Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
This talk defines who I am.
Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
81–90 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#82Maybe not the 'best', but there's a great short presentation called "Wat" that I really enjoyed that talks about weird behavior in programming languages when operations are performed on variables of different types. Definitely worth a watch https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
Definitely one of the more humorous talks I've seen, in person or online.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#83Two great ones by Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure - Are We There Yet? - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic... Simple Made Easy - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-R...
this one is so far the best by the Guru himself
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#84Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen is a talk I keep going back to for inspiration. It's a well written and funny talk that instills optimism when faced with tricky code.
http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therap...
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#85not sure if essays too qualify here:
You and your research by Richard Hammings has been the most profound and deeply introspecting so far!
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#86Doug 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#87The answer for me is pretty easy: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet by Alan Kay. The OOPSLA '97 keynote speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY Great for repeated watching, I get something new from it every time I watch it. It is also great for recalibrating your point of view from amazement at whatever the current trend is in technology, to a more long-term outlook as well as encouraging higher…
Is this the one where he says the web was designed by amateurs and it should have been a virtual machine instead? He says they did a better web 30 years before or something to that effect. If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. Without going too much into detail, if he believes this,…
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk.
I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of his remarks. I will say that I think Kay explicitly agrees with the principle of least privilege (Rule of Least Power according to wikipedia) and calls that out in his talk. I see no way in which the ever-enlarging html,css, and javascript standards embody what Berners-Lee was talking about, especially when they still don't offer nearly the functionality that an OS offers currently. You can tell this because there are really only 4 organizations capable of creating a full browser and they happen to be mostly the largest tech corporations on the planet. If you need those kinds of resources to be able to implement the web today, how can this ever be considered "Least Power"? I suspect that in 10 years the W3C will have added so much more functionality to the various standards in an attempt to make them somewhat at parity with native development that browsers will collapse under their own weight as they try to implement what is basically an OS (this really became explicit when Chrome started using processes to "protect" tabs. Sound familiar?).
The web as it exists today is a huge pile of hodge-podge conflicting standards, none of which are remotely close to offering the level of development performance for apps rather than pages that you can get with any desktop toolkit. Alan is fully behind the "idea" of the web, but is taking the long-term, and I believe correct, view that this cannot continue as it is and we would be well served by trying do something about it by conscious effort rather than evolving half-heartedly in that direction.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#88http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren
miniKanren is an embedding of logic programming in Scheme. In this interactive presentation, William E. Byrd and Dan Friedman introduce miniKanren, from the basic building blocks to the methodology for translating regular programs to relational program, which can run "backwards". Their examples are fun and convincing: a relational environment-passing interpreter that can trivially generate quines, a relational type checker that doubles as a generator of well-typed terms and a type inferencer.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#89The answer for me is pretty easy: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet by Alan Kay. The OOPSLA '97 keynote speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY Great for repeated watching, I get something new from it every time I watch it. It is also great for recalibrating your point of view from amazement at whatever the current trend is in technology, to a more long-term outlook as well as encouraging higher…
Is this the one where he says the web was designed by amateurs and it should have been a virtual machine instead? He says they did a better web 30 years before or something to that effect. If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. Without going too much into detail, if he believes this,…
That line is in the "Programming and Scaling" talk: http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#90Simple 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
Also see Stuart Halloway’s earlier talk, Simplicity Ain’t Easy. There’s a fair amount of overlap with Rich Hickey’s talk, but both are worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cidchWg74Y4
And also his talk Radical Simplicity: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/radical-simplicity/...