l: A new runtime for k and q

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• Hacker News
• Am I the only one not getting the hate for the website? The site looks fine to me. What about it is bad?
  by nilirl
• Have you used Claude Design? The site has all the hallmarks of it.
  by Athanase000
• 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

  by refulgentis
• I mean, this is perhaps the most vibecoded website possible so... deff AI.
  by hasteg
• >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

  by ofalkaed
• 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.

  by beng-nl
• > 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.

  by bradrn
• > “unit vector of thought”

  The language and its ideas come from Ken Iverson's famous paper "Notation as a Tool of Thought". This is a common understanding for people in the APL, K/J/Q etc array language communities, who are likely this website and product's intended audience.

  by dintech
• The UI screams gpt 5.5 high lol.
  by cute_boi
• l must be named 1 because I is taken
  by pasquinelli
• next letter after k
  by jloveless
• 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.
  by bikeshaving
• ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ quants be minimal
  by zacharynewton
• 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 ?

  by cassepipe
• Algol derivatives usually written by, commercialized, then sold by Arthur Whitney. Generally considered write-only :)
  by vessenes
• 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.
  by ofalkaed
• 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.
  by chews
• | Memory is relatively slower.

  Memory got faster, no?

  by bingemaker
• relative to CPU speed ... no. see [1][2].

  the early versions of L (circa ... 2011/2012) couldn't really deliver any substantial performance improvement over what is out there (BQN/ngn/Kona). The memory bandwidth was the limit - I simply couldn't keep the cores active. ~2018/2019 I started from scratch with arrays (vectors) using compression by default. That was a massive unlock - and I could not keep most of the CPU doing actual compute! Then it was years of working on compression native operations - some of which were obvious[3] like sum/reductions ... others not so much!

  [1] https://www.emergentmind.com/topics/memory-wall [2] https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~rijurekha/col216/quantitative_ap... [3] https://lv1.sh/blog/compute-on-compressed/

  by jloveless
• I thought too long to find out what a means in a new runtime.
  by plastic041
• Sorry about that. Basically you can now write and run code in the K/q/or qsql languages on your laptop for free. For a very long time (20 years+) this language has not been accessible to most - it’s almost exclusively used on Wall Street and has a very high price barrier to entry. Q programmers are still some of the most highly paid engineers consistently - as the workforce is small and the use cases are (generally) extremely lucrative. If you are a programmer wondering what comes next… q might be for you. Over the decades I’ve taught a few dozen people Q- and I’m happy to say they’ve gone on to have wonderful and stable careers in high paying jobs with deep stability. Mostly hedge funds and banks (and exchanges). It’s a wonderful and often times world changing language and now you can play with it yourself. It’s also very very fast. As a database it’s still insanely great for many usecases.
  by jloveless
• These single letter names are getting out of hand.
  by Xirdus
• We'd like to see some benchmarks against open and closed k interpreters please! I'm curious how well a vibe coded k/q interpreter stands up to Shakti or whatever Mr. Whitney is letting out the door right now.
  by vessenes
• https://github.com/l-labs/master-benchmark/tree/master/resul...
  by jloveless
• Definitely not a vibe coded language - I really wish the ai models were more helpful - but I should do a write up of the assembly analysis (and asm2vec). ATW is working on even more impressive things at the moment! Well beyond the scope of an interpreter itself.
  by jloveless
• If this kind of thing interests you, you can try KlongPy (based on Klong) which also now has backprop support making it a differential array language.
  by eismcc
• KlongPy and KlongPy + duckDB are wonderful. GREAT job. I think there's a whole world of backprop / ML work that can be done in that style! Given the heritage not surprising that most Klong code is ~= L in k mode! Same with ngn/k . E.g. sigmoid is almost the same (:: for assign in klongpy , : for l/q/k). The autograd work is great!
  by jloveless
• So many keyboard warriors with all the hate about a vibe coded website? If you judge a project based on its website, that tells everything about you.
  by AUnterrainer
• Why would you not base your first impressions of a product on the way it chooses to describe itself? It’s not feasible to install everything you lay eyes on for evaluation, and reviews often assume you already assume the product is a good fit and want to evaluate quality/validity of that assumption
  by UnfitFootprint
• There is so many low quality projects that rely on vibe coded websites and vibe written copy, that this becomes a smell, to the detriment of projects like OP's which is genuinely interesting and looks like high quality, well-crafted software.
  by Athanase000