LICEcap: Simple Animated Screen Captures - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockos.com/licecap/ <comment><USER2> From macOS Catalina on, there's a new screen capture mode under cmd + shift + 5, that includes mp4 recording capture. That's replaced most of my previous Giphy Capture use.

<comment><USER3> MP4s aren't as supported as GIFs. Even if you convert them they'll be heavier than LICEcap's results because of the MPEG compression artifacts

<comment><USER4> > MP4s aren't as supported as GIFs.

That's barely true for H.264 and it is a much worse format in every other way. Effective quality is higher with modern video formats because the lower data rates afford higher resolutions and higher frame rates. Even the LICEcap demos show that.

It's a neat tool, the user interface is really cool, but it would be better in a different format.

<comment><USER5> This would be more true if sites like GitHub would allow uploading and embedding of MP4 files where they allow GIFs. But that's not usually the case unless you go through something Gyfy first.

<comment><USER4> Fair, I was thinking more about device compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember I accidentally left Licecap running for about 6 hours and it just generated this massive unoptimized binary blob of raw screen grabs on my disk. Generated a file so large that Windows was complaining it had no space left to do vital things like allocate memory to swap and other tasks.

</comment><comment><USER7> For a Linux alternative (which is not supported by LICEcap), I recommend Peek[1].

[1] [https://github.com/phw/peek](https://github.com/phw/peek)

<comment><USER8> This one [1] works well for me on Linux, it allows exporting to many different formats. You can even make the recording rectangle follow your cursor, works well with multiple screens too.

Still looking for something that allows panning and zooming while recording, on Linux or Windows.

[1] [https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/](https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/)

<comment><USER9> I can second the SimpleScreenRecorder suggestion; it is amazing and feature- rich yet still relatively straightforward to use.

For panning and zooming, you could try to use a screen magnifier such as KMag and then have SSR record the KMag window?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is such a great tool which deserves a wider audience. I honestly think that more people would hear about it & use it if it had a less unappealing name.

<comment><USER11> Agree, every time I recommend it to someone I feel the need to qualify it with "the name is really weird, but trust me it's a great tool". It would be hard to come up with anything that is more random/irrelevant to the functionality, and also more off-putting than "lice".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> On Windows, I use ShareX[1], which is free, open-source, lightweight, and has tons of useful features. I love it!

There used to be an issue with ShareX where, by default, it uploaded screenshots and recordings to free online sharing sites, so that you could quickly share links to your files with others. I am not sure if this is still the case, but if you want to give ShareX a try and don't want your files online, make sure to disable this option.

1\. [https://getsharex.com](https://getsharex.com)

<comment><USER13> While somewhat the default, there is a prompt on the first capture if you would like to upload it. Selecting No will be remembered until toggled manually in the user settings

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love LICEcap. I would use the built in video capture from macOS, but LICEcap produces files that are much smaller.

The quality isn't as good, but most gifs I am producing are meant to be viewed in slack or iMessage where the quality is not super important.

</comment><comment><USER15> For Windows you can use ScreenToGif ([https://www.screentogif.com/](https://www.screentogif.com/)), which does exactly the same thing + you can edit your GIF afterwards.

<comment><USER16> This one's my favorite, use it all the time at work. It even downloaded ffmpeg for me, which was a nice bonus, and is easily portable

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is one of the best little tools around AFAICT.

The Windows version "installer" can be opened with 7-zip and double clicking on \licecap128-install.exe\licecap-exe (155877 bytes) the program works just fine from within the archive.

</comment><comment><USER18> Convenient to use and very helpful for technical illustrations. For ex, I created the gifs here [1] using LICEcap - showing a class boundary in 3D space. Have been using it at work for a couple of years now.

[1] [https://blog.statsbot.co/support-vector-machines- tutorial-c1...](https://blog.statsbot.co/support-vector-machines- tutorial-c1618e635e93) sorry, couldn't find a gif to directly link to. If you don't want to scroll, ctrl+F for the text "This is what the projected data looks like". There are two consecutive gifs, then a static image, and then another gif after that.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have been using this for 5 years now. Great for demos, bug report, etc. Super light weight. Everyone I recommend it to loves it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Cockos is the company that also develops Reaper, which is probably the best audio production software out there.

<comment><USER21> Which is Justin Frankel of Winamp fame

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a really useful tool and I had been using it for quite a while before I learned that Cockos is the new name of Justin Frankel's company. He who made Winamp and Gnutella.

<comment><USER23> And Reaper! The best DAW for music and podcast production because it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I didn't realize all these were made by the same company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> LICEcap is great. Unfortunately I always need or want to edit the gifs afterwards.

That's where ezgif [1] comes into play. I'm usually not a fan of web apps, but ezgif works well and I never found a offline gif editor that capable. It's amazing how hard you can optimize a gif if you can live with less frames or a few artifacts.

[1] [https://ezgif.com/](https://ezgif.com/)

<comment><USER25> With LICEcap you can always record to .lcf and edit with REAPER then you render to GIF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used to use LICEcap, but for some reason it was failing me (I don't remember what). I went on a journey (through 10 Mac gif makers) to find the "best" gif maker and I settled on GIF Brewery[1] and I've never looked back.

[1] - [https://gfycat.com/gifbrewery](https://gfycat.com/gifbrewery)

<comment> noman-land I've had trouble doing captures on a second monitor; the gifs turn out all black. I always move my items to my laptop monitor before capturing and that does the trick.

<comment><USER27> This dual monitor capture bug was a pain point. Unhooking the monitor each time I wanted to capture a non-blank gif wore me down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For Windows ScreenToGif seems to be one of the best due to a small footprint and features available.

On Mac I was using LICECap as well, but wasn't too satisfied with the blurry picture, color palette and low frame rate, although it's still good if needed urgently.

Trying to find something else I bumped into Kap[1] with mp4, gif and webm format exporting, also simple trimming is included. I'm not that happy to know that it's an Electron-based app, but that's the price. Apart from that the size of webm files is even smaller than mp4 and browser support is pretty good these days.

[1] [https://github.com/wulkano/kap](https://github.com/wulkano/kap)

</comment><comment><USER29> Back when I was just a wee tike hoping I could record my screen to make machinima or perhaps even Runescape videos, screen recording was the holy grail of cool tools that were hard to access or nowhere near accessible. I'm talking Camtasia, that sort of thing. It seems like a very obvious result of the level of technology we have at our disposal now but it still warms my heart that there are so many ways to freely and virtually tap friends and strangers on the shoulder and show them what's happening on our screen.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here's a similar one that does webm, mp4 and gif [https://github.com/tarkusdev/WebMCam](https://github.com/tarkusdev/WebMCam)

</comment><comment><USER31> One tip - for UI based Pull Requests/Merge Requests, consider attaching a LICEcap GIF of the before and after if you don't have any screenshot testing set up.

I work on a pretty front-end-intensive app ([https://wanderlog.com](https://wanderlog.com)) and it makes code reviews way easier, as you can see the change in context.

The gifs occasionally can go over the 10 MB cap that Gitlab allows, and in those cases I do a quick re-encode using Handbrake to a mp4 video.

<comment><USER32> I really wished github would allow mp4 videos in the pull-request/issue threads. Getting a capture of the bug makes things easy. Being able to control the playback of the demo would be even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> A bit from 2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695308)

</comment><comment><USER34> You should also give gifcap[1] a try. It's cross platform, browser based, client side only, with a preview editor which allows you to trim and crop the recording.

[1] [https://gifcap.dev](https://gifcap.dev)

<comment><USER34> Plus, it's open source: [https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap](https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I really love LICEcap, I've been using it for years. It's a simple program that does exactly what it advertises to do, no fluff.

</comment><comment><USER36> I haven't seen any mention of what I think is the best gif screen recording app, Claquette. It's quite advanced and has built in cropping/trimming. The exported GIFs are high quality and somehow magically quite small file size.

[https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/](https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/)

<comment><USER37> Is it still maintained? The latest release notes are from 2018.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> LICEcap is great software - we use it extensively on my team to share little highlight reels of a given feature in pull requests

</comment><comment><USER39> I used this constantly for things like making demo "videos". Great tool. The only thing that drew me away was using a cloud based screen capture tool so that after capture the gif/video was already being pushed to a url I could share. It's wild how just saving me a step or two makes all the difference in adoption of somthing.

</comment><comment><USER40> Any idea why it's called LICEcap? Feel like I'm missing something obvious. I get the cap part, but not the LICE.

<comment><USER41> See [https://www.cockos.com/wdl/](https://www.cockos.com/wdl/)

LICE - Lightweight Image Compositing Engine. WDL is a small cross platform library they have built to support the development of REAPER afaik

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Its an amazing tool to quickly record product feature demos for sales pages, or visual aids for user support cases.

</comment><comment><USER43> LICEcap is really nice for making itch.io covers. I'm a big fan of it!

</comment><comment><USER44> I recently found [https://gifcap.dev/](https://gifcap.dev/). Performance is slow, but good to use if I can't install software on a machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> The best part of LICEcap is that the result is often quite lightweight, even though the color palette isn't always the best.

Too bad it's a little buggy on macOS (especially Catalina)

<comment><USER45> On macOS, I use GIPHY Capture - not open-source but free and works much better than LICEcap.

edit: just noticed this comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692523)

<comment><USER3> I'd rather not use yet another bloated Electron app. The bugs can be overcome and the results are not affected

<comment><USER45> It is actually a native and fast Swift app and its only feature that can be considered 'bloated' is instant upload to giphy.com (which I have never used).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I used this for years until gifcam came out...now I use it whenever I'm on a retired machine that does not have internet connection anymore

</comment><comment><USER47> My only problem with this is that I can't get a high enough frame-rate.

Oh, anyone else noticed that it sometimes creates a 1px white line on an edge?

<comment><USER48> Yes, the frame rate seems to cap out at ~15-20 fps, and captured images really don't play well with Discord in most cases. I usually open then re-export with Gimp when posting to Discord, which isn't a great workflow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This still works for latest macOS? I tried it the other day and the record button didn't do anything.

<comment><USER50> Make sure you have the .gif extension on your filename. Fixed it for me on Catalina. See [https://github.com/justinfrankel/licecap/issues/71#issuecomm...](https://github.com/justinfrankel/licecap/issues/71#issuecomment-542028032)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is there any capture solution that will post directly to Slack? With transcriptions?

</comment><comment><USER52> LICEcap is a good bit of software. I also really enjoy OBS which allows for narration.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is anybody else mildly annoyed by the proliferation of meaningful or instructive gifs. Videos have been supported on by all major browsers for almost a decade now. And videos are both smaller in size and provide better interaction for viewers. Why are we still recording gifs?

<comment><USER53> Nope, the opposite. Markdown + animated gif has been a great improvement in the world in recent years. The Visual Studio Code release information pages are an example: [https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_43](https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_43) \- this page with uBlock is about as good as the modern web gets. I don't love how long it takes to load, but if they were videos I had to click to play, that would be worse.

Video, video buffering, video with broken skipping, players blocked by ad blockers, players that take ages to load and contact tons of sites, autoplaying video, video which pops out to picture-in-picture and floats over the content, video with adverts interrupting playback, video with overlays interrupting the video, video which stalls midway through, video which breaks if you leave it paused long enough for some session to timeout and it can't resume, video which often re-downloads after skipping back to an already- downloaded section, has been the opposite of a great improvement.

Twitter feeds in a browser where the videos auto-play as you scroll over them, but play without sound so you have to mute your audio, unmute the video, then restart it to catch whether you missed anything - but if you click wrong it whisks you away to load that tweet in a new page and reloads everything including the video muted again - are the worst of all worlds.

> _And videos are smaller in size_

Even as someone who whines a lot about efficiency and waste and bloaty websites, this is still a time I'd rather say "if gif is too big, find a way to make gif smaller, not replace them with a worse experience".

<comment><USER32> Your comparison is unfair. Authors can make videos autoplay, play on scroll or whatever. Authors don't need to put ads or trackers in their videos, and there is nothing stopping them from adding ads or trackers to a gif (replace the source with an ad every couple of loops; in fact the 1px transparent gif is the original tracker). Everything else you complained about can also be present with gifs (except the picture-in-picture; which is simply not a feature animated gifs).

Your twitter complaints for example is completely invalid, gifs cannot play sound at all, nor can you start from beginning if you wanted to. In fact I find it very frustrating to have to wait an entire loop to wait for an instructional gif to start from scratch, with videos you can auto-play on scroll, you can pause, you can rewind, etc.

Btw. your favorite vs-code website stalls in my browser, spins up my fan and scrolls really sluggishly because of all the gifs.

<comment><USER53> My complaints about what people actually do are unfair, because you can imagine things being different? Load a page with a video which doesn't play immediately and a gif which doesn't play immediately, and it's annoying for both, then leave it for a bit and the gif will very likely load then loop so I don't miss it when I look back, the video is as likely to play then autoplay the next 'related' video so if I don't wait, I do miss it. Gifs tend to sit inside a mobile page while loading, then play in-place ready to be scrolled back to. Videos tend to fullscreen when played and _then_ have to be waited for, or start playing tiny then have to be fullscreened and restarted to watch. Gifs tend to scale with pinch-zoom, videos don't. It's not that the gif file format mandates that they must loop, or that video codecs mandate playlists, but that's what people actually do with them and all those things together make videos a worse experience for anything which doesn't need to be long form video.

Authors don't need to put ads in videos but they do. I have never seen a gif say "an error occurred, try again later" when I try to unpause it, like YouTube says several times each day for videos I paused yesterday. (inb4 "works on my machine"). Authors could replace gif frames with ads but they generally don't, and haven't done so for years.

> _Your twitter complaints for example is completely invalid, gifs cannot play > sound at all_

Excellent. This means I a) never miss something in the audio track, because there isn't one. b) never have to take action unmute a gif. c) never have to mute music and unmute a gif and rewind it just to find out if there is audio to miss or not. d) Nobody ever says "don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell, thanks from my Patreon sponsors like xxSwagMaster, buy my merch and smash that like button" on a gif. This means gifs can't be a replacement for all video, nor am I suggesting they should be; only saying I prefer to err on the side of gif more than most people, because the experience is generally less annoying (not completely annoyance-free).

> _I find it very frustrating to have to wait an entire loop to wait for an > instructional gif to start from scratch_

Me too. It would be neat if right click -> reload image, restarted it, or if there was a restart option in the right click menu.

> _with videos you can auto-play on scroll_

You can also be listening to a Twitter video, scroll it juuuust off screen, and have Twitter decide you must have gone deaf as well and pause playing. You can also no longer watch a YouTube video and lock your iPhone to keep the audio playing, like you could a few iOS versions ago. This is nothing to do with video codecs per-se, it's just part and parcel of video on the web and the companies which control it and the things people do with it to grab control and commercialise and overreach. Apparently nobody cares about gif enough to do that kind of thing with it - or it's so limited, there are fewer places to do that kind of thing.

> Btw. your favorite vs-code website stalls in my browser, spins up my fan and > scrolls really sluggishly because of all the gifs.

"That thing you like, sucks" \- well, different things for different people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's a must

</comment><comment><USER55> There's ttygif for Linux that does the same.</comment>


It seems that it is impossible to get to level 10 - <AUTHOR> https://thundershotgames.github.io/Pamman/ <comment><AUTHOR> I would be most grateful if you could try and comment my game. Help me to spread a bit of my passion.

<comment><USER2> Ok let's kick things off with mixed content security warning. You must change all http resources to https. Just look at browser console.</comment></comment>


Why I Dropped Everything and Started Teaching Kendrick Lamar's New Album - <AUTHOR> https://bemoons.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/why-i-dropped-everything-and-started-teaching-kendrick-lamars-new-album/ <comment><USER2> I just had a teacher do the exact same thing. Its all about the narrative.</comment>


Dr. Seuss' arms race allegory - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailyfig.com/2016/08/15/dr-seuss-satrical-lesson-on-nuclear-armament-and-the-absurdity-of-war/ <comment><USER2> Some fun facts and thoughts:

\- Seuss sought input on the book from his acquaintance, marine General Victor H. Krulak.

\- Like _The Lorax_ , the story is structured as a tale from an older generation to a modern one, where the younger character is a stand-in for the reader.

\- As much as Seuss was against transparent moralizing, he delighted in obvious satire, and he wasn't afraid of being too on the nose. The Chief Yookeroo, the back-room boys with their slide rules and spectacles, the butter-up band. The "Your yookery" sign. The slavic-named antagonist VanItch.

\- This book is interesting to compare with Seuss' editorial cartoons decades earlier, during WWII. At that time, he was producing unabashed anti-axis propaganda. During his lifetime, he had not just observed the kind of wartime fervor the Yooks subscribed to - he had been an active participant in it. [http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/](http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/)

\- Writing a funny and poignant children's book about nuclear war is a hell of a challenge. _The Butter Battle Book_ is a masterpiece.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing I think many people fail to consider is that, contrary to perception, we have entered into one of the most peaceful eras in all of humanity, and nuclear weapons are likely largely responsible for that peace. It's easy to fail to see the peace amongst all the war, and the media anxious to report for weeks on end about any violent event of significant scale.

However, look at things in terms of scale. 9/11 was considered an atrocious and unprecedented event. 2,996 lives lost in a matter of hours. Look at something like World War 2. In World War 2 the total death toll was around 75 million with a world population of about 2.3 billion. That's 248 million lives lost scaled up to today's population. Think about that. That would be the equivalent of a 9/11 event happening every single day for 83,555 days. Or a 9/11 event every single day for 229 years.

That sort of loss of life is completely unimaginable. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of lives lost. The Mongol Invasions in the 13th century killed off 35 million people. The colonization of America resulted in deaths that are difficult to measure but it was also in the high tens of millions at the minimum.

But today even if we look at places we ignore, like Iraq, the high end of the death tolls there are around 1 million. And a big part of the reason for the dramatic decline in war is because of nukes. If not for nuclear weapons we would have long since had a World War 3 as Europe, China, and the US vied to determine whose ideology would become the world ideology. And it's extremely possible we could have seen the first war with a death toll in excess of a billion. Instead we live in an era when a few hundred people being killed in one act is something that shakes the entire western world for months.

Mutually assured destruction may be MAD, but it demonstrates quite clearly peace sustained by self interest alone is vastly more effective than any peace built on words and promises.

<comment><USER4> "Not as bad as WWII" isn't much of a standard for world peace.

If you total up casualties from the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia then you might be surprised at just how many violent deaths have transpired in the past decade. What's more, many of these conflicts have significantly outlived WWII in duration. Will the humpty dumpty of Syria ever be put together again? Probably not as long as it's the proxy battleground for regional powers.

What we might be seeing, rather than real peace, is a disparity of safety from violence. Some countries will be bomb-wrecked hellscapes for decades, while others fund those conflicts but don't think about them too much (except for when terrorists show up to burst our bubbles).

<comment><USER5> I don't think the world has ever seen a decade without any major armed conflict. Immediately after WWII we had the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the first Indo-Pakistani war, war in French Indochina-- and virtually all of those involved either major world powers or extremely populous countries.

There hasn't been a direct conflict between two major powers since the Korean War. Such a conflict would result in unprecedented levels of death and destruction even without nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons, it becomes impossible. Sure, sometimes there are wars between tin-pot dictators and insurgents in pickup trucks, but there have always been those wars. What we don't have anymore are modern, industrialized nations killing millions of each other's citizens in an attempt to press their respective claims on Alsace- Lorraine.

And if anything, that's a sign of hope. If Alsace-Lorraine can move beyond decades of being a bomb-wrecked hellscape, perhaps Damascus or Aleppo or Kirkuk or Mogadishu can some day achieve the same peace. Just as (fingers crossed) Sarajevo has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ohh man, the memories around this book. Lets just say it was required reading for intel analysts at my base, and we found every way possible to reference it in our reports/briefings.

For example, the SA-6 was known as a "three sling jigger"

<comment><USER7> Once upon a time we escorted an Air Force convoy whose commander referred to the enemy as "butter-side-down people".

<comment><USER6> Yes!

I wonder if they happened to come from Eielson AFB. (Not expecting you to know that, but it makes me smile knowing that it stuck)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with the premise halfway in the article. My generation has not grown to fear the bombs as the previous generation did. When someone of my generation is behind the buttons, I wonder if somewhere in the back of their minds there isn't a part of them that says 'perhaps in this and this situation it'd be okay to press the big red button?'.

I think the horror that war/these weapons cause will slowly drift from collective memory in mainstream western society. The warnings of the previous generation will be an endorsement of the destructive power of these weapons, instead of a deterrent of their usage.

<comment><USER9> With nuclear war there isn't just one worst case scenario but two. On the one hand even a small scale nuclear exchange with modern thermonuclear weapons could be so incredibly devastating that it would set back human civilization substantially, disrupting the entire global economy and technological/industrial/agricultural infrastructure, perhaps even leading to a cascading collapse of civilization. On the other hand, it might not. In which case people might be encouraged to think (as was common during too much of the Cold War) that nuclear weapons could just be shuffled into the military toolkit, for occasional use in "ordinary" warfare.

I grew up in the '80s, and I well remember the omnipresent feeling of dread that I'm sure most people from that generation experienced on a regular basis. Everyone knew that global catastrophe was a moment away, that any moment of any day a missile could be launched and only minutes later nuclear annihilation would rain down. You can see that in the popular media at the time, of course, the Terminator movies being a particular example, but countless others expressing that feeling (some more direct than others). It's difficult to explain what that feeling and that deep-seated knowledge is like without having experienced it. At the end of the Cold War it felt like a great weight was lifted from the world. But since then, especially most recently, it's felt that that weight has been incrementally coming back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's absurd to me that chemical and biological weapons are banned, but nuclear weapons are not.

There is an international campaign to ban nuclear weapons, and I hope more people learn about it. The organization won the nobel peace prize in 2017.

Many nations last year signed on to the ban. Let's encourage the rest to also sign it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abolish_Nuclear_Weapons)

<comment><USER3> The 'rules of war' are written by those on top, and they tend to benefit them. Chemical/biological weapons are relatively easy to make for smaller nations, and their development can be disguised. Nuclear weapons are the opposite on both accounts. As an aside, this is a recurring theme throughout history. Chivalry, for instance, had a not coincidental effect of ensuring that knights were very rarely killed in most battles.

Look for what can't be done in warfare and it tends to have a direct link to strengthening (or sustaining) the established powers at the expense of 'lesser' forces.

<comment><USER11> > Chivalry, for instance, had a not coincidental effect of ensuring that > knights were very rarely killed in most battles.

Which is the goal of any 'rules of combat' \- to formalize the process in a way which reduces the actual damage done (or at least, the damage done to those writing the rules).

It's no different to the way cats will hiss and growl and spit at each other but will usually try and avoid actually fighting. Both sides have too much to lose unless a fight is really necessary.

<comment><USER3> It had nothing to do with reducing the actual damage done. Disemboweling an unarmed and yielding infantryman was considered perfectly chivalrous. Chivalric warfare only applied to the self preservation of those in power at the time, which would be the knights and other ruling class individuals.

<comment><USER12> Reducing the damage done to people who matter, i.e. knights...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the fact that we only dropped two nukes in anger is absolutely shocking; it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality. It goes against everything else I think I know of humanity, especially against the previous history of the 20th century, against everything I know of human nature.

I mean, I'm not saying it's good we still have nukes pointed at oneanother, but we're still alive, and that's the best historical evidence I've found that humans aren't completely self-destructive.

<comment><USER14> > it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality

It's probably more of an affirmation that humans behave better when accountable for their actions. Two nukes were dropped when the enemy of the bomber had no way to retaliate in kind, and no more have been dropped since that stopped being true.

<comment><USER15> US was the only nuclear power for several years though.

<comment><USER14> About four years from Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the USSR's first successful test. Soviets had the bomb before the Korean War.

<comment><USER15> True. (Though the USSR's first successful air drop wasn't until Oct 1951, well into the Korea War.)

Soviet nukes were not why the U.S. held back in Korea. It was the unpleasant prospect of a war with China (albeit a non-nuclear China).

[https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/how-korean- war...](https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/how-korean-war-almost- went-nuclear-180955324/)

And it didn't use them in Vietnam because it was thought to require so many (dozens/hundreds) as to be the antithesis of reunification.

\---

In short, the US avoided nukes for decades in the hope of peace, not because there were any nukes sighted on D.C. (MAD).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait, is this book not well known? My kid dressed up as one of the lab guys for his "literacy day" character (since we can't just have _Halloween_ costumes...).

</comment><comment><USER17> I was surprised to learn that the book had been banned in some libraries, although in hindsight, perhaps I shouldn't have been. It would explain why I didn't know about the book until sometime in my late 20s.

Reading it, it was immediately apparent to me that it was a cold war allegory, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I didn't recall Dr. Seuss books having much in the way of sociopolitical commentary, and I still don't, outside stories like Yertle the Turtle or The Lorax. If the politics apparent in Yertle the Turtle went over my head as a child, it's possible that other allegories went over my head as well. I should go back and read those books again.

<comment><USER18> I happened to read this to my 4 year olds a few weeks ago after finding it at my Mother-in-law's house. I can tell you that at least for 4 year olds, it's just a book about buttered bread.

My son asked for butter side down bread at lunch and my daughter asked for butter side up.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. To the degree that Dr Seuss' books had a sociopolitical moral, whether or not I picked up on it depended how old I was when I (re)read it and what i was aware of in the world at the time. I picked up on the environmental message in the Lorax the first time through. But then again, "Save the envrionment, kids!" was very much a part of the zeitgeist from the late 80s into the mid-late 90s. The anti-discrimination message of the Sneetches on Beaches didn't hit me until I was old enough to realize that having different skin color was an intrinsic thing that people cared about only if they wanted to be meanies, and not simply people who'd gotten more sun tanning time than me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think this book elucidates something that I miss in most popular discussions, which is _fragility_. As the two sides escalate, the entire system becomes more fragile.

E.g., the dude at the beginning uses a slingshot which has the consequence of breaking one other dude's stick. Not so fragile. But by the end neither dude can use their weapon at all without destroying _everything_ on _both_ sides of the fence. And the capabilities to use the weapon is put directly in the hands of the two dudes and no one else. Extremely fragile.

Is this a studied phenomenon? For example, does the auto industry measure fragility wrt putting networked self-driving cars on the highway?

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm amazed that given the depth of Dr Seuss's work its stuff like Cat in the Hat that is the most exposed. Ever since I went through his work to read to a small child I know i've been amazed at how useful and framed in reality the less known stories are (e.g. Sneeches at Beaches, Yrtle the Turtle).

<comment><USER21> The "Voom" in the Cat in The Hat Comes Back is thought to be a metaphor for the bomb.

<comment><USER17> By whom? To me, it was always a fun noise to say as loud and dramatically as possible, so to annoy my younger sister when I read the story to her. I'd always read it as a silly bit of deus ex machina employed to end the story, as we'd run out of letters in the alphabet.

Metaphor for a bomb? Maybe. But I doubt Dr. Seuss was trying to put forward the lesson to children that when you're out of ideas, the thing to do is blow it all up. I honestly think he was being silly for the sake of whimsy and amusement.

<comment><USER22> By me? As far as I know it's the most powerful object in any Seuss book and it derives that power from something so small it's invisible.

It's where my thoughts immediately went on first reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We read this to our kids from early on, they understand - there are even more lesser known Seuss books ...

His 'adult' "The 7 Lady Godivas' with, shock! nudity ....

[https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven- lady...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady- godivas/)

And my favourite - 'The Kings Stilts':

[https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic- Seuss/dp/0394800...](https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic- Seuss/dp/0394800826/)

</comment><comment><USER24> It was also turned into an animated short, directed by Ralph Bakshi[0]:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl- oOI7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I)

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Televis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Television_special)

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if he changed his mind after the war. During the war, he drew a lot of anti-Japanese and anti-German propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER26> What I find amazing is how that it was so hard for people to just say no to nuclear weapons. So we have literature that aludes to the topic rather than speak about things directly. It is cowardly to write some allegorical tale about how wicked the rulers are, setting everything in a fanciful animal kingdom. Authors should write up rather than down for children, most ten year olds may not have adult reading ability but plenty do. They can be told the truth about the world.

<comment><USER27> If I am given the choice between 'A world with nuclear weapons' and 'A world without nuclear weapons', I would choose the latter every time.

However, no person or nation is ever given THAT choice. The choice is always between 'A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, and yours does, too' and 'A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, but not yours'.

Given that choice, I would probably pick the former. It doesn't make you immoral to not want to be the country without nuclear weapons when others have them.</comment></comment>


Announcing TypeScript 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2014/04/02/announcing-typescript-1-0.aspx <comment><USER3> The typescript playground[1], which lets you try TypeScript in your browser, looks so professional and finished when compared to CoffeeScript[2] or Dart[3]. As someone who attempted a half-baked Rust to JavaScript transpiler[4], I am floored with the packaging of TypeScript (tutorials, specs, editor integrations, npm, playground). At the moment, the only missing feature that my jealousy could point out is autoscrolling (see lexer example in my demo)!

By the way, is playground using v1.0?

[1] [http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/](http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/)

[2] [http://coffeescript.org/](http://coffeescript.org/) (Try CoffeeScript tab)

[3] [http://try.dartlang.org/](http://try.dartlang.org/)

[4] [http://bilalhusain.com/rust- lexer/syntax.html](http://bilalhusain.com/rust-lexer/syntax.html)

<comment><USER4> I don't think any of them are very polished or professional.

The CoffeeScript site reports errors unintuitively yet visibly in the top- right corner. The TypeScript site requires that you scroll right to the error and then realize it's not just your browser complaining about a misspelling. But both are better than the Dart sandbox, which basically only says "error".

None of them get page layout right. Dart and TypeScript have obvious input/output boxes, but both get demerits for their handling of overflow. Dart just grows the box which is acceptable, but TypeScript thinks their customized scroll bars are better than native. CoffeeScript handles overflow reasonably, but it's a big translucent overlay causing all sorts of moire on my screen.

I suppose if you're on a Windows computer you might be tricked into thinking the TypeScript page looks reasonable, since it probably fits in. For me, though, I'm having a hell of a time figuring out what's a button and what's not.

<comment><USER3> I hope the respective developers are listening. It should be noted that most of these 'try X' editors are not marketed as a product, but I do agree that calling it 'professional' was mistake. The warts show up during heavy usage of a tool (the overflow example) and I was quick to reach conclusions based on the first impressions. But all the features like completion, line numbers, syntax highlighting do deserve respect (I couldn't find a better executed alternative!).

Also, confirming that I am on a Windows computer :)

<comment><USER5> The Try it for CoffeeScript was meant to be extremely simple, not to replace JSFiddle and such. The errors will be moved to the output area in next release. Someone might get around to implementing proper editor into it (say CodeMirror). That said, MS has people they pay for developing TypeScript, CoffeeScript is just of bunch of folks who enjoy working on the compiler and helping others. You certainly shouldn't expect the same level of secondary effort as in Dart or TypeScript - yet I think CoffeeScript is doing great on this front.

<comment><USER6> I described some details that would help implement a rich code editor (like CodeMirror) in Try CoffeeScript in this issue:

"Use rich code editor in Try CoffeeScript on coffeescript.org" – [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee- script/issues/3076](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/3076)

I'm glad to hear that compile errors will finally be displayed in the output area in the next release ([https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee- script/pull/3425](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/pull/3425)). If anyone feels like improving that interface even further, they could try implementing the mockup in this issue:

"Highlight code errors and move error message in Try CoffeeScript" – [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee- script/issues/3077](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/3077)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am huge believer in typescript. This has made me consider html5 seriously for the first time.

There are still many dark spots (hello js scope, bs standards), but with Typescript I've already built stuff I could have only done AIR in the past.

I find it ironic that MSFT tried to compete with Flash with Silverlight (and failed I think), and to me, Typescript means end of the line for Flash/AS3.

The language is dead easy to pick up, and IntelliJ has been a really good IDE with it.

Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER8> We've been using TypeScript for 9 months now on a large project. It's fantastic. There's now way I'll go back to pure JavaScript again.

The type system just catches so many defects, and they're of the kind that are hard and boring to find (typos).

Plus IntelliSense integration (including jsdoc) is great.

On the downside, our project takes some time to compile so we had to build a tool to do it incrementally. Plus it doesn't play well with one-class-per-file structures (but I expect that to be fixed).

<comment><USER9> Agreed, TypeScript is great, but the compiler is excruciatingly slow. I have to segment my app into multiple sub-build areas and only build a subset at a time, which is annoying because I frequently end up making small changes outside of that subset of code. My app is only around 25000 lines of code and a full compilation still takes around 50-60 seconds which, in a JavaScript workflow, is a lot of friction.

<comment><USER10> I was expecting something in the order of minutes. Seeing as I work at a place where full build used to took about three hours on a server. I see how it's not ideal though.

<comment><USER11> In a typical Javascript workflow, near-instant feedback is the baseline.

I really like how Facebook's Hack has a local file system monitor which incrementally compiles on file changes. I haven't used it yet, but it sounds like a nearly ideal compromise.

<comment><USER12> Typescript has a command line option for this as well.

As far as I can tell, the language would also support a non-validating mode that would be more or less instantaneous (the transformations it performs are all local, and none of them involve knowledge of the types involved).

<comment><USER11> Neat, I'll need to look into that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most significant announcement IMHO:

> _Today, we 're announcing that we will begin taking pull requests for the > TypeScript compiler and language service._

A relatively-flagshippy MS project becomes truly open source. This is awesome!

<comment><USER14> You're required to sign a CLA before you can contribute and they only accept pull requests for bugs.

Nothing prevents you from forking, but the main repository doesn't look 100% free.

<comment><USER15> CLA's are good practice in general. It's always up to the maintainers whether they want feature requests.

And as you pointed out, you can always fork.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having spent quite a bit of my dev life with typed languages and now coding a LOT in pure JavaScript, I'm actually not at all thrilled by TypeScript. Yes, pure JS is bit hard to maintain and it does occasionally pisses me off but at the same time it is liberating.

Not having to constantly keep adding types all over, not having to constantly refactor things because I now accept object instead of an int etc is refreshing. And best of all, not having _compile_ at all is fast and simple. I'm only using JS frameworks that doesn't force me do build before testing the page and retains purity of JavaScript (that means no simulations of traditional OOP). Yes, sometime I do make bad mistakes and spend some time chasing down bugs that would have been caught in typed languages. However overall I find cost of adding types all over and maintaining them over the evolution of code is actually higher. It would have been really great if they had produced cool algorithms that could have inferred types as much as possible and added it as static analysis tool instead of JS extension.

Just because JS doesn't have type checking I'm now set in to mindset of doing quick tests of small changes, write more elaborate tests and so on. Even in moderately large project I think pure JavaScript is not only _maintainable_ but also joy to work with compared to typed languages.

<comment><USER17> I don't know very much about TypeScript, yet, but I'm doing some research and I'm going to advocate it on my next project. From what I already know:

> Not having to constantly keep adding types all over,

TypeScript is gradually typed (which means it's happy with as little or as much type declarations as you want to give to it) and uses type inference, which reduces amount of needless type declarations even more. Actually, coming from C and later C++ to Python and JavaScript I thought the same as you, that type systems are a complete PITA. I then learned OCaml and I changed my mind: _bad, archaic_ type systems _are_ PITA, but modern and powerful ones are a huge help and incur little cost.

> and retains purity of JavaScript

That's like saying that you're not using any Scheme library which implements convenient exception handling and you use bare call/cc instead.

Prototypal inheritance in JavaScript is strictly more powerful than most of the class based systems, but it _is_ less convenient to express some common idioms using just what's built-in. This is why you're going to implement some kind of object and meta-object protocols on top of prototypes sooner or later. It makes sense to agree on a standard way to do it, otherwise you're just going to add _yet another_ slightly incompatible object system. I agree that there are many cases where prototypal inheritance is enough, though, and you shouldn't use classes by default in JavaScript.

> adding types all over and maintaining them over the evolution of code is > actually higher

I have vastly different experience here. Types tend to make refactoring rather easier than harder. It's because when you change a return value or expected argument of some function you don't need to grep for all its calls in the codebase - the compiler will tell you. With sufficiently good type system, the compiler will tell you if the new type is compatible with the old one, which makes writing adapters easier. And it all happens on compile time, which means you don't need to run your app to test it. I read that TypeScript compilation is slow - that may be, but I bet it's comparable to running all the unit tests for a project, for example.

> It would have been really great if they had produced cool algorithms that > could have inferred types as much as possible and added it as static > analysis tool instead of JS extension.

Yeah, I agree, I'd like it too. I remember there being a very cool project from some distinguished JS developer which did just that; it was an editor and a supporting library for checking and validating JS code. I can't remember what it was, exactly, though... Help, anyone?

> Just because JS doesn't have type checking

As I said, it's not either-or situation. Gradual typing is one thing, contracts are the other. You _can_ have the best of both worlds. After a few years I'm still amazed with Racket and Typed Racket combo - it's exactly the right mixture of compile-time and run-time support for ensuring program correctness and I would like to have something very similar in JS one day. In the meantime, TypeScript is a step in the right direction. I only hope it will continue to evolve after 1.0 release.

<comment><USER18> I have performed QA tasks on both, and find that either JS developers are better or going pure vanilla makes a much stabler product. The TypeScript projects I have seen had some major flaws and requests (vs bugs) always turned into low priority because of the inability to perform the task.

<comment><USER17> I think it's easy to explain: TypeScript is a new technology and programmers will have very little experience in using it. It's completely impossible to find "TypeScript programmer with 5 years of experience" for example. On the other hand, JS is stable and much older and you can easily assemble a team of highly experienced people.

Relative strengths and weaknesses of TypeScript will be only visible after it's around long enough to get its own best practices and experienced programmers. I see the same process with CoffeeScript - in the beginning average CS code was much worse than average JS, but now they are comparable and the advantages of CS are starting to be visible.

That's of course on average. It's still possible to get a few people with enough knowledge to be able to use TS effectively, but I think it's hard enough to make it very rare. It's unfortunate, but technologies - <USER2> especially languages - take very long time to mature. In short, your impression is probably correct, but it's not because of TypeScript features; we need to wait a few years before we can compare TS and JS products success rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anders is my favourite language designer, ever :)

TypeScript is something I'm still trying to get more buy-in from my team, but the issue is the lack of decent autocomplete/static analysis in anything other than Visual Studio. I'm working on that problem myself, actually.

<comment><USER20> IntelliJ supports TypeScript! [http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/typescript- support.htm...](http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/typescript-support.html)

<comment><USER21> From past experience, their support is good, but one significant thing I missed was type inference:

        // function signature
        getNumber(context: any, callback: (result: Number) => void);

        // calling that function
        // unfortunately, here the type of num is any
        // unless I specify it manually
        getNumber(..., (num) => { ... });

Visual Studio figured out the type on its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It'd be great if there was a compiler that would compile TypeScript to asm.js [0]. Adding type-safety in TypeScript is only for the programmer -- when you compile it to Javascript, you don't get any performance increase. But, if you could compile it to asm.js, you'd actually get some performance increase out of it. (Note: I don't know much about TypeScript or asm.js, so if what I just said is completely untrue, I'd love to know why.)

[0]: [http://asmjs.org/](http://asmjs.org/)

<comment><USER23> asm.js requires you to manage your own memory. TypesScript doesn't, it's a pretty thin layer on top of JavaScript.

<comment><USER24> Care to explain why?

To my understanding asm.js is a restricted subset of JS that allows for optimisations to be performed that would not otherwise be possible. In a similar way to how Java bytecode can be interpreted more efficiently compared to a non-compiled language, like Python.

With that in mind, sure you could target asm.js with a high level language that requires memory management, but why couldn't you also target it with a language that assumes GC. JS interpreters have this GC component built in already. Essentially I don't see how it is different from Java + Java bytecode + the JVM, which does perform GC.

I'm very curious about this.

<comment><USER25> asm.js is a subset of JavaScript, and to be easy to optimize, it removes most of the dynamic stuff from JS and leaves a simple, low-level dialect that is basically equivalent to LLVM IR or to C.

You can compile many things to C and LLVM IR, like C++, C#, and so forth. You can compile the VMs of dynamic languages like Python, Lua and Ruby, but compiling them directly would be inefficient - you'd need type checks all over the place. You need a custom VM to be fast on those.

asm.js can run Lua at close to the speed of the normal Lua VM running natively, so this approach is very feasible. But, for JavaScript itself, it probably doesn't make sense, the current VMs are the best that can be done.

However, a subset of TypeScript - without classes, without weird prototype things, just arrays and numbers and computation on those - could be compiled to asm.js. That might be an interesting project to try out.

<comment><USER24> OK, so are you saying that compiling the language's runtime environment, including the GC, to asm.js would not be efficient enough? That makes sense.

I guess I was hoping that there may be some way to compile the runtime such that the GC wouldn't need to be compiled, and the GC of whatever is interpreting the asm.js code (e.g. SpiderMonkey) could be used instead.

<comment><USER26> That's roughly what happens when TypeScript gets compiled to JavaScript, it can use the browser's GC. asm.js is used to avoid the browser's GC, either when the original code doesn't need a GC since it uses manual memory management, or it uses a different type of GC from the browser and wants to use that instead (which is effectively the same thing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Could someone be so kind as to explain why I should consider Typescript over Coffeescript in future projects?

I've been using CS for the past year or two, but I'm hearing a lot of buzz around TS for the past few months. It would be really nice to have a better idea as to why it should be best to move now - is it really that much better?

(I love the CS tools available on PyCharm; they really made my life easier. That said, I think that there are similar TS tools available as well)

<comment><USER28> One reason (as I see it) is that TypeScript is implementing ES6 features along with the type-specifc stuff, so it's going to end up in a place where it's very compatible with the 'future' of JavaScript.

CoffeeScript will always be something quite different. I love it, but that difference makes me nervous. ES6 ought to bring a lot of the features I like about CoffeeScript into JavaScript.

<comment><USER29> I don't want to troll here but "very compatible" sounds like MS best days of EEE - Typescript still IS a different lang. Question is what if future Javascript will go in a different direction than todays Typescript ?

Typescript main feature is tooling but I would rather go with lang where I'm not second class citizen on non-windows (eg. Dart's editor works on Windows/OSX/Linux)

<comment><USER30> Do you really feel JavaScript has that luxury? Seeing as how widely deployed and used it is I feel that it can't go in a completely different direction anytime soon.

<comment><USER29> Not JavaScript, but Typescript. What if Typescript will implement _now_ features incompatibile with future JS ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Am I really missing it or are they announcing a new version with no release notes?

edit: it seems that they had them in the blog post for the release candidate [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2014/02/25/announ...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2014/02/25/announcing- typescript-1-0rc.aspx)

<comment><USER32> There are a few little new things, but 1.0 is essentially bugfixes from the 0.98 release which was essentially feature complete.

New things (eg async) are further away on the roadmap: [http://typescript.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Roadmap](http://typescript.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Roadmap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The article is light on 'What is Typescript'. Can someone explain what TypeScript is?

<comment><USER34> It's a compile-to-JavaScript language, like CoffeeScript. Differentiating features:

\- Strict superset of JS. All(?) JS is valid TS, making it easier to migrate to TS.

\- Many of the added features are from EcmaScript 6, i.e. JavaScript Of The Future. TS lets you use those today, instead of waiting for browsers to implement.

\- (Optional) type system, which some people are fans of.

\- Much stronger tooling & IDE support, in part due to the typing.

<comment><USER35> Also, compiling down to human-readable and well formatted JS has always been a priority. So it's never difficult to migrate away from typescript, since the typescript can simply be replaced by the compiler's javascript output.

IIRC, this is actually one of the main reasons they're holding off on implementing async/await, since that would require the compiler to convert functions into unreadable state machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Anders is a really good language designer. Everything this dude touches turns to gold. He was also behind C# and as far as enterprise languages go C# is a joy to work with. TypeScript is the same way. It's all really well thought out and instead of getting in the way the type system actually helps because you can leverage the dynamic aspects of JavaScript during the prototyping phase and then gradually add types as the design is fleshed out. Typed Racket I think is the other language that gives you similar capabilities but I haven't played enough with that one to have an opinion yet.

<comment><USER37> Linq _(cough)_

Delphy _(cough, cough)_

<comment><USER38> Is there anything wrong with LINQ that we are not aware of?

<comment><USER39> I guess it's not wrong, but not designed by Anders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The language is nice, but the compiler uses its own lib.d.ts which has all sorts of definitions for browsers and even proprietary MSIE ones. This doesn't make any sense when using TypeScript in any other context (like Gjs, NodeJS, Rhino, Seed, etc.). TypeScript shouldn't assume a browser by default, or at least provide an option for compiling without lib.d.ts.

<comment><USER41> $ tsc --nolib

<comment><USER40> Ooh, undocumented features! How nice, thanks =]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This project really is the greatest thing that could happen in computer science : a great mind trying to solve a problem in the most pragmatic yet elegant way to achieve the greatest possible benefit for developper with th minimal amount of time and work.

<comment><USER43> A little strong on hyperbole.

Less Flair version - Happy to see a well know and respected computer scientist trying to solve a problem faced by lots of developers and doing it in a simple and easy to understand way.

<comment><USER42> Agree. I wanted to put some emphasis on the fact that technologies with modest goals, but well executed, may in fact achieve more than grand masterplans. After more than 15 years of coding I came to realize that focusing very strongly to your true needs and nothing more, is really a quality met only by the very advanced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> TypeScript IRC channel: irc://irc.freenode.net/#typescript

</comment><comment><USER45> edit: The talk has ended now. Will update if I find a link to that talk.

Anders talking about TypeScript live: [http://channel9.msdn.com/](http://channel9.msdn.com/)

<comment><USER46> [http://video.ch9.ms/sessions/build/2014/3-576_LG.mp4](http://video.ch9.ms/sessions/build/2014/3-576_LG.mp4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I always get voted down for this, but I still feel that typescript is an answer to a question that nobody is asking. (I'm also very suspect of all of the positive comments. Is HN really this pro-MS for JavaScript?) In my company, we literally have a typescript counterpart team doing the same projects. Our code is cleaner, better architected, and our team is able to consistently produce 2 to 3 times more features. In my experience, the teams that choose typescript are usually windows devs that cannot wean themselves off of visual studio due to their dependence upon auto completion and IDE tools. I'm not hating, I just don't understand why any js dev would add code to their code.

<comment><USER48> > In my experience, the teams that choose typescript are usually windows devs > that cannot wean themselves off of visual studio due to their dependence > upon auto completion and IDE tools.

Well, since VS does auto-completion with JavaScript too, so maybe you're not understanding the whole situation. Some people like TypeScript for its ability to facilitate creation of large projects via addition types, classes, and namespaces, while retaining much of the basic JavaScript syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I was really hoping it would have a lib style compile api, but it seems fairly locked down. :(

</comment><comment><USER50> How does it stack with dart?

</comment><comment><USER51> typescript at stackoverflow [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/typescript](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/typescript)

<comment><USER52> any leads on what should we be seeing?

<comment><USER53> Stack Overflow questions and answers on TypeScript I assume..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I thought it was a font.

I was just opening MSVC expecting an update, looking in the font configuration menu and everything...</comment>


Justice Department Investigating Lawmakers for Possible Insider Trading - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-investigating-lawmakers-for-possible-insider-trading-11585586365 <comment><USER2> Why aren't all financial investments put in a blind trust when you become a member of Congress? It seems so obvious and uncontroversial to me.

<comment><USER3> The cynical answer is that they won't unless it's the law, and Congress probably won't pass a law that prevents themselves from making money. They can claim that insider trading is already illegal, so there's no need for a law like that- and then they can exploit the loopholes that exist, or just blatantly commit a crime and assume that they won't be held accountable. There's a few honest lawmakers, but there are a lot that pursued the office specifically for the advantages they receive.

I highly doubt that the investigation will find enough evidence to convict Burr of anything. Unless he sent communication that he ordered certain trades as a result of a classified briefing then he's going to get off scot free. The virus was already covered by the news, and while a lot of people don't believe Burr's argument he's not going to get convicted because it's reasonable enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://archive.md/k8AqR](https://archive.md/k8AqR)</comment>


No Chirp This Year, So Twitter Developers Holding Their Own Summit - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/08/twitter-developers-summit/

<comment><USER2> Twitter is not a defensible product, they are a critical mass service that is ripe for disruption. But there has ti be some solid fundamental infrastructure in place. Twitter can deffend with inertia and that might prove to be enough - but a usage puvot is near, where a new fully integrated cluent with novel features will disrupt their rule.</comment>


Résumés Are Starting to Look Like Instagram–and Sometimes Even Tinder - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/resumes-are-starting-to-look-like-instagramand-sometimes-even-tinder-11565707364?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that was taught to adjust your resume for the position you are applying for?

I get having a resume that encompasses everything to make bulk applications easier, however would it be best to have the "bulk resume" be the template to which you adjust for the job offer.

If you are applying to be some social media manager for an Instagram influence or something, I could see a flashy resume being a benefit. For anything else give them the information they want and cut out the crud.

In a corporate environment cut through the crap and get to the point without the extra fluff I feel is an invaluable skill. You could even have a traditional resume listing your certs/skills etc with a link to a resume blog you have, on the blog you could put all the flashy imagery/junk for them to look at if they want.

I remember is psychology class our instructor would have us write our names on the back of essays so he could judge them by the content of the essay and not who it was. Obviously he learned the writing styles of the students and towards the end of the class this didn't work anymore, however to eliminate initial bias this was a great lesson.

I feel this should be applied to job applicants where you should base hiring someone off the merits of their skills, not what type of latte they like.

I also get wanting to feel out who the person is and get a grasp on their personality to see if they may fit with a team or not, but that can be determined in the follow up interview/tests not in the initial screenings.</comment>


Start the conversation on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fanchimp.com/start-the-conversation-on-twitter/

<comment><USER2> My new post it's about features of Twitter that not everybody known.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What do you think about our advices? What's the one we missed?</comment>


Unraveling the Long Thread of the Sony Attack [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.operationblockbuster.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Operation-Blockbuster-Report.pdf <comment><USER2> And yet even after this big corporations can buy insurance policies that make the top brass happy enough they don't feel the need to invest in improving security. Until that changes there will be many more high profile attacks.</comment>


Warning about the article "SQL Injection" in current "PHP Magazin" - <AUTHOR> http://www.christopher-kunz.de/archives/195-Warning-about-the-article-SQL-Injection-in-current-PHP-Magazin.html

<comment><USER2> I don't know what's worse, the quality of the article or the fact that people are still _writing articles about PHP-based SQL injection in web apps_. This topic has been covered sufficiently and anyone who fails to escape input should be put to death.</comment>


Reflection on crisis: Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Taleb at DLD conference [video] - <AUTHOR> http://video.dld-conference.com/watch/aj4OXAg <comment><USER2> I wish everyone on HN would quit debating Arrington's spit incident (breaking news: man gleefully disparages European society, returns to Europe and is spit upon, and then proceeds to declare himself a victim of cruel and unusual punishment!) and would watch this instead. This really does so much to explain the core of our economy, its problems, and where we go from here. Totally loved Nassim's thoughts on medicine and religion as well...

Even if you don't care about the economy, the psychological discussions here are very, very useful as an entrepreneur. Billions of dollars have been made on the thoughts contained in this panel session (see: John Paulson).

</comment><comment><USER3> Daniel Kahneman's nobel prize lecture from 2002: [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/...](http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/kahneman- lecture.html)

Definitely worth watching. It gives you a totally different view of macroeconomics.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Do not drive a school bus blindfolded, as Bernanke did."</comment>


Can zoos be redesigned for a more ethical generation? - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/design/zoos-animal-rights-welfare-eifel-cincinatti-giant-panda-zootopia-design-a8504341.html <comment><USER2> I'm more interested in the story's _headline_ : "Can zoos be redesigned for a more ethical generation?"

I'd be interested to hear precisely what the headline's author meant by "more ethical", and his/her reason for believing that the current generation _is_ more ethical.

<comment><USER3> Came exactly to make this point.Whig history applied to ethics I guess. Same old navel gazing.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for introducing the term "Whig history" to me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some animals can be kept in captivity well. Dolphins no, but tigers, bears, zebra and the like can do very well. Work with animals in the wild. Learn the misery that is thier "natural" life before making some high-minded judgement about fences. See how many ticks live on a wild lion's face, what starvation means. Zoos are hard, very expensive, but can be ethical. They can give some animals a good life and by doing so fill a social purpose.

Be afraid of a world without zoos. Look at what happens to people who never see animals. Talk to anyone who grew up without dogs. They have all sorts of misconceptions. Zoo animals represent the wild. They manifest our nebulous ideas about wildlife and wild spaces. Without them our kids will too easily dismiss wild nature. To demonstate to kids that wild animals have the right to exist we need to first show them how they actually exist. Nothing does that so well as seeing the wild in the flesh.

<comment><USER5> You're arguing that a lion that sits in such a small cage it cannot run, has nothing to hunt, and little to do, is better off because they might get ticks out in the wild? Really? And if you want to talk about starvation, then let's talk about the source of Lions struggling out in the world, like human encroachment on their hunting grounds, farming, deforestation, etc.

A theoretical zoo paradise could work, but such a zoo would look more like a wildlife refuge than what we're typically used it. And members of the public may even have to put up with wild predators actually killed their food, and not seeing some of the wildlife very often.

Most zoos have small enclosures for economic reasons, not because it is what the animals themselves need.

<comment><USER6> > _You 're arguing that a lion that sits in such a small cage it cannot run, > has nothing to hunt, and little to do, is better off because they might get > ticks out in the wild? Really? And if you want to talk about starvation, > then let's talk about the source of Lions struggling out in the world, like > human encroachment on their hunting grounds, farming, deforestation, etc._

Do you know what happens to male lions in the wild? A stronger male lion takes their mate, kills their children, and then kills them. And this is just the ones lucky enough to survive _that long_. Male lions are kicked out of their pride as soon as they reach adolescence. Most don't even make it to adulthood or survive long enough to mate. And if you've never seen an animal kill another animal, they don't exactly prioritize a quick and painless death. Life as a wild lion is nasty, brutish, and short. It's incredible, the the romantic notions that people dream up for themselves.

<comment><USER7> Isn't that, like, their natural way of being?

Wtf is being proposed here, to keep lions at capture to avoid the parts of their lifestyle we don't like or consider too savage?

That which you described is what MAKES a lion.

<comment><USER6> It _is_ their natural way of being, but that doesn't make it inherently morally superior to captivity by humans. The way humans live in the wild is pretty different than in civilization too.

As an aside: I personally don't think it actually matters whether captivity is better than nature, but I'm pointing out _arguendo_ that it probably isn't. I think it is fine, short of wanton cruelty, for us humans to use animals for our own ends.

<comment><USER7> > _It is their natural way of being, but that doesn't make it inherently > morally superior to captivity by humans._

Of course it does.

> _The way humans live in the wild is pretty different than in civilization > too._

The civilisation is human's wild. We built this, it was not imposed upon us.

<comment><USER6> That's the naturalistic fallacy. You need to do more than appeal to nature to make that argument. You have to give a reason why that nature, or at least nature in general, is superior.

Also, by the logic you're using, you can just as well say that possibly living in captivity is the lion's new nature. After all, humans are part of nature and our capturing of animals then is too.

<comment><USER7> > _That's the naturalistic fallacy. You need to do more than appeal to nature > to make that argument. You have to give a reason why that nature, or at > least nature in general, is superior._

It's a sad day when you need to give a reason why captivity is worst than letting lions live free.

In the end, even genocide is not good or bad objectively. It depends on a value judgement, which from a rational perspective it's still a leap of faith or "fallacy".

Either you acknowledge the value of freedom for animals or you don't.

But to avoid the "naturalistic fallacy" let's perform an empirical, scientific experiment: let's keep you captive in a cage for several years, and see how you fare, and whether you find it alright afterwards. We'll also have a control group and everything of course, lest we mess up the experiment.

> _Also, by the logic you 're using, you can just as well say that possibly > living in captivity is the lion's new nature. After all, humans are part of > nature and our capturing of animals then is too._

In the lion's case, it's a nature imposed on them, so there's a difference. Just because we're all parts of nature doesn't mean we enjoy or thrive under everything that happens in nature: we wouldn't enjoy being eaten by lions or being kept captive in cages by higher sentient animals (e.g. aliens).

<comment><USER6> I am a person, not a lion. Pretty different. A lion doesn't even understand what freedom is. Freedom as we understand it is a very high level abstraction of a messy world that involves all sorts of limits on what we can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we just get rid of zoos altogether? Wild animals shouldn't be caged or confined just for our amusement. This goes for all wild animals. I don't think we should be allowed to keep wild animals as pets as it is inhumane.

I'd make an exception for research institutions, but with the rise of drone, camera, etc technology, we could and should be studying animals in the wild.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Wild animals shouldn't be caged or confined just for our amusement."_

What about for our education?

The zoo is the closest a lot of people even come to the natural world and to appreciating and connecting with animals beyond common cats and dogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More natural history museums with stuffed animals that died in captivity, by accident, by natural causes. The kids get to see the animal up close, learn about behavior/history, connect the animal to the 'bigger picture' of the biosphere/ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER10> yes, by closing them down and returning the animals to where they belong

<comment><USER7> Though we should also heavily protect those places where they belong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why don't we pay humans to act like certain animals in zoos?

<comment><USER12> Check out the reality shows. May not be accurate representation of humans or worse maybe it is.</comment></comment>