Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

shakti.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 234 posts

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#221

Post by davidmurdoch »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #99
fragmede wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

haven't you ever written code with single letter variable names and it makes sense to you? and then been forced to read somebody else's code with single character variable names and found it completely inscrutable? this is just that on (a lot of) steroids

I've written code with single letter variable names lots if times! But later on it most certainly does not make sense to me.

Is single letter programming like a religion and I've offended the zealots with my comment?

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#222

Post by mxz3000 »

rscho wrote: post #107
mrob wrote: post #60

Is there some application that demonstrates the utility of this language? E.g. it's tempting to dismiss Haskell as something invented by mathematicians more concerned with the elegance of their abstractions than actually getting things done, but Pandoc is so undeniably good and useful that you're forced to admit Haskell can be a good choice. What's the Pandoc of K?

That's not the idea. In a sense, the Pandoc of K is K itself. I mean its designed for interactive, fast and terse scripting on financial data for quants. And it's incredibly good for that. So almost all substantial K is proprietary.

[dead]

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#223

Post by jimberlage »

rak1507 wrote: post #220
jimberlage wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would an array language without the terseness, but with hygienic macros, fit the same niche?

I don't see how it could, the terseness is the point. I'm not sure how a macro system could really help. Did you have a specific idea in mind?

The thought was - if I have a long piece of code repeated, and I want it to be shorter, I can

- Use a language that minimizes the code to write

- Use a helper function, maybe at some runtime cost

- Use a macro, turning a short piece of code into a longer one, at a compile-time cost

Having a DTI (debt-to-income ratio) macro and a very short definition of DTI that looks similar everywhere in code sort of do the same thing.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#224

Post by spopejoy »

wood_spirit wrote: post #214
oefrha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems weird to switch to develop faster and complain about people conflating the two aspects when this thread is clearly talking about runtime performance, triggered by the benchmark claims: > real-sql(k) is consistently 100 times faster (or more) than redshift, bigquery, snowflake, spark, mongodb, postgres, .. > same data. same queries. same hardware. anyone can run the scripts.

GP here :) When talking about speed I was rolling the time taken to write the query and get the query to run with the run time. The total speed depends upon both. In another thread someone pointed out that being a good quant is also about having the best ideas in the first place. This is just a general comment on the whole comments section in general that I leave here: We have this weird situation where the general p…

> most profitable programmers

This more than anything demonstrates the hothouse-flower mentality of K stans. Quants have long since stopped being the best-paid or most value-generating engineers, and since K has zero application outside of quant, it's no longer even a particularly lucrative skill to acquire.

It's interesting though that the opacity of the "I make more money than you" argument fits so snugly with other unverifiable and outdated claims of K supremacy, like performance, job security, or expressiveness.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#225

Post by spopejoy »

gitonthescene wrote: post #210
eigenvalue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to explore new ideas much much faster using Python than the experienced k people could. But creativity is more important anyway. Ultimately, having good ideas/data/signals trumps fancy or fast data wrangling. Glad I’m doing other things now in any case.

Any detail whatsoever would make this a more credible claim. I haven’t met many people, including those skeptical of the performance claims, who have called K _slow_. Maybe for particular domains but I’d doubt that includes the kind of quant work that gets done at Millennium.

I've heard plenty of complaints over the years, and only within quant, unsurprisingly since that is the only field you'll get paid to use K.

A brilliant programmer I met who came from DE Shaw said he reimplemented a K-based portfolio optimization pipeline because the performance hit a wall once the dataset got large enough. He was able to beat K with Java of all things.

Columnar and timeseries dbs have continued to evolve, K is the same tech it was in the 2000s. The only reason it gets used at a Millennium is that whatever trade is still printing money, not any tech advantage.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#226

Post by jeremiahbuckley »

losvedir wrote: post #189
jeremiahbuckley wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve been charging a that amount forever, it’s a crazy ask. But you’ll be happy to hear that the quoted price is about 80% off of the price in 2000, so take advantage of the discount. In 2000 it was $100K/month.

Inflation has been 80% since then, but that doesn't mean it's 80% off. $1000 in 2000 is $1800 today, so a discount of 44%. 80% off would imply it's $5000 today, but prices didn't 5x fortunately. Good joke, though.

I absolutely got it wrong, thanks for the correction.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#227

Post by sudosysgen »

spopejoy wrote: post #224
wood_spirit wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP here :) When talking about speed I was rolling the time taken to write the query and get the query to run with the run time. The total speed depends upon both. In another thread someone pointed out that being a good quant is also about having the best ideas in the first place. This is just a general comment on the whole comments section in general that I leave here: We have this weird situation where the general p…

> most profitable programmers This more than anything demonstrates the hothouse-flower mentality of K stans. Quants have long since stopped being the best-paid or most value-generating engineers, and since K has zero application outside of quant, it's no longer even a particularly lucrative skill to acquire. It's interesting though that the opacity of the "I make more money than you" argument fits so snugly with othe…

Besides, it has been my experience that the more the programming part of a given quant's job contributes to their profitability, the less they enjoy using K. K is a neat language for research, but I don't know of many who still like it as a language to write code you intend to reuse or maintain.

That said, I would personally rather do research in python, especially now that the performance situation is reversed.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#228

Post by gitonthescene »

spopejoy wrote: post #225
gitonthescene wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any detail whatsoever would make this a more credible claim. I haven’t met many people, including those skeptical of the performance claims, who have called K _slow_. Maybe for particular domains but I’d doubt that includes the kind of quant work that gets done at Millennium.

I've heard plenty of complaints over the years, and only within quant, unsurprisingly since that is the only field you'll get paid to use K. A brilliant programmer I met who came from DE Shaw said he reimplemented a K-based portfolio optimization pipeline because the performance hit a wall once the dataset got large enough. He was able to beat K with Java of all things. Columnar and timeseries dbs have continued to e…

I appreciate it's probably not possible to share too many details but I wouldn't be surprised if the choice of Java wasn't simply preference. It may have been a problem with the pipeline rather than with K. I.e. a fix might have been available using K but it can be easier (and harder) to just use some out-of-the box solution. I agree that columnar and time series dbs may have caught up with K over the years, but most of the complaints I've heard about K aren't technical.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#229

Post by nathan_compton »

rscho wrote: post #178
nathan_compton wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a programmer, scientist, etc, at various times in my life and I have programmed in J. I don't think there is any compelling reason to use J over Matlab, R, or Python and very many reasons not to. Vector languages are mind expanding, for sure, but they have done a very poor job keeping up with the user experience and network effects of newer languages. A few years ago I wrote a pipeline in J and then re-im…

I disagree. For the stuff I'm doing, I've been rewriting the same 1-screen program in different ways many times. J made that easy, R would make that much more tedious since I'd have >250 lines instead of 30. Of course if I'm doing something for which R has libs, I'll do it in R. Additionally, I'll very probably end up rewriting my final program in another language for speed and libs, because by then I'll know precise…

I think there is an element of truth to this, but the context where this ends up being an advantage is personal and idiosyncratic.

Re: Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license

#230

Post by lelf »

doug-moen wrote: post #129

FYI: This only implements a subset of K (I'd estimate 1/3). Calling it a 'release' is an overstatement. The docs state that it is a work in progress. It's also quite buggy (it's easy to get a segmentation fault). The version I saw in January was about 1/3 the size of this version, and also buggy. I hope that the final version of this code is less buggy and more usable. If you want to learn the K language, don't use t…

it's work-in-progress for fun/educational purposes (i.e. read and learn something)
Post reply on HN