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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?

#111

Post by kickingvegas »

Surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but watching Alan Kay describe Ivan Sutherland's program "Sketchpad" was monumentally jaw-dropping for me.

To wit, "Sketchpad" was the first GUI program.

It featured: * Interactive graphics * Constraint-based layout * Object Oriented Programming * Pen-based input

Sutherland wrote "Sketchpad" as part of his Ph.D. thesis in 1963.

1963.

Here's some links on this:

Alan Kay describing "Sketchpad"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg

Wikipedia Entry for "Sketchpad"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

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

#112

Post by marshray »

coldtea wrote: post #100
ghotli wrote: post #9

Simple 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

Don't know, I like Clojure and Hickey, but I've never got much out of his talks. Seem more like a series of really obvious ideas and some platitudes thrown in for good measure.

So what's your favorite talk then?

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

#113

Post by coldtea »

marshray wrote: post #112
coldtea wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know, I like Clojure and Hickey, but I've never got much out of his talks. Seem more like a series of really obvious ideas and some platitudes thrown in for good measure.

So what's your favorite talk then?

Fair question.

One that immediately pops to mind is this:

http://vimeo.com/36579366

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

#114

Post by coldtea »

chubot wrote: post #67
jgon wrote: post #62

The 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,…

>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.

I don't see how he can be wrong. The point he made wasn't that the things they did in the 70s were better than today's web or UIs. Just that people (and companies) should have invested in THAT line of work, and building on THOSE principles, instead of making a mess with reinventing the wheel, competing on BS differentiators and cutting off research.

I'd take my OS X or an Ubuntu desktop over any Xerox guy of the time, any day of the week. But I'd take the volume of research, innovation, insights and coherence that they had at the time over today's ho-hum idea of development too.

Despite having all those things 30 years ago, it took 30 years for them to become mainstream -- and far fewer stuff emerged since. And not for lack of CPU resources. Even something like BeOS could offer a 2005 desktop experience in 1996.

The most wide innovation mover in the 00's was Apple. And even they, they mostly worked on market innovation (ie. repackage older niche stuff in a way that finally makes people want to use them, instead of a jumbled mess), not on research innovation.

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

#117

Post by dougk16 »

ghotli wrote: post #9

Simple 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

Just watched it...really great stuff. But can anyone chime in on how you can apply some of the principles in his talk to something like a retain-mode display library, for GUI or 3d for example? Libraries like these pop up in all popular OO languages and usually have long inheritance chains with very state-heavy classes, which further form somewhat rigid hierarchies of class instances at runtime. This violates some of his tenants in a big way, but they seem to be the predominant design pattern for getting stuff on screen. Even HTML5 is essentially like this.

Any thoughts on how his talk could apply here? Is there a better way?

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

#118

Post by samatman »

I was surprised to command-F for Van Jacobson and not find this lecture, "A New Way to Look at Networking".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM

Van Jacobson was the major architect of TCP/IP; here is how the Internet would work if he were in charge. If this is ever implemented it will change everything.

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

#119

Post by ghotli »

dougk16 wrote: post #117
ghotli wrote: post #9

Simple 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

Just watched it...really great stuff. But can anyone chime in on how you can apply some of the principles in his talk to something like a retain-mode display library, for GUI or 3d for example? Libraries like these pop up in all popular OO languages and usually have long inheritance chains with very state-heavy classes, which further form somewhat rigid hierarchies of class instances at runtime. This violates some of…

View layers can get complex, but you can at the very least encapsulate complexity and have it interact with other parts of the system in a simple well defined way. Have the separate layers of the application communicate via interfaces that keep the ingress, egress points of data flow well defined. Things like event pub/sub systems can further decouple things, the observer pattern, etc.

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

#120

Post by Jach »

alxbrun wrote: post #47

Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Laws http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk Incredible talk for both the content and the form ! There is so much we could learn from him.

I second that and pretty much anything else Feynman did. His lectures on quantum electrodynamics for the layman that later got put into his QED book are also excellent.
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