News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

owenm

Re:Why it's impossible to measure England's coastline on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @03:43AM (#47762536)
Three countries - England, Scotland, Wales.
Re:Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @02:32PM (#47591548)
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...

Re:Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @01:53PM (#47591079)
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.

Any plans to make it available to other languages via bindings?
Re:Investing in the Python Ecosystem on Wednesday December 03, 2025 @02:51PM (#46139134)
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.
Re:RayforceDB is now an open-source project on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @07:19PM (#45894769)
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?
Re:Why F#? on Tuesday April 01, 2025 @09:24AM (#43546522)
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.
The Interlisp VM sounds awesome - I would love to see Notecards on Windows/Linux/Mac natively!
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.

Re:Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house? on Friday August 09, 2024 @03:45AM (#41199639)
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.

Re:(Next Rich) on Friday August 04, 2023 @04:57PM (#37005783)
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!
Re:My Thoughts on OCaml on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @01:24PM (#35703715)
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
Re:The Missing Semester of Your CS Education on Sunday February 26, 2023 @04:26AM (#34944232)
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...
Re:Use the Wrong Tool for the Job on Sunday January 22, 2023 @03:30PM (#34481884)
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?
Re:Use the Wrong Tool for the Job on Sunday January 22, 2023 @09:40AM (#34477779)
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/

Re:Why Kubernetes Is So Complex on Tuesday October 18, 2022 @03:58AM (#33244301)
I really like Azure Container Apps for this. It's a great way to dip into the world of containers.
Re:The struggles of building a feed reader on Sunday October 09, 2022 @04:55AM (#33139213)
Yes, you're right - I'm not from the US, but I think it's the classic example...
Re:The struggles of building a feed reader on Saturday October 08, 2022 @01:47PM (#33134357)
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!
Re:What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020) on Saturday September 10, 2022 @11:33AM (#32791540)
Of course, Teams uses SharePoint for file storage, so it’s basically the same thing for Microsoft, build on the things you have already.
Re:The Case for C# and .NET on Monday July 25, 2022 @07:40AM (#32223041)
I used to use Visual Studio and VSMac for my F# experimentation. Over the past couple of years, Ionide has got so much better that I've switched completely over to it from VS for all my F# work. The new 7.0 release a couple of days ago looks to have continued this trend.
Re:Inline Assembly in F# on Monday February 07, 2022 @01:27PM (#30248922)
I was in a similar position when I started learning F# - I'd say start with F#, but you will likely need to be able to read through some of the C# examples to work out how to do common things that rely on the .NET standard library if you haven't worked with .NET before (for example, if you want to read the contents of a file into memory, it's simple, but the examples on the MS site are in C# here and would need a small amount of translating: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/io/how-to-r...).
Re:Amber Smalltalk on Sunday February 14, 2021 @04:49AM (#26130929)
The Silk web framework built into Amber looks really interesting: https://lolg.it/herby/silk and an introduction here: https://smalltalkrenaissance.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/silk-i...