Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | outintospace's commentslogin

whynotboth.gif

Thanks for sharing the link. I built that site. :)

Awesome find. :)

That is correct. DJ Kurlander is the creator of Comic Chat and he is credited in the blog post. I'm just the guy that made the open source release happen, with DJ's support. He retired from Microsoft 20+ years ago.

I wrote that, not AI. There's a typo: it was supposed to be, "Is the Space Jam guy still playing baseball?" I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.

> I didn't have time to recreate the entire comic before publish date.

It's depressing that even a blog post about open sourcing a two decade old piece of software has such a hard deadline the author feels pressured to publish before they're ready.


Sorry to bring you down. I hope you can find joy in the rest of the work.

Hi, I'm Robert Standefer, the guy who made this happen, with lots of support. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm about Comic Chat being open sourced. How this came to happen is a very interesting story that spans a six-year period with success that hinged upon being in the right place at the right time, literally.

I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it.


Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out.

Man I hadn’t even thought of MSN Gaming Zone again until now yet spent who knows how many hours on it.

Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it

I used it to create a presentation for my talk at a conference last year. https://standefer.com/agent-platform-comic/about.html

I take that comic a bit personal, to be honest - I just returned from a two-month odyssey to find a way of offering our customers a simple way of connecting our MCP Server to their Copilot Chat. Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless support staff was, just as trying out four (four!) different ways to create an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere.

What's more, people seemed to be actively confused by the use case ("Why would your customers even want to use an external tool that isn't part of their Microsoft environment?").

I finally found out about "declarative agents", which seem to be able to do what I need. And if I don't trash my computer against the wall out of pure rage over page changes in partner center taking 15 seconds or longer, I might just be able to complete the 40-step form required for the marketplace listing. Progress!


Jerk City lives on, and is now known as Bonequest. Here's today's comic:

https://www.bonequest.com/


Wow just about to hit 10k comics too.

No shade on the author intended, as someone with no artistic talent this is a great idea for a way you could make them.


T DEUCE ME TOO HUGALUGAHGLGHLAHALHGGGGG

https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/


On occasion I meet one of the creators of that professionally. And then I always think of asking him about it. And then I don't do it.

I once worked with nearly all of those guys! A very interesting bunch....

You should (I assume it's Rands), he clearly does not want to be rembered as a Jerkcity guy now that he's a Serious Palantir Poobah.

I wonder if bong hits ever helped him with his Makefile.

Amazing timing, Jerkcity hits 10,000 strips in like two weeks.

Open sourcing code is always welcome.

However it's kind of weird that you choose this very explicit 1996 Embrace, extend, and extinguish piece of software to showcase. In this case it was IRC. In other cases it was Java, the web, etc.


Why is it every time some company people hate does anything good, no matter how trivial, people have to trash it?

Someone at MS made a fun IRC client. Thats it. It’s a WILDLY different world than 30 years ago and MS is a different company.

They released old code for those interested. Celebrate it.


Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: