Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?

Maybe not the 'best', but there's a great short presentation called "Wat" that I really enjoyed that talks about weird behavior in programming languages when operations are performed on variables of different types.

Definitely worth a watch

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Real Software Engineering, by Glenn Vandenburg. Not a perfect talk (especially the conclusions IMO), but a very good exploration of how some of the common beliefs in the field of software "engineering" came to be, and how something resembling actual engineering practice might be beneficial and practical.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9AIUT9nos

Abstract: "Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all.

That's odd, because in every other field, the term "engineering" is reserved for methods that work.

What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this session, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being "anti-engineering" (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development."

Designing and Evaluating Reusable Components by Casey Muratori. Slides PDF and audio track available here:

http://mollyrocket.com/9438

This is a talk about the practical realities of integrating with APIs over the lifetime of a project. In particular, it presents an insightful list of pitfalls API designers often fall into that hamper integration, and it suggests ways to avoid those pitfalls.

Sadly, a decade or so later, many of us are still making the same basic mistakes. If this talk were better known, perhaps we wouldn’t be, so it gets my vote.

Eric Pickup on scaling YouPorn [SFW]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlkCdM_f3p4

[edit] Spoiler alert: Everything's in Redis!

Guy Steele's "Growing a Language". A very cool idea for a talk!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0