Hacker News: stormcode

New comment by stormcode in "Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"

stormcode — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:31:38 +0000

Does it work? Absolutely. It just depends how you use it and what for.

I had 12 legacy node apps running node 4, with jQuery front ends. Outdated dependencies and best practices all over. No build pipeline. No tests. Express 3. All of it worked but it's aging to the point of no return. And the upgrade work is boring, with very little ROI.

In a month, without writing any code, I've got them all upgraded to Node 22, with updated dependencies, removed jQuery completely, newer version of express, better logging, improved UI.

It's work that would have taken me a year of my free time and been soul crushing and annoying.

Did it with codex as a way of better learning the tooling. It felt more like playing a resource sim game than coding. Pretty enjoyable. Was able to work on multiple tasks at once while doing some other work.

It worked really well for that.

New comment by stormcode in "US Government takes down major North Korean 'remote IT workers' operation"

stormcode — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 02:24:06 +0000

> The FBI seized 137 laptops as a result of the raids.

So close. 1200 more and it would have been epic.

New comment by stormcode in "Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon"

stormcode — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 13:43:06 +0000

What's the symbology there?

New comment by stormcode in "Hacker Typer"

stormcode — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 16:14:02 +0000

Love this app, the GitHub is easy to clone and modify as well. Used it for a game once.

New comment by stormcode in "Destigmatizing Drug Use Has Been a Profound Mistake"

stormcode — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 15:41:50 +0000

It sure does. That was an uncomfortable read. Lots of implications in that statement. Many of them ungood.

New comment by stormcode in "Evennia: MUD/MU* creation system"

stormcode — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 03:56:32 +0000

ToastStunt is an actively developed fork of Stunt which is a fork of LambdaMOO. It's extended a lot of what LambdaMOO offered via patches, as well as adding a lot of new and much needed stuff. Active Discord community as well. And several large MOOs are running it instead of LambdaMOO these days.

https://github.com/lisdude/toaststunt

New comment by stormcode in "Evennia: MUD/MU* creation system"

stormcode — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 03:53:50 +0000

Great write up and very very true. The MUD I staff has a running joke (but also not a joke) that the first one of us to win the lottery will just pay everyone to admin it.

New comment by stormcode in "Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet"

stormcode — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 22:29:33 +0000

In a way, yes. I vape instead of smoking. But it isn't the same. It's a different way to get nicotine, like dipping. And vaping was, AFAIK, more of a grass roots thing than a Big Tobbaco thing, at least at first. It felt like Big Tobbaco was caught kinda unawares when vaping became very popular and ended up buying a bunch of vape companies.

New comment by stormcode in "Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet"

stormcode — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 22:27:22 +0000

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this.

New comment by stormcode in "Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet"

stormcode — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 22:17:45 +0000

It's a little surprising to me that no company has come out with a 'healthier cigarette'. They could claim to do the acid washing and all the things mentioned in the article in their advertising. Probably without actually saying their cigarettes are healthier but instead focusing on what other companies don't do (the acid wash) and the cancer causing carcinogens their competition's cigarettes contain that their own do not.

That would hook people who enjoy smoking but also enjoy not dying. Even if they are just deluding themselves. It would at least get me (former smoker) curious.

I've also always wondered if Big Tobbaco was working to cure cancer. It would make business sense. If we cured the types of cancer that smoking causes... A lot more people would probably smoke. (Obviously there are other issues like emphasima).

New comment by stormcode in "ErlMUD Commentary"

stormcode — Sun, 21 May 2023 02:22:57 +0000

Have you checked out ToastStunt at all? C++ fork of Stunr which is itself a fork of LambdaMOO.

New comment by stormcode in "ChatGPT Plugins"

stormcode — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 04:25:36 +0000

I dig the Hackers reference.

New comment by stormcode in "Google releases Bard to a limited number of users in the US and UK"

stormcode — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 04:29:17 +0000

Comparing Bard to Bing and GOT4 today. Bard was the worst of the bunch. Bing was actually the best overall. Not surprising since it's basically GPT4+Search context.

Bard did do fairly well on some of the questions I asked that were things google would be good at answering. Did not do well at all on generating code in more obscure languages.

New comment by stormcode in "Not deploying on Friday is a red flag indicating a seriously broken process"

stormcode — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 04:30:45 +0000

I don't generally agree with this take. I also don't think allowing deploys on Friday and letting the team decide their risk/reward ratio is a bad thing. Teams should be empowered to make their own decisions. If they are consistently making bad decisions that will become apparent and can be addressed in a variety of ways. Most likely by the team itself because they don't want to be working on the weekend.

New comment by stormcode in "Ask HN: Great text based games to play?"

stormcode — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 23:48:34 +0000

https://www.mudverse.com/ is actively maintained.

New comment by stormcode in "Ask HN: Great text based games to play?"

stormcode — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 23:47:07 +0000

Grapevine is awesome. Good call-out.

New comment by stormcode in "Ask HN: Great text based games to play?"

stormcode — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 23:46:23 +0000

https://www.mudverse.com/

New comment by stormcode in "Class-action lawsuit filed against US state agency over mobile 'spyware'"

stormcode — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 05:40:57 +0000

I remember finding this BS on my phone and being pretty annoyed about it.

New comment by stormcode in "Fencer Matthias Behr takes in relatives of the opponent he stabbed (2022)"

stormcode — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 05:12:01 +0000

I got flicked in the back of the head at a tourney a few weeks ago!

New comment by stormcode in "Fencer Matthias Behr takes in relatives of the opponent he stabbed (2022)"

stormcode — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 05:11:27 +0000

Beginners are the most dangerous to fence against in my experience. They don't move like you expect, they flail and flourish and smack you in weird spots with the flat of the blade. All the worst bruises I have gotten have been fencing newbies. It isn't their fault, they are still learning. But owww.