplained grandiose thinking like “k and q made the vector the unit of thought.” K and q are unexplained and unlinked and “unit vector of thought” is pseudoscientific language Extremely likely to be AI, though I’m not sure that matters for rules re: submissions

I see how jarring it is for you, but I want to comment-vouch against your flag. If you slow down a little, you can spot some meaning there. Its oddly phrased, but it does make sense that vectors (as in: simd vectors) are the building blocks of execution (to put it closer to how I might say it).

I’ve had similar ideas in the past: clearly simd is the way to get the most out of your cpu. Can we design a language where all operations are automatically simd, and it takes effort to do anything in scalars?

And I guess these array languages are what you might get.

It’s not ‘unit vector of thought,’ btw, which is weirder than what it says.

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#13

Post by chews »

if you k you k ;-) for the uninitiated, this looks like some wallstreet quant's new startup. Initially I thought it was the rebrand of shakti, Arthur Whites most recent rewrite of an array language. It's purpose built tooling for computing tick data for financial markets, but the best way I can describe it is codegolf for experienced programmers who don't want to give up the keyboard. these tools combine dataaccess and the ability to compute against that data with as few abstractions as possible.

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#14

Post by casey2 »

zacharynewton wrote: post #8

Not sure why all the hate (sure site may be vibecoded, not all of us are front-end masters and it's at least not spartan)... I've always found k to be fascinating, and cool idea to try and roll a new one. Wish it were wholly open source, but cool to have a new variant that seems to bench well.

Sure the site, the articles, the program. But sure lets just trust that the author who can't write knows how to benchmark software

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#16

Post by enduku »

yeah the site's clearly vibecoded and isn't opensource, but i also think this is a genuinely interesting design space and more people should be building in it. APL (https://www.dyalog.com/), BQN (https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/), J/Jd (https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Jd/Overview), Klong (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586872), Kerf (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782520), RayforceDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45889607), k/q (https://kx.com/) glad there's a new entrant.

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#17

Post by ofalkaed »

refulgentis wrote: post #3

Flagged, lots of unexplained grandiose thinking like “k and q made the vector the unit of thought.” K and q are unexplained and unlinked and “unit vector of thought” is pseudoscientific language Extremely likely to be AI, though I’m not sure that matters for rules re: submissions

>If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#18

Post by skruger »

refulgentis wrote: post #10
bradrn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lots of unexplained grandiose thinking like “ k and q made the vector the unit of thought.” That much makes sense in context: K is an array language, like APL, J, etc. From what little experience I have with J, ‘vector as a unit of thought’ seems like a reasonable description. > Extremely likely to be AI I had the same thought though.

That’s fair: The most fair-to-submitter reading of your comment is my concerns are unfounded. If you didn’t intend that, that’s fine. For moderators, I’d suggest that for the community, it’s spam. That’s one example, there are many more like it. The individual statement may be defensible but is still pseudoscientific language. This sort of content is a massive burden to community. Unanswerable anrguments about AI wri…

The 'unit of thought' thing is a nod to the Ken Iverson paper on APL that won him the Turing Award ("Notation as a Tool of Thought"), also referenced by Dyalog's tag line "The tool of thought for software solutions"). Variations of that phrase are endemic in the array languages space.

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#19

Post by zX41ZdbW »

enduku wrote: post #16

yeah the site's clearly vibecoded and isn't opensource, but i also think this is a genuinely interesting design space and more people should be building in it. APL ( https://www.dyalog.com/ ), BQN ( https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/ ), J/Jd ( https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Jd/Overview ), Klong ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586872 ), Kerf ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782520 ), RayforceDB ( https:…

I've recently tested BQN on ClickBench (a benchmark for OLAP databases), and the results are not great: https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/#system=+N|liH&type=-&machi...

If anyone is curious how queries in this language look, you can see it here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/939/changes#di...

Re: l: A new runtime for k and q

#20

Post by jackdoe »

enduku wrote: post #16

yeah the site's clearly vibecoded and isn't opensource, but i also think this is a genuinely interesting design space and more people should be building in it. APL ( https://www.dyalog.com/ ), BQN ( https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/ ), J/Jd ( https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Jd/Overview ), Klong ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586872 ), Kerf ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782520 ), RayforceDB ( https:…

I vibecoded https://punkx.org/apl/learn.html [1] its good slow entry into gnu-apl, at least it got me to be able to make tictactoe, vibecoded or not, it helped me to start.

I am amazed how quickly APL changed the way I think.

Also strongly recommend watching Aaron Hsu on youtube.

There is no better time to re-learn programming, try APL, Forth, LISP, z80 machine code, UXN TAL, just try new things.

"Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail."

[1]: https://github.com/jackdoe/gnu-apl-wasm source of the repl and learn playground and also how to compile gnu apl to wasm (vibecoded)

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