Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?

If you like Wat, you should like this talk by James Mickens on computer security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF24WHumvIc

Meta-comment regarding the videos posted on this thread:

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.

not necessarily favourite, but very entertaining

Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. EMF2012 (by Thomas Figg)

https://hooktube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c

I'm not sure why you're singling out YouTube here. YouTube is the main go to place for videos on the web, so it shouldn't be surprising that most of the videos posted here are hosted by YouTube.

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.

Anything by Doug Hofstadter

* 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.