Keith Winstein presenting mosh at USENIX 2012 is easily the most entertaining tech talk I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsIxNYl0oyU
Scott Meyers' talks are fun to watch too.
Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
31–40 of 266 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#32Raymond Hettinger's talk about good code reviews -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M
Carmack's talk about functional programming and Haskell -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A
Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0
All with a good sense of humor.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#33Rupert Sheldrake, "The Extended Mind, Experimental Evidence", Google Talks 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hic18Xyk9is
If you are in for something out of the ordinary.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#34Linus Torvalds on Git. It's funny, and it really does tell you a lot about why Git is the way it is.
Bryan Cantrill's 2011(?) Lightning talk on ta(1). It's fascinating, but it also shows you just long-lived software can be.
Randall Munroe's Talk on the JoCo cruise. Because it's effing hilarious, and teaches everybody the important art of building a ball pit inside your house.
Finally, an honorable mention to three papers that don't qualify, but which I think you should read anyway.
Reflections on Trusting Trust: This is required reading for... Everybody. It describes a particularly insidious hack, and discusses its ramifications for security.
In the Beginning Was The Command Line: If you want get into interface design, programming, or ever work with computers, this is required. It's a snapshot of the 90's, a discussion of operating systems, corporations, and society as we know it. But more importantly, it's a crash course in abstractions. Before you can contribute to the infinite stack of turtles we programmers work with, you should probably understand why it's there, and what it is.
Finally, The Lambda Papers. If you've ever wondered how abstractions work, and how they're modeled... This won't really tell you, not totally, but they'll give you something cool to think about, and give you the start of an answer.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#35Raymond Hettinger's talk about good code reviews -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M Carmack's talk about functional programming and Haskell -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0 All with a good sense of humor.
Yes, RH's Beyond PEP8 is great, even if you don't do Python. Will put the others in my queue.
I'm reminded of Crockford's "Good Parts" of Javascript, I believe where he introduced me to the "Mother of all Demos."
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#36Richard Hamming's You and your research.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#37Hans Rosling's original Ted talk, which has so much passion about data visualisation and making information accessible - http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#38Paul Buchheit - Startup School Europe 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5w-0H-hq6E
Anjana Vakil: Learning Functional Programming with JavaScript - JSUnconf 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-5obm1G_FY
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway? | JSConf EU 2014
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#39I'm a fan of "Knocking my neighbors kids cruddy drone offline" by Robinson and Mithcell from DEFCON 23.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CzURm7OpAARe: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#40> what's that one talk that changed the way you think and you feel everyone needs to see? Growing a Language by Guy Steele. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
Thanks for posting this; it's my favourite talk too :)
BTW, does somebody know of (or have) a better quality version of this talk? The one on YouTube has some annoying audio cuts. There used to be a copy on Google Video[1], which i don't remember having the same issues.