Steve Souders @ HTML5 Dev Conf 2012... Really great material and I actually _learned_ a ton, which is fairly rare from most of the talks I've seen.
Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
61–70 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#62The answer for me is pretty easy: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet by Alan Kay. The OOPSLA '97 keynote speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
Great for repeated watching, I get something new from it every time I watch it. It is also great for recalibrating your point of view from amazement at whatever the current trend is in technology, to a more long-term outlook as well as encouraging higher standards for what is currently available.
I think this shift in outlook is important for technologists like us, because it easy to become immersed in the day to day goings-on of tech and become myopic in a way. Using the invention of the printing press and literacy, etc, etc is a great way to reorient your attitude towards technology and what it can/should do.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#63I highly recommend substack's talk on node.js streams.
LXJS 2012 - James Halliday - Harnessing The Awesome Power Of Streams: http://youtu.be/lQAV3bPOYHo
substack@hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=substack
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#64Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#65Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
This talk alone convinced me to attend CUSEC 2013. It's a fantastic demo.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#66Simple Made Easy changed how I think about constructing software systems of any kind. It provided me with a strong vocabulary and mental model to identify coupling and design with a more clear separation of concerns and focus on the output rather than the ease of development. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
I second Simple Made Easy. It put into words what I thought was wrong but never could formulate.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#67The answer for me is pretty easy: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet by Alan Kay. The OOPSLA '97 keynote speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY Great for repeated watching, I get something new from it every time I watch it. It is also great for recalibrating your point of view from amazement at whatever the current trend is in technology, to a more long-term outlook as well as encouraging higher…
Is this the one where he says the web was designed by amateurs and it should have been a virtual machine instead? He says they did a better web 30 years before or something to that effect.
If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others.
Without going too much into detail, if he believes this, then he can't possibly understand Tim Berner-Lee's principle of least privilege. And that the web would have never become ubiquitous, e.g. made the jump from PCs to mobile, in his bizarre universe.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#68As a passionate web developer, Can We Get There From Here? at Google IO 2008, by Alex Russell (before he joined Google), will always be paramount.
It's a technical view of the web platform, the problems attached to it (especially when we try to push its boundries), and questions why they're not being answered by the standards process and browser vendors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG66hIhUdEU
Looking back, it's amazing how far the web platform has come, but also in the problems that still plague it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#69The Macronomicon by Michael Fogus http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023...
404, and searching for "macronomicon" doesn't dig up anything
Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
#70Gerald Jay Sussman (of SICP): We Really Don't Know How To Compute! http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...
I consider Sussman to be one of the eminent genius' of computing. This talk is one of many that blew my mind. Time and again he demonstrates that his use of Scheme is simply for demonstration (I mean to emphasize this because the correlation with SICP/Sussman and Scheme is often regurgitated in FUD). It's not the languages we use that are important -- it is the models by which we compute things which is!