Hacker News: munchler

New comment by munchler in "After AI Takes Everything"

munchler — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:30:32 +0000

> Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?

This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is:

Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth?

If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting.

I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.

New comment by munchler in "Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)"

munchler — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:00:25 +0000

As a kid, I liked arithmetic function machines that "magically" force a particular output or allow one to quickly deduce the input from the output. These are usually based on non-obvious (to a kid) identities. I would invent my own and then ask family members to play along. I'm not sure if this sort of puzzle game has a name?

A simple example:

- Multiply your number by 2

- Add 10

- Divide by 2

- Subtract the original number

New comment by munchler in "My new obsession: A horse-racing board game of pure luck"

munchler — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:51:35 +0000

The classic I remember from childhood is the card game "War". Assuming neither player cheats or makes a mistake, the outcome is totally predetermined.

New comment by munchler in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

munchler — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:07:40 +0000

If, say, a certain version of Claude tends to be better at front-end than back-end work, that can be important for deciding how to use it in the future. Just like when managing human developers.

New comment by munchler in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

munchler — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:01:04 +0000

> Disclose your "AI" tools in a merge request if needed but leave them out of the damn commits, those are for technical information and not for advertising.

I think this is very poor advice. Knowing who/what changed the code is often crucial for understanding why it changed.

New comment by munchler in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

munchler — Sun, 24 May 2026 04:44:11 +0000

All types of problems. F# can do almost anything C# can do and with less ceremony. The quote I like is that once you get comfortable with F#, switching back to C# is like "having to fill out government forms in triplicate".

New comment by munchler in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

munchler — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:26:50 +0000

Yes, all that stuff. I try to stick to F# where no special syntax is required for missing values (via Option).

New comment by munchler in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

munchler — Sat, 23 May 2026 21:49:46 +0000

Simple example:

   type Expr =
       | Primitive of int
       | Addition of (Expr * Expr)
       | Subtraction of (Expr * Expr)
       | Negation of Expr

New comment by munchler in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

munchler — Sat, 23 May 2026 21:23:18 +0000

All the weird cruft around nullability, for starters. Once again confirming that allowing null references is usually a mistake.

New comment by munchler in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

munchler — Sat, 23 May 2026 21:20:09 +0000

Unions are simpler than subclasses and more powerful than enums, so the use cases are plentiful. This should reduce the proliferation of verbose class hierarchies in C#. Algebraic data types (i.e. records and unions) can usually express domain models much more succinctly than traditional OO.

New comment by munchler in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

munchler — Sat, 23 May 2026 21:10:14 +0000

F# leads the way and C# slowly catches up, as always. Yet for some reason, C# still gets all the mindshare.

New comment by munchler in "Oura says it gets government demands for user data"

munchler — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:15:19 +0000

My understanding is that E2E encryption implies encryption in transit. The message is encrypted at the source and only decrypted at the destination, so it is encrypted everywhere in between.

New comment by munchler in "Chess invariants"

munchler — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:54:45 +0000

The point is that, logically, the first part of that rule (“expose the king”) is implied by the second part (“leave that king”), so the first part is redundant. You could simplify the rule to:

No piece can be moved that will leave the king of the same color in check.

New comment by munchler in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

munchler — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:36:52 +0000

If Google stops driving traffic to websites, won't those websites stop allowing Google to crawl their pages? The pendulum might be in motion, but it seems like there should still be some natural equilibrium that it's heading to.

New comment by munchler in "Disney erased FiveThirtyEight"

munchler — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:11:32 +0000

Well, that’s my point. You can model a coin flip, but you can’t predict it. A model and a prediction are two different things.

New comment by munchler in "Disney erased FiveThirtyEight"

munchler — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:53:43 +0000

I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.

Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.

New comment by munchler in "LinkedIn Fanfiction"

munchler — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:29:32 +0000

This is charming, but not at all like the soul-sucking content typical on LinkedIn.

New comment by munchler in "Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged"

munchler — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:03:16 +0000

The choppy language is the biggest trigger for me. Examples:

* "With Fraud Defense, there was no process to respond to. The product launched. The requirements page went live."

* "That is not a technical limitation waiting to be engineered around. It is the mechanism."

* "The defeat is mechanical. Bot operators point a camera at a screen, a trivial automation with off-the-shelf hardware."

I could be wrong, of course. Maybe humans are starting to write like LLM's, or maybe it's just confirmation bias on my part.

New comment by munchler in "Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged"

munchler — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:42:06 +0000

I think this is the third HN link I've clicked on in a row that leads to an LLM-generated article. I'm not opposed to AI, but I'm tired of seeing it quietly substituted for human thought and expression.

New comment by munchler in "A playable DOOM MCP app"

munchler — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:46:54 +0000

Thank you for this explanation. So the AI can respond based on the DOOM game that it’s watching? E.g. Could you ask the chatbot for advice on what to do next on the current game level?