Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

news.ycombinator.com

151–160 of 179 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#152
post #150
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex mathematician, I can't handle the part where he claims mathematicians have only been studying imaginary numbers "in recent decades" and then goes on to say that Mandelbrot is the first person to rigorously study these kinds of systems. Made me die inside.

And the whole "mathematicians are only interested in problems they can solve" bit. Mathematicians have been interested in unsolved problems as long as maths has existed! Edit: Okay, now I've watched the whole talk. Overall it's great.

Gödel has entered the chat

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#153
post #34

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE

Clicked it because the hyperlink wasn't clear from the description.....

GOTO 2019 • The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić

This talk feels, as a coding analogy, a lot more like throwing ingredients into a recipe than architecting an abstract machine.

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#154
post #30

I cant recall if it was released this year but Lamport's Intro to TLA+ (uploaded on youtube) stands out for me.

I met him in person in 2019 in Palo Alto, as a consequence of me being a big fan of his work in the field of Computer Science. He seems to be a really nice and smart individual.

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#155
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It bugs me that everytime he goes on a talk show recently, he pegs himself up a horse with "I have stopped doing talk shows and I am doing it for you because ____". He comes across as an arrogant and self-serving. Most of his content is rehashing from other books. A lot of it straight from Feynman interviews on Youtube. Some spiritual stuff repeated verbatim from Jiddu Krishnamurthy. The interesting thing about Naval…

I'm pretty sure I saw people getting banned on twitter for disagreeing/challenging him (in a civil way).

That would be strange - why would Twitter give him a preferential treatment? Any source you can provide?

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#156
post #12

My favorite is Naval’s talk at Tim Ferriss: https://tim.blog/2020/10/14/naval/amp/

It bugs me that everytime he goes on a talk show recently, he pegs himself up a horse with "I have stopped doing talk shows and I am doing it for you because ____". He comes across as an arrogant and self-serving. Most of his content is rehashing from other books. A lot of it straight from Feynman interviews on Youtube. Some spiritual stuff repeated verbatim from Jiddu Krishnamurthy. The interesting thing about Naval…

I partially agree and partially disagree with you.

I think most of the problem is people treating him (or Tim Ferriss) like a God, and his thoughts as the Holy Bible.

For example, tons of people in Silicon Valley praise "Sapiens" by Harari. When I finally read it, I quickly realized that I knew most of his stuff from other books. Surprised that Naval loved that book so much - but as a consequence, many people have bought and read and praised the book.

I don't know if he's a narcissist person, and I am not sure he's not humble. I think he partially suffers from the same problem that plagues Sam Altman: they both come across in a certain way, because they don't seem to have the social skills to present their persona and give justice to the nice parts. I think it happens when you think most other people are super smart and introverts like you.

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the evil mediocrities that enforce COCs Most "people who actually create things" like communities with an explicit, reasonable code of conduct. This is of course not to say that mistakes haven't ever been made in enforcement, or that some COCs are poorly designed. People under-appreciate the difficulty of building a community that people want to participate in. The problem is a close analogue to maintaining a desir…

There are people who like communities with codes of conduct, and there are people who like to be the ones in the community enforcing codes of conduct. I prefer to live in a country with laws, but I don't fancy being a police officer enforcing the law. And, while plenty of good folks do want to enforce the rules with the purest of intentions, there's no question that, as with any role of power, some people will try to…

I don't think we disagree. I'm not pro-bad-enforcement, and I'm sure the phenomenon you point out does exist to some extent, just as we see in law enforcement.

The "the evil mediocrities that enforce COCs" comment that I replied to is low-effort and worse than useless. The "all cops are bastards" phrase has a similar level of subtlety and utility. Describing all conference organisers and community moderators as "evil" is nigh on absurd, and yet that comment has been upvoted, and my reply is on -3. That's evidence enough that my reply was needed - as Jeremy mentioned in his blog post, there's an irrational destroy-all-COCs meme going around lately.

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#159

I really enjoyed the talk on Linux kernel memory management from Chris Down that was held during this years Arch Conf. It's well structured, funny, and gives nice insight into how you scale when you can't throw more hardware on the problem. https://media.ccc.de/v/arch-conf-online-2020-6390-linux-memo... Disclaimer: I helped organize the conference.

This is great! Good resource to link people that worry too much about Resident Set (RSS) memory usage...

Worry beyond it not exceeding available memory?

Re: Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The storage animation goes through some of it but for the basics using something like an 80/20 rule for content popularity you can also apply that to data cost. Your most popular 20% of content needs to be as close to the client as possible and will probably be the most expensive for you to store (typically in 1 or many CDNs). The next most popular 20% will probably be semi expensive but doesn't need to be as close.…

Hmm, makes sense. Does same principles also hold while rendering the movie? The 80/20 rule will be harder to maintain because assets can change frequently and unexpectedly during production. But I guess the need for the data to geographically replicated, with fast and easy access, remains (especially during these remote times). During those times, is s3 a still good enough choice or do you want something more robust…

Rendering is different because the assets are very interdependent and the tooling is very POSIX specific. Rendering a scene (especially with ray tracing) can use thousands of assets from the movie even if they aren't directly on screen. Artists draw and save files in tools like Autodesk Maya and renderers read files from disk and work on them while in memory.

For some assets and tooling FUSE mounted s3 can work but generally FUSE and other userspace mounters I've seen slow down artists and rendering measurably.

Think of rendering assets more like code files and git with trunk based development. You want all of your artists to use the latest assets which are daily being updated. All of the assets should be co-located and you don't want geo-replication because of latency. Even if your artists are located all over the world you'll want them to store the saved assets in one place. Where the rendering happens.

There will be different assets that are hot as the movie progresses. But you're more likely to try to keep the latest version of all assets hot rather than all versions of specific assets hot.

Most studios use HPC style environments. NFS + big compute servers connected with high bandwidth.

Post reply on HN