Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?

This talk is obscenely underrated. There is not nearly as much tech-focused performance art in our industry.

That transaction talk is really good, thank you. I can now finally name the effect that I had noticed but had trouble explaining and referring to, write skews.

It's interesting that he doesn't mention phantom reads as the difference between repeatable read/snapshot isolation, and serializable, which is what other sources tend to do.

Snapshot isolation always seemed to me like cheating the intended meaning of repeatable read, insofar as some databases refer to their snapshot isolation level as repeatable read.

That is, in the strictest sense, if you read a row twice, you get the same value with snapshot isolation, but you don't actually know that the value will be the same when you commit, which as I understand is a case of a write skew.

In fact, if one thinks of the definition of these levels in terms of locking semantics, one would expect a repeatable read to have the same meaning as obtaining a read lock on the row you read, which I understand would prevent at least some types of write skew, since no modification would be possible on that row, because it would need a write lock. There could still be hazards related to phantom reads (and possibly other effects), such as making a decision based on a computed aggregate that can change if new rows are inserted. Still, this meaning of repeatable reads would already provide a useful isolation level for various cases, except that it doesn't work with snapshot isolation.

I have a suspicion that applications out there made incorrect assumptions as to the actual isolation provided by the DB they use.

Underrated by who? (“Whom”?) It always shows up in these lists, and rightly so.

The art of destroying software: Greg Young - https://vimeo.com/108441214

Watching this now. It's great. Thanks! Not only are there some nice restatements of powerful high-level insights in to network effects in general (which I am considering with respect to physical logistics requirements in our current business), but some great historical tidbits too.

The resounding rejection of packet switching by period communications experts at https://youtu.be/8Z685OF-PS8?t=21m0s is awesome. Oh how the mighty have fallen!