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
All of Gary Bernhardt's stuff is great, he has some other talks up here: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/ And his screencasts are worth the money too (#notsponsored)
Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
221–230 of 266 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#222Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#223> 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
- operator overloading
- small value types on the stack (for vectors, rationals, etc.)
- generic types
Generic types are the only feature that made it (not without some controversy).C++ has all three features. I suppose there is some success in games and graphics using overloaded operators on vector types. But otherwise it doesn't seem like a huge win, or something that is critical for the design of a language.
Python has operator overloading. I never really use it, but I guess it did allow NumPy and Pandas to exist. And TensorFlow uses it.
Perhaps it boils down to the fact that Java is more of a business language, and C++ and Python have more mathematical applications, which require richer algebraic expressions of many types. But I suppose if Java had gotten operator overloading, it may have been used more for scientific computing.
Perl 6 and Racket seem to be the languages that really allow creating your own language. But actually I heard Larry Wall say that they want to provide so many little languages within Perl 6 that users don't need to invent their own. Because this often makes it harder for others to read your program.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#224"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?
#225Not a technical deepdive, but entertaining.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#226grin 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 O…
My manager: "Oh, so we have all of these enterprise customers that purchase software from us. Basically, they are presented with a list of all of our various enterprise applications [FYI, there's a TON of them] with check boxes next to each one. Our application licenses are sold using a subscription model. Most companies don't bother reading the list and just pay for everything, which will include ours."
WTF? I wrote some of the Ruby on Rails code for the application my team was working on. Also, this was in 2012; Facebook Pages had just been released, and no one even understood why a "Page" was the name given to a concept in which businesses could establish Facebook accounts in order to promote their brand and products, but a "Page" contained multiple "web pages" of content within the larger "Page" object.
In short, our product sucked at every level and even I, a member of the development team, didn't know how to use it. But because it was on the almighty "Product List", it added millions of dollars to Oracle's net income, despite the fact that I'm guessing hardly any customer knew what it was, let alone knew how to use it.
I resigned shortly after the first release, so I have no idea what happened to the product or how long it remained an official Oracle enterprise software application, appearing on the "Product List".
While it was nice being 26 years old and making a $70,000 salary, receiving a nearly-guaranteed $10,000 annual bonus, having a 401k package with company-matched contributions, getting full healthcare benefits which included a FSA, and being able to order all of the free snacks and beverages that one could think of simply by telling the secretary to add them to the supply list . . . I just couldn't work at a place where innovation didn't matter, the customer didn't matter, and even the product didn't matter. Not to mention that, after having worked there, with 100 other people, for 3 months, maybe 10 people knew my name (and my product team consisted of 8 people - I'm only including 5 of them in the 10). I happened to discover one day that I was the youngest employee there, and I'm pretty sure that people didn't like me based on that fact alone.
Oh well, I applied for a similar job at a digital marketing agency down the street the next week, and soon thereafter, began working again, now earning a salary which was $10,000 greater than what I made at Oracle (and which included all of the same benefits).
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#227Growing a Language by Guy Steele (video and transcription): http://dropclickpaste.com/#7d1673d81ee5a0bb7994e80a4f394997c...
http://dropclickpaste.com/#CYBgRgjA7AzAHANjMOwDGBODYCmYM4ICs...
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#228> 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
This is a great talk, but what he was advocating never came to pass. He wanted to add 3 things to Java: - operator overloading - small value types on the stack (for vectors, rationals, etc.) - generic types Generic types are the only feature that made it (not without some controversy). C++ has all three features. I suppose there is some success in games and graphics using overloaded operators on vector types. But oth…
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#229Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#230"Writing A Thumb Drive From Scratch" by Travis Goodspeed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Im0_KUEf8&nohtml5=False
Excellent talk on the hardware side of security, goes into some really cool theoretical hard disk defense stuff, incredibly insightful and introduces a hardware security tech toy so fun you'll want to go out and order it the moment you're done watching. The speaker is entertaining as all heck to boot.
"Programming and Scaling" by Alan Kay - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY&nohtml5=False
Interesting talk on the theoretical limits of code size and engineering versus tinkering. Also talks a lot about Alan Kay's philosophy of computer science which analogizes systems to biological systems, which are the systems with the largest proven scaling on the planet.
"The Mother Of All Demos" by Douglas Engelbart - https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn...
This talk is so prescient you won't believe your eyes. Given in 1968, Douglas demonstrates just about every major computing concept in use today on a modern machine, along with some ones that are still experimental or unevenly distributed such as smooth remote desktop and collaborative editing.