Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

No, but they're all on youtube, and I can give you names.

-"The Lawnmower"

from Fork Yeah

-"Nazis in Oracle Allegory"

Manta (both talks, IIRC)

-"AWK"

Manta (New Relic), and Surge 2013 (aka "Middle Management: Cancer or Poison?")

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

Surge 2013

-"madvise MADV_DONTNEED writes lazily to disk?"

Surge 2015 ligtning talk (or a crime against common sense)

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

Surge 2013 lightning talk

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"

Both from surge 2013 ligtning talk.

Damien Katz - CouchDB and Me: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me

The talk is about how Damien quit his job to hack on open source software. It shows his struggle and doubt while embarking on the project and then finally invented CouchDB. It's a passionate and human account of the process of creating something significant. I recommend every hacker watch this.

First, the "Mother of all Demos" by Doug Engelbart: https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY This was in 1968, at a time when most people thought about computers as being machines for solving computation problems, like processing payrolls or calculating rocket trajectories. Engelbart and his students had the radical idea that computers could be used for human "knowledge worker" productivity. In one 90 minute presentation, he introduces everything from the idea of a GUI, to the mouse, to word processing, hypertext, computer graphics, and (simulated) videoconferencing. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the audience that has never seen this stuff before, and it'll blow you away.

Something more recent: Martin Fowler's great introduction to NoSQL: https://youtu.be/qI_g07C_Q5I Not so technical, this is a great overview of the reasons why (and when) NoSQL is valuable. He crams a lot into a short speech, so it's one of the rare videos I've required students in my database classes to watch.

Now, really getting away from the technical, I have to recommend watching the IDEO shopping cart video: https://youtu.be/taJOV-YCieI This is the classic introduction of Design Thinking to the world, in 1999. If you're using the Lean Startup or an Agile method, but have never heard of IDEO's shopping cart, you may be able to get along fine at work, but you should be kind of embarrassed like a physicist who's never read Newton.

I think Gary was way ahead of the industry when he did this talk in 2012. Today it's common to look at Erlang, Haskell and other good but previously unpopular languages and retrofit their ideas to your language of choice (or build something like Elixir/Kotlin/Swift). But back then Ruby/Python/Java/etc devs would usually not look at anything else because functional programming was only something you might have heard in university and OOP was clearly the only way to build practical software.

For me this talk was especially great as he only explains the problems, possible solutions and their trade-offs and leaves the (clear?) conclusion to the audience instead of shoving "you should really use X because it's awesome" down their throat.

> I think Gary was way ahead of the industry when he did this talk in 2012. Today it's common to look at Erlang, Haskell and other good but previously unpopular languages and retrofit their ideas to your language of choice (or build something like Elixir/Kotlin/Swift). But back then Ruby/Python/Java/etc devs would usually not look at anything else because functional programming was only something you might have heard in university and OOP was clearly the only way to build practical software.

Ruby and Python were incorporating things from FP long before 2012; the idea that Ruby and Python were pure-OOP and not following inspiration from languages with other primary paradigms before that is simply historically inaccurate, Ruby and Python were never dominated by OOP-is-the-one-true-way philosophy.