Hacker News: owenm

New comment by owenm in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

owenm — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:32:27 +0000

No, I’m saying that MS have different terms for their business and personal offerings (as do OpenAI and Anthropic).

To be fair to them, MS are quite open about accuracy for the business offerings, see here as one example:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/micr...

New comment by owenm in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

owenm — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:53:09 +0000

As far as I can tell, this is only for the free personal plan, not any of the business offerings (ie not Copilot for M365) and Github Copilot is under a separate set of terms.

“These Terms don’t apply to Microsoft 365 Copilot apps or services unless that specific app or service says that these Terms apply.”

Think of Copilot being a suite of different products under the same overall banner and it starts to make (a bit) more sense.

New comment by owenm in "Sub-Millisecond RAG on Apple Silicon. No Server. No API. One File"

owenm — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:30:17 +0000

Any plans to make it available to other languages via bindings?

New comment by owenm in "Investing in the Python Ecosystem"

owenm — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:51:13 +0000

I feel a bit sad since I hadn't heard of Gel Data until today, but it's too late... seems like they had some interesting stuff in progress.

New comment by owenm in "RayforceDB is now an open-source project"

owenm — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:19:31 +0000

This is super interesting - aside from the benchmarks are there any good examples of loading and querying data from external sources? Any plans to support other formats like parquet?

SwirlDB: Modular-first, CRDT-based embedded database

owenm — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:07:41 +0000

Article URL: https://docs.swirldb.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45739877

Points: 74

# Comments: 12

Xlwings Lite – Python in Excel Using Pyodide

owenm — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:44:04 +0000

Article URL: https://lite.xlwings.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584060

Points: 22

# Comments: 5

New comment by owenm in "Why F#?"

owenm — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 13:24:08 +0000

I hear you on the opportunity side and I can't see that changing. The good news is in recent releases there's a lot less boilerplate - "dotnet new console -lang F#" results in two files, a short fsproj file and a single line of Hello World.

Leveraging Immutability and Observability for Undo in Document-Based Apps

owenm — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:58:43 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.voyonic-systems.de/leveraging-immutability-and-observability-for-reliable-undo-redo-in-document-based-applications/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43057342

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by owenm in "Luon programming language"

owenm — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 04:13:54 +0000

The Interlisp VM sounds awesome - I would love to see Notecards on Windows/Linux/Mac natively!

New comment by owenm in "Luon programming language"

owenm — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 01:11:38 +0000

This is an impressive achievement, given there’s a whole language plus IDE. Kudos to the author. I couldn’t see any indication of what the author plans to use it for - I hope he can share more below?

I’m intrigued by the LeanQt library as well that the IDE uses (https://github.com/rochus-keller/LeanQt) too.

New comment by owenm in "Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?"

owenm — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 07:45:23 +0000

I would start with a business case - what are the benefits, is it going to generate revenue or reduce costs, when do the benefits start to be realised.

Then look at the cost in starting to develop what you need, and how you’re going to get started.

Are there existing COTS systems (e.g. SAP, Dynamics, Salesforce) that are extensible but can do 60% of the base functionality out of the box? Can you start by integrating two systems or using your low code platform to prove the concept? A couple of engineers/freelancers/external shop for a few months is a lot cheaper than hiring a whole development team… others in the thread have given you a reasonable estimate of that.

Think about what’s the MVP needed to start showing ROI. Maybe do a smaller business case for that.

Look at the payback period internally and ask what hurdle rate is needed to invest from your CFO.

New comment by owenm in "(next Rich)"

owenm — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 20:57:27 +0000

FWIW, I started programming F# during your tenure at MS and in a couple of years it became a really capable cross platform option - partly MS, partly community, but definitely helped out by you. Thanks!

New comment by owenm in "My thoughts on OCaml"

owenm — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 17:24:18 +0000

Starting with F# on Mac is worlds away from what it was in the past, I bet you could be up and running in 5 minutes:

  brew install dotnet-sdk
  dotnet new console -lang F# (in your project directory)

Start VS Code in that directory, install ionide via extensions, write code…

  dotnet run

New comment by owenm in "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education"

owenm — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 09:26:40 +0000

This was me - my first .net language was F# (although I'd dabbled a tiny bit in C#); it was hard to learn the .net standard library as well as trying to learn functional idioms...

New comment by owenm in "Use the wrong tool for the job"

owenm — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 20:30:56 +0000

Very interesting - thanks! It's an interesting exercise thinking through some of the constraints and some of the engineering tradeoffs. Out of interest, how much development is actually done on device vs being done on another system and then loaded onto the SD card?

New comment by owenm in "Use the wrong tool for the job"

owenm — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 14:40:08 +0000

As a thought experiment, this got me thinking what would a solution just using .NET core look like? Obviously I don't have all the details but I think you can do all of those things in .NET (with the exception of the embedded stuff probably).

* Bluetooth and maps libraries are available for Xamarin, [1] [2]

* Control server could be written in C# using the .NET core worker template [3] and deployed as a SystemD service and then the SDK deployed as a package to enable local development.

* Cloud bridge deployed as a service or website using raw sockets, SignalR or Azure IOT hub (depending on requirements).

You'd end up with 2 languages instead of 5 and I suspect you'd be able to factor some code out into libraries as well...

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/user...

[2]: https://github.com/dotnet-bluetooth-le/dotnet-bluetooth-le

[3]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/net-core-and-systemd/

New comment by owenm in "Why Kubernetes is so complex"

owenm — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 07:58:12 +0000

I really like Azure Container Apps for this. It's a great way to dip into the world of containers.

New comment by owenm in "The struggles of building a feed reader"

owenm — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 08:55:26 +0000

Yes, you're right - I'm not from the US, but I think it's the classic example...

New comment by owenm in "The struggles of building a feed reader"

owenm — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 17:47:11 +0000

It's a diaeresis symbol rather than an umlaut, used (infrequently) to show that it's pronounced co-or rather than coor. Quite archaic, unless you're the New York Times, who use it as part of their house style, but not wrong!