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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?

#51
post #32

Anything by Damian Conway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAf9HK16F-A I've watched him give talks in Klingon. I've watched him explain how to build a supercomputer using laser printers. And who can forget that classic talk, "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachines"?

Seconded.

My favorite was his talk on SelfGOL, and I don't even like obfuscated code! (See http://libarynth.org/selfgol for an explanation of what SelfGOL is.)

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

#53
I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8

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

#54
Doug Engelbart's mother of all demos (1968):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

This is the talk that, according to Wikipedia, included the first public demonstration of the following technologies: the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. Pretty good for one talk!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

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

#59

Doug Engelbart's mother of all demos (1968): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY This is the talk that, according to Wikipedia, included the first public demonstration of the following technologies: the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. Pretty good for one…

"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.

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