Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 205 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#62

Post by chb »

lejalv wrote: post #27

Why Germany cannot and should not pay to save the Eurozone, by Yanis Varoufakis (Video in English) http://www.cesifo-group.de/de/ifoHome/events/seminars/Muench...

At around 15'40", Varoufakis says that Bretton Woods collapsed in 1971. I'm not enough of an economist/historian to understand this reference. Is he talking about the dollar going off of the gold standard? If so, why is he equating Bretton Woods with this arrangement (ie the dollar being on the gold standard?)

Edit: nm, found this from the US National Bureau of Economic Research: https://www.nber.org/chapters/c6876.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#63

Post by savvidis »

elorant wrote: post #51
halfastack wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial in the very least. I also got the impression that he was quite anti-EU with his whole Greece rhetoric during the discussions about another Greek buyout. Maybe I got him wrong..?

The guy is a jerk. He fucked up in an unprecedented way, his whole negotiation strategy was just a blackmail toward EU-Germany that eventually backfired. In the meantime all his proposals for reforming the public sector were laughable, like the idea of giving cameras to tourists to record tax evading shops. He may be good at writing books or giving lectures but he was a complete disaster as minister of finance.

Maybe downvoted because of the language, but the comment is accurate. The guy is a megalomaniac, who negotiated for Greece without ANY skin in the game.

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#65

Post by joshlemer »

maxhallinan wrote: post #37
ttiurani wrote: post #20

"Maybe Not" by Rich Hickey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5WdGrpoug Another excellent talk by the creator of Clojure, and like the previous ones, relevant for all programmers.

I thought this was one of the notably bad talks this year. The whole premise that a function of Maybe a should be a function of a without an API change is neither intuitive to me nor really justified by Hickey. Different things are different. It's sad to see someone build such a wall around himself when faced by something (type theory) that he doesn't understand.

>that a function of Maybe a should be a function of a without an API change is neither intuitive to me nor really justified by Hickey

He spent many minutes motivating it. If you support some functionality to a client (as a library, or a service, or more abstractly), and then later want to relax the constraints that you require from those clients, this should be an acceptable change that they shouldn't have to worry about / be broken by. Like if all of a sudden some REST api no longer requires a specific HTTP header to be present in requests, then this change shouldn't break clients that have been including that formerly-required header all along.

Similarly, if you provide something to clients, and you add functionality to provide a response in all circumstances, not just some, then this should not break clients either.

This clearly is not true of `Maybe` / `Option[T]` and I think it's a pretty fair critique. Maybe we should be using Union types in these situations instead.

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#69

Post by the_duke »

chillaxtian wrote: post #46

AWS re:Invent 2018: Close Loops & Opening Minds: How to Take Control of Systems, Big & Small https://youtu.be/O8xLxNje30M

I haven't seen the talk, but just from the title, a "taking control" talk related to AWS is kind of ironic.

I'll have to watch it though.

Post reply on HN