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

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

#24

Post by jules »

The lectures by Leonard Susskind (one of the founders of string theory) are excellent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind#Lectures

He has a series of lectures that explain physics as understood by the modern theoretical physicist. He starts with classical mechanics, goes on to quantum mechanics, special & general relativity, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. The prerequisites are only high school mathematics, he explains the more advanced mathematics as he goes along. The physics that he teaches is condensed, but not dumbed down. It's really how a working theoretical physicist understands physics, "the real deal" as he says. Beware that it's very much a theoretician's viewpoint.

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

#25

Post by riffraff »

I seem to remember the famous "Diligence, Patience, and Humility" bit by larry wall as reported in the "Open Sources" book was originally a speech. If so I'd vote for that.

Otherwise, at some time I really enjoyed Guy Steele's talks while he was working on Fortress, e.g.

How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Program...

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

#29

Post by tterrace »

Since everyone's already mentioned Rich Hickey's talks, I loved Bjarne Stroustrup's talk on C++11 style: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012... . He provides a crystal clear view of what he thinks C++ could do better and what steps are being taken to move in that direction. Also, I think he has a cool accent.
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