Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?

Anything by Bryan Cantrill (Joyent, prev Sun) or Arthur Bergman (Fastly, prev Wikia).

We Really Don't Know How to Compute: Gerry Sussman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU

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

"Bufferbloat from the plumber's point of view." I haven't found a better explanation of the problem. Because of the way it is explained, the idea to solve it becomes obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5KPryOHwk8

Not a proper tech talk, but hearing Ben Chestnut talk about the early days and growth of MailChimp stuck with me.

https://vimeo.com/34081566

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.

These three had a big impact on me:

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.

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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.

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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).