As far as I can tell, it seems to be something halfway between TempleOS and MUMPS but its a programming language instead of an OS. I don't think you are missing some deep meaning. Its more that this is written in an esoteric language which seems to be more overloaded than Perl by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications. He's just looking at ways to make more efficient code in K (the language). But it does look sort of like he is talking about math theorems (he isn't).
> more overloaded than Perl by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications.
I have the same feeling. The root of K is APL, but to avoid special characters (I assume), the same symbol has multiple meanings (overloaded), depending on eg. the position, the data type, and the context. The idea is that "programs should be short enough to fit in your head." The challenge is, similar to Perl and Regex syntax, it's very hard and often cryptic to read.
I do think a concise syntax is useful, for a programming language. But at the same time, the syntax should be readable, and that probably means that each symbol or operator must only have one meaning, and that meaning should be (more or less) obvious.
K is an array language. Even an integer is actually an array of one element. I think that makes sense for a tiny language: This is the simplest possible type system. You can even support strings, when using eg. metadata or using a heuristic like "a string is always zero terminated" (which is what I used for my tiny language).
It's clear that the symbols want to have one meaning each, for monadic and dyadic use, but that might mean quite different execution and types.
For example, & is monadic 'where' and dyadic 'min' (a logical extension of it being AND on bit-booleans), but this means you get different semantics, even if they all capture the 'where'-ness:
1 3 ~ &0 1 0 1 / when applied to a list, gives the indices of true elements
`b`d ~ &`a`b`c`d!0 1 0 1 / when applied to a dict, gives their keys
In both cases, you get that `x@&x` works, as `&x` will yield appropriate indices for `x`, but what that actually does has changed. In other languages, these would be spelled very differently, and so do seem like an overload, but sometimes it is just a point of view.
As for why it's obvious- it's not, really, but it's no less obvious than the word `where`, and you have already learnt it, as it is (as it seems to me at least) to be punned on the C syntax (same as `*`, which gives `first`).
> by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications
I don't think that's fair. If you're familiar with the programming language, his writing is fairly clear. If you're not, maybe you're just not in his target audience.
IOW, optimizing his text for people familiar with the language is probably a better choice than teaching the language, which would distract him from his goal.
Sad that the Wikipedia page links to some specific commercial service rather than the actual programming language runtime (which appears to be AGPL-licensed).
I think of K like a super-geeky version of Excel, for people who do quant stuff. People do very useful, cryptic stuff in convoluted, bespoke Excel sheets, updated and grown over decades with 37 variants of almost-but-not-quite the same VB function, etc. I imagine the K world is very similar, except K users can meet in London pubs and trade little snippets of K handwritten on scraps of paper between them like Pokemon cards.
The gulf countries hate Iran and have for a very very long time, longer than even the concept of the west has existed. Iran throwing around ballistic missiles is far more like a temper tantrum than a viable military strategy. And its a strategic gift to Trump. Whether he/we can take advantage of that, IDK.
I'm not so sure it's a strategic gift for Trump. Before the war (oh, sorry, I meant the "special military operation") everything was largely fine for the Gulf states. Now, it's not.
Unless you work in Alphabet's marketing department, then no GCP isn't the best one. The most reliable cloud has always been AWS by a wide margin. The exec in charge of GCP has had to apologize in public on multiple occasions for GCP's reliability problems. Sounds like they have fixed them by now (years later) but that doesn't make up the disaster that was BigQuery.
Also, GCP is more focused on smaller customers so perhaps that's the part that works for you. AWS can be a bit daunting. But AWS actually versions their APIs and publishes roadmaps and timelines for when APIs get added and retired and what you should use instead. GCP will just cancel things on short notice with no replacement.
The biggest expense in software is maintenance. Better software means cheaper maintenance. If you actually want to have a significant cost advantage, software is the way to go. Sadly most business is about sales and marketing and has little to do with the cost or quality of items being sold.
Because Azure customers are companies that still, in 2026 only use Windows. Anyone else uses something else. Turns out, companies like that don't tend to have the best engineering teams. So moving an entire cloud infrastructure from Azure to say AWS, probably is either really expensive, really risky or too disruptive to do for the type of engineering team that Azure customers have. I would expect MS to bleed from this slowly for a long time until they actually fix it. I seriously doubt they ever will but stranger things have happened.
Turns out outside companies shipping software products aspiring to be the next Google or Apple, most companies that work outside software industry also need software to run their business and they couldn't care less about HN technology cool factor.
They use whatever they can to ship their products into trucks, outsourcing their IT and development costs , and that is about it.
Agreed, though only up to a point. Companies that need software to run their business, need that software to run.
When your operations are constantly hampered by Azure outages, and your competitors' are not, you're not going to last if your market is at all competitive. Thankfully for many companies, a lot of markets aren't, I suppose, at least for the actors who have established a successful rent and no longer need to care how their business operations are going.
Ahem, their reporting on nuclear power was often non-scientific and just plain wrong. In fact anything having to do with the environment was generally pretty poor from a factual and scientific basis. Their reporting on politics was consistently rated as one of the most extreme in the US media.
I do wish they could do a 'just the facts' reporting as I think that is worth some taxpayer money to support. But by any measure, from any media watchdog, they were one of the most extreme and least accurate media source. That you can't see that says a lot more about you than PBS/NPR. Hell, there are 20 year old SNL skits mocking their coverage for its very narrow POV.
You're conflating dev and production erroneously. Not necessarily in dev but it could be a VM, process, or web app. The point being the production version should be performant and light on restrictions... and not necessarily web-centric either.
Do you know the actual lessons of that crash? Because we don't allow retail investors to go 10:1 on leverage anymore. There are a lot more lessons and none of them apply to this situation (even Glass-Steagall). This is much closer to the dot com crash in 2001 in how it looks, just a lot more concentrated and probably a bit bigger. If all you got is "number go up too much" then you probably shouldn't be investing your own money.
The good news is that its almost all rich folks money on the line here and a small amount of dumb money. That's very different than, 2008 where it was mostly the indexes that got hit and that's more middle class/upper middle class concentrated.
As far as I can tell, it seems to be something halfway between TempleOS and MUMPS but its a programming language instead of an OS. I don't think you are missing some deep meaning. Its more that this is written in an esoteric language which seems to be more overloaded than Perl by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications. He's just looking at ways to make more efficient code in K (the language). But it does look sort of like he is talking about math theorems (he isn't).
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