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Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#91

Post by patrec »

joshlemer wrote: post #65
maxhallinan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

His argument for spurious API breakage is strictly logically correct, but seems practically dubious to me. When have you ever had to unnecessarily break API compatibility because something you thought was an Option[T] result turned out to be really a T, always? Maybe I'm wrong and someone will post some convincing examples, but I currently don't see this as a problem that needs solving.

Union Types don't compose straightforwardly because they flatten; maybe this is desirable in some cases but the rationale in Hickey's talk leaves me unconvinced. The only practical use case for union types I'm aware of is smoother interfacing to dynamically typed APIs; any nice examples for something beyond that?

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#92

Post by mc32 »

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.

Not sure about that. He was trying to get the best deal for Greece, Germany called his bluff and he was left holding the bag, but he had the right intentions. In retrospect he probably should have gone with the Grexit. The Germans would have capitulated, and, had they not, you’d still be better off.

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#94

Post by softwaredoug »

binarymax wrote: post #19

Shameless plug for my talk in haystack in April, which was a couple years of casual research rolled up. I really enjoyed giving the talk and I've had lots of great feedback, so thought I'd share it with y'all. "Algorithmic extraction of keywords, concepts, and vocabularies." Sorry only slides and no video: https://www.slideshare.net/MaxIrwin/haystack-2018-algorithmi...

Hey and the next Haystacks CFP is open. You should submit a talk Max!

http://haystackconf.com

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#95

Post by agumonkey »

freyir wrote: post #82
nikofeyn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what good does it do pointing that out, if it's even true? it's clear they meant articulate and public.

“Pub talk” is a thing, and “can’t discern from overengineered pub talk” makes sense. “Can’t discern from overengineered public talk” is plausible, but it would be very unusual to phrase it that way. It’s not really clear that he meant "public."

I meant a never ending stream of sophisticated ideas and precise data that leads nowhere. I used to watch every interview of the guy[1] and .. I always left the video empty minded.

[1] he seemed to have human values and of course knowledge about the topic

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#96

Post by kajecounterhack »

aeleos wrote: post #81

Recent but great talk posted here, What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System [1] by Prof. Michael Levin. He talks about how long term low energy electrical networks between all cells in living organisms shape how the organism grows. I think what he talks about will be the future of medicine as it allows for an amazing degree of high level control over how animals grow. 1. https://www…

+1000

Really cool talk / highly recommend! Some things you might learn / amazing facts:

- Children 7-11 can regrow fingertips

- Planarians (a kind of flatworm) are immortal

- If you teach a planarian to find "home", chop off its head and let it regrow its brain, it will still remember where home is

Note also that this was presented at NeurIPS so the talk also includes some discussion of non-neural information systems this kind of thing could inspire.

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#97

Post by freyir »

agumonkey wrote: post #95
freyir wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Pub talk” is a thing, and “can’t discern from overengineered pub talk” makes sense. “Can’t discern from overengineered public talk” is plausible, but it would be very unusual to phrase it that way. It’s not really clear that he meant "public."

I meant a never ending stream of sophisticated ideas and precise data that leads nowhere. I used to watch every interview of the guy[1] and .. I always left the video empty minded. [1] he seemed to have human values and of course knowledge about the topic

Ok, we're going down a rabbit hole here, but just to clarify, you meant "pub talk" as in the kind of conversation people have at a pub after a few beers? Or "public talk" as in a public speech, as nikofeyn suggested?

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#98

Post by walterbell »

The 2018 Turing Award lecture, by John Hennessy (MIPS, Stanford, Alphabet) and David Patterson (Berkeley, RISC)

https://iscaconf.org/isca2018/turing_lecture.html

> Titled “A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture: Domain-Specific Hardware/Software Co-Design, Enhanced Security, Open Instruction Sets, and Agile Chip Development,” the talk covers recent developments and future directions in computer architecture. Hennessy and Patterson were recognized with the Turing Award for “pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry.”

Re: Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?

#99

Post by sifoobar »

olodus wrote: post #47
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.

Was about to suggest this myself. I see a few that didn't like this and I can see why, but I thought it was interesting to listen too. Always interesting to hear someone knowledgeable argue for something you don't think you agree with. It is also interesting since Rich is in the quite unique position of handling a functional language with dynamic types (a dying breed in the functional space imo). I don't think Rich f…

Dying breed based on what? They're different compromises, there is nothing inherently superior about static types. It's more popular right now, because we're very much into rules at the moment; but I have a feeling that's peaking.

Typically, you need to move back and forth a number of times before it clicks. So you have all these people on the net fighting over which end of the spectrum is the Right one, and next month they're on opposite sides.

They're tools, hammers, screw drivers whatever; it doesn't make any kind of sense to identify with them. Unless your goal is to be a tool, I guess.

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