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Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#161

Post by brzed »

asdfs wrote: post #34

"Inseperable from Magic: The Manufacture of Modern Semiconductors" — an overview of semiconductor fabrication (and its current challenges) by a former Intel engineer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4 "The Atomic Level of Porn", by Jason Scott — a history of low-bandwidth pornography, from ham radio to telegraphs to BBSes. http://vimeo.com/7088524 How to build your own X-ray backscatter imager (aka "airport…

"Inseperable from Magic: The Manufacture of Modern Semiconductors"

Hey that's me! Very cool and VERY humbling to be mentioned in such esteemable company. I tried to cram way way to much into 50 minutes...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#162

Post by bsaul »

ghotli wrote: post #9

Simple Made Easy changed how I think about constructing software systems of any kind. It provided me with a strong vocabulary and mental model to identify coupling and design with a more clear separation of concerns and focus on the output rather than the ease of development. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Just rewatched it, and it is a good talk, but i always think the whole OO dismissal is a bit too extreme. I did code "generic data structure + functionnal language" program and "ORM + objects + states" and i didn't find any problem in both cases, because i used it when they were suited.

A document based user application is basically a gigantic state. If you're using generic data structure such as loosely typed maps and sets, with separate functions in various modules for manipulating parts of that structure, you'll end up with a far bigger mess than if you're having a regular three tier MVC code with objects on the model layer (even with an ORM). I do think, and i have experienced it, that sometimes, regular OO is the good abstraction.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#166

Post by catwell »

This is not really a "talk" but rather a whole course. In 2009 Gérard Berry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gérard_Berry) gave a class in French at Collège de France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collège_de_France) on CS fundamentals: http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/gerard-berry/#course

This class is still, to my eyes, the best I have ever seen on this topic.

He has given another one recently on time and computing which I have not yet seen, but which is promising too.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#167

Post by ygra »

wink wrote: post #86
dgreensp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And observe that if I forget to tell the computer to save my work, it loses it!" furious scribbling in the audience as everyone takes notes I'm so glad we're finally getting away from this paradigm after four decades. For example, the iPhone notepad (and now Mac TextEdit) doesn't wait for a cue from the user to write the few dozen bytes of new input to persistent storage.

Autosave without saving many undo states is equally dangerous. Not saying the iPhone does anything in a bad way (I have no clue) - but I've hardly been bitten by losing unsaved work because I'm deliberately using ctrl-c very often.

That's why many people (I first read about this in Alan Cooper's About Face 2.0) advocating for automatic save also advocate for unlimited undo (or at least something close to it) because closing a document and not saving it is just a form of undo while closing a document and saving it should be the default action.

This is also a place where the desktop metaphor (with paper documents) around which most WIMP systems are built exposes computer details and fails to stick to its metaphoric roots. When I scribble something on paper it's there and I don't have to consciously remember to somehow commit a transient state of my scribbling to paper explicitly.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#169

Post by jules »

chubot wrote: post #137
coldtea wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your whole premise is that his ideas "weren't successful", whereas I see it more as a case of "Greenspun's tenth rule". That is: tt's not that the VMs lost and the web won. It's the web started from something that wasn't adequate for what we wanted, and after all these years it has been adding all kinds of kludgy, warty and half-baked implementations of VM features. In essence, instead of designing a proper web-as-VM…

Right, so you are arguing exactly what Kay argued, and what the Adobe guys argued. I am saying that is wrong for the reasons above (i.e., exactly what Tim Berner's Lee argued). Anyway, Kay basically attributed it to ignorance and stupidity on the part of the TBL and the web's designers, which I think is incredibly arrogant, especially since he is wrong. You didn't really address the arguments above -- you're basicall…

You're absolutely right that historically, it wouldn't have worked. But the web has since moved beyond plain old static documents. What was good for a 1989 web isn't what's good for a 2013 web.

The design by committee of the W3C has resulted in overcomplicated yet at the same time underpowered designs. The model where an ivory tower mandates new things from the top down rarely works well. How many man years does it take to implement a new browser? It's basically an impossible task unless you have mullions of dollars to spend. A much better model for innovation is one where multiple competing technologies get implemented, and the best one wins organically. The web as a VM would have enabled that. You no longer need a committee that mandates HTML5. It can be implemented as a library, and if people like it they will use it. The W3C has a chicken and egg problem: before it standardizes something, there is not much experience with the features it standardizes, so it's hard to do good designs. On the other hand once you standardize something, you're stuck with it. It can (practically) never die. If you have multiple "HTML5 libraries" then it's not a problem to try something out, and pick the best thing. The best solution can win, and the others can slowly fall out of use.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

#170

Post by [deleted] »

dougk16 wrote: post #117
ghotli wrote: post #9

Simple Made Easy changed how I think about constructing software systems of any kind. It provided me with a strong vocabulary and mental model to identify coupling and design with a more clear separation of concerns and focus on the output rather than the ease of development. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Just watched it...really great stuff. But can anyone chime in on how you can apply some of the principles in his talk to something like a retain-mode display library, for GUI or 3d for example? Libraries like these pop up in all popular OO languages and usually have long inheritance chains with very state-heavy classes, which further form somewhat rigid hierarchies of class instances at runtime. This violates some of…

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