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Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#141
post #109

Pretty much anything by David Beazley or Bryan Cantrill Discovering Python (David Beazley) http://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-python.html David finds himself in a dark vault, stuck for months sifting through deliberately obfuscated pile of old code and manuals. All seems lost, but then he finds Python on a vanilla Windows box. Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos (Bryan Cantrill) https://www.youtu…

I'm glad you brought that dabeaz talk up, I really enjoyed that one myself.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#143
Aside from the typical, I watched Damian Conway "Standing on the shoulders of giants" from YAPC 2016 last week and found it interesting. Always fun to see a modern feature full language collide with history and algorithms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2HkAYbG5o&index=2&list=PLA...

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#144
post #68

grin Here we go... For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m00s

It's like a tech talk combined with a stand-up comedy, two-in-one.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#146
post #68

grin Here we go... For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m00s

Oh god yes. And from the Manta talk, to paraphrase:

I believe that if you talk about Oracle without going into Nazi allegory, than some understanding has been left on the table. In fact, I firmly believe that if you were talking to someone who hadn't heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, that you would explain the Nazis to them in Oracle allegory:

Wow. Really?

Yes, it's true: Larry Ellison owned a whole country

Oh god! The humanity! Just imagine the licences on that thing

I know, it was terrible dude, just ask Poland

Also, for another excellent talk by Bernhardt, this time about the differences in philosophy between Python and Ruby, which gives a very fair critique of them both: https://vimeo.com/9471538.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#147
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8 "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"

not a high tech talk, or particularly technically complex, but it shows a common blindspot in a way that is both clear, enlightening and frightening.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#148

"The Last Lecture", by Randy Pausch. While it's by a well-known CS professor (who was dying of cancer at the time), it's not a technical talk, but about life and work, and how to make the most of it. One of the most inspiring things I've ever seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo Another fantastic one is Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

The talks are awesome. I still downvoted this, because I consider it off topic. Sorry.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#149
post #68

grin Here we go... For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m00s

It's like a tech talk combined with a stand-up comedy, two-in-one.

That's Bryan's talks in a nutshell. And it is glorious.

Standout moments from his talks:

-"The Lawnmower"

-"Nazis in Oracle Allegory"

-"AWK"

-"Architectural Review Board (Keep your compiler people in little boxes)"

-"madvise MADV_DONTNEED writes lazily to disk?"

-"A piece of on-the-fly software engineering (or: you're f*ked)"

Also, from Brendan Gregg's lighning talk in 2013:

-"SO LET's JUST CUT THEM OFF!"

-"Their reporting software also couldn't handle decimal points"

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#150
CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

Detailed discussion of how to get the most out of your memory cache and memory bandwidth, focusing on games development. It's full of examples of how understanding both the problem and the hardware, and working in a straightforward way, can give you huge performance gains over using poorly suited abstractions. It shows how low level thinking is still important even with modern compilers. I recommend people interested in performance optimization watch it.

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