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. Sounds cool but, jeez.
K4 is the K programming language, Q is a language built on top of K. They are the practical over achieving members of the array family of programming languages.
Quite cool, but for a new runtime of an existing language it might make sense to compare to, y'know, the other[0] runtimes of that language? Even if one has to omit the best, closed ones for lack of access / permission to benchmark?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 writing, whether the ability for an individual to have a parse-able reading is the same as writing being parable. The net effect is negative experiences for many and copy-editing for someone who did not do copy editing.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_programming
[0]: https://k.miraheze.org/wiki/Running_K
Extremely likely to be AI, though I’m not sure that matters for rules re: submissions
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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 writing, whether the ability for an individual to have a parse-able reading is the same as writing being parable. The net effect is negative experiences for many and copy-editing for someone who did not do copy editing.