Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk? Could be related to software engineering or any other field that is enabled via technology. Do include a link to the talk if it is available online. |
Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk? Could be related to software engineering or any other field that is enabled via technology. Do include a link to the talk if it is available online. |
Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. EMF2012 (by Thomas Figg)
On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8
Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo
This one ("moving away from defensive programming") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj3lzsr0_I
Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsD-3jtXz0
Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ
Everybody should understand procedural generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU
Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=narjui3em1k
More hypertext history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8
Even more hypertext / UX stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs
A great explanation of Fourier transforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY
Allison Parrish does mindblowing things with corpus statistics by treating term vector spaces as generalizations of 2d image formats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc
Finally, these aren't tech talks but instead UI demo reels. If you have any interest in UI or UX, you should watch them. They are wonderfully cheesy, mostly doable, and despite being more than 20 years old, nobody has bothered actually implementing the useful features shown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...
I saw it at my first job out of uni and it was so simple that it changed the way I wrote code at the time.
The ones that had the most profound effect for me would be Linus's talk about git and Carsten Dominik on org-mode.
Also, Richard Feynman explaining how computers work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA This actually changed the way I think about it after years of programming.
He gives a history of SunOS, Solaris, and OpenSolaris up to the Oracle acquisition, and then onto post acquisition and the creation of illumos. It's a brilliant talk and a must-watch for any Unix enthusiast or historian. Bryan is an incredibly engaging speaker.
Procedural programming: it's back? It never went away
The resounding rejection of packet switching by period communications experts at https://youtu.be/8Z685OF-PS8?t=21m0s is awesome. Oh how the mighty have fallen!
This is a great talk from another networking legend: "Network Protocols: Myths, Missteps, and Mysteries" by Radia Perlman.
I love her personality and sense of humor, and it has tech content that is completely relevant today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfiMBegejQM
Grew up playing Tony Hawk. His talk really inspired me follow my creativity.
The speaker is good but I think I like it just because it fixes the relationship between HTML and CSS.
He's given several versions of this talk (including the Advancements in Real-time Rendering course at Siggraph), but here's one available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
This is a humorous talk about javascript
Every time people think a technology will solve all their problems (remember guys from NOSQL back in the days?), they need to see this talk. The speaker also did this talk as a keynote a couple of times during other conferences.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239
Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
848 points by mngutterman on Oct 4, 2016 | hide | past | web | un-favorite | 255 comments
Simply put, what are your favorite talks or trainings? It could by a one-off lecture about a specific concept or a series of talks about a languag
The initial Node.js presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY&t=597s
Bryan Cantrill - Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers ((but really about Larry Ellison being a lawnmower...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI
David Beazley - Discovering Python (Dave is locked in a bunker for months with 1TB+ source code related to a patent law suit) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8
Joe Armstrong - React 2014 : Joe Armstrong - K things I know about building Resilient Reactive Systems ("What is on the wire?" Talks about protocols and other interesting things) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQIE22e0cW8
A talk by Robert Harper at OPLSS in 2017 is really good as well, covering the basics of programming language background https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer17/to... "concrete syntax is where computer science meets psychology.... at the moment it's all a matter of opinion"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&index=49&t=2s&li...
Van Albert and Banks: Looping Surveillance Cameras through Live Editing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOqznZUClI
Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...
And of course, Simple Made Easy, Wat, etc.
Neil is completely colour blind; he sees no colour at all. So he implanted an antenna on his skull that detects the information he choses (like colour) and converts it to vibrations on his skull. So not only can he now perceive colour, he can even perceive more colours than regular humans, since the antenna can be augmented.
Remember at the time of this talk things like Google Maps were still very new, and nowhere near this level of performance.
Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs
Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HsGAc0_Y5c
Robert Cialdini - On Influence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC6ItuT1Eso
Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZQnKtjM1TA
Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast)
https://www.fs.blog/2017/02/naval-ravikant-reading-decision-...
Josh Wolfe - On "This is who you are up against" podcast
http://investorfieldguide.com/wolfe/
Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZbX_9ru9U
Paul Graham - Startup school (2008)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc
James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary)
<No link>
Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm3p_3Vgejk
Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afZTrfvB2AQ
Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience
This talk is both inspiring and funny, I got introduced to David Beazley by this talk and although every time I listen to him my barin melts, I enjoy his talks the most.
One of my favorite talks. Very quick, very to the point. I'm not saying I agree with this in 100% of cases, but in many cases I think it's the right call
This is an high level talk. it guides on how to choose between competing solutions to a problem when the commonly accepted answer is "it depends"
Not strictly about tech itself, but it was one of my favorites talks at CodeConf a few years back.
I loved it when says 'i am not a people person'
We need more stand up comedians as presenters
chicken chicken chicken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
one of my top talks is dan friedman + will byrd doing evalo in minikanren.
similarly there's an old talk by sean parent about reversible computing while he was at Adobe R&D (kinda like relational programming of friedman and byrd, except, in cpp)
I also greatly enjoy anything chuck moore on forth / ga144
And recently the talk about the values of APL
Oh and Gary Bernhardt. Wat and the unix chainsaw. beautiful.
Three talks that I tend to reference a lot and have had a huge impact on the way I think about software:
The Soul of Software: Avdi Grimm - https://youtu.be/IgbHzFb1hGw
The Humane Representation of Thought: Bret Victor - https://youtu.be/agOdP2Bmieg
How to Program Independent Games: Jonathan Blow - https://youtu.be/JjDsP5n2kSM
Rusty Russell - Advanced C Coding For Fun! - A series of crazy tricks that is quite enlightening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEQ3sRakIs0
Tridge - Linux powered coffee roaster. Tridge (of Samba and rsync fame) walks through the process he used to reverse engineer a USB thermometer live during the talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LQr4At5Z5Q
[0] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4087.en.... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KNZsNTPlec
* Analogies are the core of thinking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vORB92BU7zk
* Analogy as the Core of Cognition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk
If you haven't read Godel, Escher & Bach, go read it now. Will change your thinking.
How bacteria "talk" - Bonnie Bassler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXWurAmtf78
Stefano Mancuso - The roots of plants intelligence TED talks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2Vck2iPvBs
Genius.com CEO gives talk about how the worst possible thing you can think of, is in fact the best thing.
I like this video because I tend to get stuck in my own head, or get carried away on useless features/ideas that don't really contribute to the overall progress of the product.
His QuakeCon talks are particularly good.
QuakeCon 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28
QuakeCon 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk
I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code.
Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM.
Crockford on JavaScript - Volume 1: The Early Years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg
Stamos has been in the news recently for quitting as CSO at Facebook. Before that he quit as CSO at Yahoo after the government scanning scandal (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive/exclu...).
This talk took place before he started at Yahoo. In the latter half he goes over a number of potential moral quandaries and how ethically to respond to them. One matches the later Yahoo incident almost exactly.
The overall point is that it’s important to consider these scenarios beforehand, because it’s easier to do the wrong thing if you have to make decisions on the fly.
It's funny, but still useful.
Bootstrapped to over half a billion dollars in revenue. Worth many multiples of that. Built it Atlanta, not a startup city. B2B, but with a more creative ethos than most VC-backed startups in SF. Just an extraordinary story, well worth the hour it takes to watch.
Inventing on Principle: Bret Victor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
I see what you mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g
and
Applying Failure Testing Research @Netflix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3mHQCkr-4I
both by Peter Alvaro (second also includes Kolton Andrus) are thought-provoking looks at failure modeling in distributed systems.
Programing Should Be More Than Coding - Leslie Lamport https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QsTfL-uXd8
If you are interested in functional programing this little gem has some great insights into how to translate between data and behavior correctly. Not quite the level of Rich Hickey or Philip Wadler, but very good.
Zebras All the Way Down: Bryan Cantrill - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE
Jonathan Blow on Deep Work: Jonathan Blow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ej_3NKA3pk
Simple Made Easy: Rich Hickey - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure: Rich Hickey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU&t=845s
The Last Thing D Needs: Scott Meyers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0
How to Depth Jam: http://chrishecker.com/The_Depth_Jam
Honorable mention: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
A talk from the 'future' about how everything became 'YavaScript'.
It might not sound like much from the title, but it's really worth a watch. Thrimbleby talks about UX (captivatingly, even though I'm not usually particularly interested in it) and the many, many bad examples within healthcare tech that leads, directly, to people dying—such as his mother. He also has some really interesting points about tires at one point. I'm not sure if I'm selling it.
These two are also really good: Steve Rambam, “You've Lost Privacy, Now They're Taking Anonymity” (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNZrq2iK87k Lepht Anonym, “Cybernetics for the Masses” (2010): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APOAmxFEMkQ
And this one always makes me chuckle: Bryan Lunduke, “Linux is Freaking Weird” (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPbAXKMCDkY
[1]https://sapiensanonym.blogspot.co.uk/
[2]https://sapiensanonym.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/upcoming.html
Bret Victor - The Future of Programming (imagined from perspective of 1970's)
Geoff Hinton, The Next Generation of Neural Networks (2007): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M
While the exact approach described there didn't end up being necessary (restricted Boltzmann machines), all the summaries of the competition results made me realize machine image and voice recognition was going to accelerate massively and rival humans in many areas in the very near term.
----
Cracking the neural code: Speaking the language of the brain with optics (2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SLdSbp6VjM
This one made me realize how gene manipulation would be a near term thing and how big of an impact it would have. They used mostly old techniques but all the in situ modifications of cells in mammals were something I hadn't been aware were possible to that degree. One of the guys from his lab, Feng Zhang, went on to be one of the major forces behind CRISPR.
----
Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
New design for a tokamak fusion reactor, made much cheaper by new super conductors that use liquid nitrogen instead of helium/etc. and which have more structural strength by being bound into a metallic ribbon. This one made me really optimistic (it hasn't been borne out like the others yet, but they recently raised $50 million).
Geoff Hinton, The Next Generation of Neural Networks (2007): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M
I watched that talk probably 10 times after it first came out and wrote some visual basic stuff to try and replicate his results.
Rob Pike - "concurrency is not parallelism" https://youtu.be/cN_DpYBzKso
Uncle Bob Martin - "future of programming" https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc
Martin Kleppmann - "transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities" https://youtu.be/5ZjhNTM8XU8
Simon Brown - "software architecture vs code" https://youtu.be/GAFZcYlO5S0
It's interesting that he doesn't mention phantom reads as the difference between repeatable read/snapshot isolation, and serializable, which is what other sources tend to do.
Snapshot isolation always seemed to me like cheating the intended meaning of repeatable read, insofar as some databases refer to their snapshot isolation level as repeatable read.
That is, in the strictest sense, if you read a row twice, you get the same value with snapshot isolation, but you don't actually know that the value will be the same when you commit, which as I understand is a case of a write skew.
In fact, if one thinks of the definition of these levels in terms of locking semantics, one would expect a repeatable read to have the same meaning as obtaining a read lock on the row you read, which I understand would prevent at least some types of write skew, since no modification would be possible on that row, because it would need a write lock. There could still be hazards related to phantom reads (and possibly other effects), such as making a decision based on a computed aggregate that can change if new rows are inserted. Still, this meaning of repeatable reads would already provide a useful isolation level for various cases, except that it doesn't work with snapshot isolation.
I have a suspicion that applications out there made incorrect assumptions as to the actual isolation provided by the DB they use.
Clasp: Common Lisp using LLVM and C++ for Molecular Metaprogramming.
ABSTRACT
This talk describes our unique approach to constructing large, atomically precise molecules (called "Molecular Lego" or "spiroligomers") that could act as new therapeutics, new catalysts (molecules that make new chemical reactions happen faster) and ultimately to construct atomically precise molecular devices. Then I describe Clasp and CANDO, a new implementation of the powerful language Common Lisp. Clasp is a Common Lisp compiler that uses LLVM to generate fast machine code and it interoperates with C++. CANDO is a molecular design tool that uses Clasp as its programming language. Together I believe that these are the hardware (molecules) and the software (the CANDO/Clasp compiler) that will enable the development of sophisticated molecular nanotechnology.
It’s concerning to me that 90%+ of these videos are hosted by a single entity. The significance to me (and I assume many others here) is a cultural one. These videos relflect on our livelihoods and our day-to-day interests and pursuits.
My advice is to not get complacent about always having access to this content. Use youtube-dl and keep a local backup of what’s important to you.
Concerning, maybe, but the same could be said of a lot of other centralized mediums (such as Medium, WordPress, even HN threads itself).
When you rely on someone else to host your stuff, you always run the risk of it disappearing. Important stuff should always be backed up, whether it's video stored on YouTube or an amazing blog post on medium.
If YouTube disappeared tomorrow and all these videos disappeared, I'm sure within a week or month, people will have reuploaded many of the really great talks posted in this thread on some other site.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
He starts with a nice history of SunOS and Solaris, goes into open source, then midway through (33:00) he goes into a brutally honest rant against Oracle. Even better is that Oracle was one of the sponsors of the conference.
But truly, his Oracle rant was one for the ages. And this from me where our system RDBMS is Oracle, sigh.
Don't put your hand in the lawn mower.
Find it here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSkXABXNKIo2eKpTsnWWj...
greg wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True - https://vimeo.com/9270320#t=3450s
steve wittens - making webgl dance - the title is deceptive, it's in some ways a visual crash course in linear algebra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNO_CYUjMK8&t=84s
glenn vanderburg - software engineering doesn't work - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCns726nBhQ
chris granger - in search of tomorrow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8
alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw
bret victor - this is already mentioned but if I had to pick one it'd be 'the humane representation of thought' - https://vimeo.com/115154289
#Hardwarish:
saul griffith - soft, not solid: beyond traditional hardware engineering - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyMowPAJwqo
deb chachra - Architectural Biology and Biological Architectures - https://vimeo.com/232544872
#Getting more meta in technology and history:
James Burke - Connections
Not necessarily tech. More like great life advice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmsQeSzMdw
The essence of it is that constraints actually allow for easier composition and more modularity. It had a real impact on the way I think about the design of systems.
Bonus: that was the talk that introduced Lambdaman to the world.
I'm rather early in my career doing mostly Ruby, Python and JavaScript things. As you might expect, I consume mainly Ruby, Python and JavaScript related talks.
The first two talks that really blew my mind are:
- K Lars Lohn's PyCon Keynote from 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSfe5M_zG2s
- Jim Weirich's (RIP) "Y Not" talk from RubyConf 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs
There are many other presenters who I have a good opinion of:
- Raymond Hettinger: his presentation/teaching style is something I'd like to model my own after, also he gave the first talk on writing proper threaded/concurrent python that I was able to understand and make use of.
- Brandon Rhoades: another speaker with a presentation style that I've found easy to follow, also he takes a little shot at the dd utility about 18 minutes into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Hmys8ojno)
- Sandi Metz: I started out in Python land and moved to Ruby land, where I was introduced to Sandi's talks. She doesn't talk about incredibly complex topics, but she's got insight into some really basic things that's helpful to new people who can't see the forest through the trees.
- Robert Martin: I gather that his OO principles are not universally revered, but I find his talks useful.
- Gary Bernhardt: his talks are interesting and entertaining in ways that most are not
The list goes on, but I can't think of them all right now.