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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?

#151

Post by seanmcdirmid »

endgame wrote: post #133
kenjackson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great talk. One of the best. His talk with Gabriel, 50 in 50, is not as good, but still quite fun. Well worth watching, but it is much better in person than on video (saw it at HOPL): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc

Seconded. I saw it at YOW a few years back. If you get a chance to see it live, it is well worth it.

Steele (and Grabriel) are great at doing this talks, they are almost art. Which is why I wouldn't call them so much technical (even growing a language) as they are entertaining and perhaps a bit influential.

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

#152

Post by Confusion »

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,…

I either don't understand your point or I don't understand Kay's idea, because: javascript is Turing complete and runs in a VM/sandbox?

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

#153

Post by AustinLin »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #54

Doug Engelbart's mother of all demos (1968): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY This is the talk that, according to Wikipedia, included the first public demonstration of the following technologies: the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. Pretty good for one…

If you have not watched at least that first 30 minutes of Engelbart's talk, I would recommend you stop what your doing and watch it right now.

In an hour and 40 minutes Englebart demonstrates input via mouse, video conferencing and collaborative editing among other things. This was before the internet, before UIs, before the idea of personal computing. Incidentally the most profound thing about this demo is not the technology demonstrated but rather the introduction of the concept of personal computing. At a time where computers were reserved for number crunching Englebart envisioned a future where they would be a part of our daily lives not controlling us but enhancing our abilities.

A quick side note, it is worth noting that while Englebart was certainly the visionary, his partner Bill English brought Englebart's visions into the world.

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

#154

Post by ezy »

jdietrich wrote: post #38

Meredith Patterson's astonishing CCC talk on computing and linguistics. It's a tour de force, presenting a systematic and practical proposal for how we can build an open and secure future for computing. I can't imagine a better example of the joys of inter-disciplinary thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY

This is a great talk, although maybe a little bit too precious (but this is common to a lot of [security] conference talks so I don't hold it against her). Pushing people towards using more formal methods to generate and accept protocols is always good.

That said, I thought the argument against length fields was somewhat.. weak. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the context. The question at the end was not answered satisfactorily. A protocol with a length field is most certainly deterministic, and if you go the other way and use a delimiter, escaping/encoding is the only way you're going to work with arbitrary user data. I would argue the length field is miles better. If someone injects bytes into your stream that match the protocol, your recognizer isn't going to save you, just the same way someone rewriting the length field is going to blow up.

What this talk seems to argue for is making the language simpler (e.g. context-free), so you can validate that the semantics are working as intended, but transferring arbitrary blobs of data is always going to be an issue as long as people enter random musings in text boxes that are rendered by Turing complete software. :-)

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

#155

Post by zerr »

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.

Exactly. Except, ironically, I happen to like only Hickey, not Clojure. Rich has some great mood in his talks, and also makes good articulations.

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

#156

Post by _juof »

jdietrich wrote: post #38

Meredith Patterson's astonishing CCC talk on computing and linguistics. It's a tour de force, presenting a systematic and practical proposal for how we can build an open and secure future for computing. I can't imagine a better example of the joys of inter-disciplinary thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY

She also had a more practical talk on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVZrmp5MAas

And also talks about a general parser she's building for this issue on github[1]. Using this parser , she have built a DNS and base64 recognizer , and i think they are working on building recognizers for more protocols.

[1]https://github.com/abiggerhammer/hammer

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

#157

Post by chubot »

Confusion wrote: post #152
chubot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I either don't understand your point or I don't understand Kay's idea, because: javascript is Turing complete and runs in a VM/sandbox?

If you have JavaScript, "technically" HTML, CSS, XML, and JSON are unnecessary. You can write programs to print and layout text (that's essentially what a PDF file is), and programs can emit and compute data as well.

Kay specifically calls out HTML as a "step backward" for this reason (although he is simply wrong as I've said). He wants a web based entirely on executable code. Yes, it sounds dumb prima facie but that's what he has said consistently over a long period of time.

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

#158

Post by dasil003 »

jules wrote: post #97
dasil003 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.

The web can, and will continue to accumulate stuff. You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. It's definitely not inconceivable that somebody will build Kay's VM vision as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that at least we no longer…

> You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff.

You can't clean up a mess by adding layers, but you can replace layers (eg. you can add web sockets and start driving real time apps that way). Therefore incremental improvement is possible essentially forever.

> There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way.

Agreed. However it's not just accidental either. The web is many things to many people. It's not like cross-platform GUI toolkits failed for lack of trying, but the fact is that they could not reproduce the advantages that the web had in the very beginning. Specifically, it was comically easy to create content and even a browser on any platform in those early days. Obviously over the next decade web tech was severely abused to shoehorn application functionality where it was never intended, and ends up being more complex in the long run. However the number and utility of the dead simple documents is absolutely massive. That, combined with a defacto standard for creating server apps without installation that is perfectly accessible to a layman (theoretically with any disability as well) was the wedge that GUI toolkits never came close to having.

Your idea about building a new abstract layer on top of existing web technologies and then reimplementing it natively is the most credible idea I've heard about how the web could be supplanted, and I certainly wouldn't bet against that happening over the coming decades. However I think the web should be a textbook example of how worse is better is not just a conciliatory platitude for disgruntled engineers, but as an actual requirement for certain classes of technology to gain critical mass.

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

#159

Post by chubot »

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…

FWIW I just watched this talk, and tried to judge it apart from my opinion that he is totally wrong about the web.

I think Kay is one of the most interesting speakers in CS; he's a learned man. But I didn't find the content that great. If you want some thoughts on software architecture, programming languages, with a lot of great cultural references outside the field, I much prefer the thoughts of Richard Gabriel:

http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html

If you search for his work on "ultra large scale systems", it is a lot more thought provoking than what Kay offers, and it is a lot more specific at the same time.

When watching the Kay talk, I was struck that he seems to be lumping every "good" in software engineering under the term "object oriented". Virtual machines are objects. Servers are objects. Numbers should be objects. All abstraction is objects. It was not really a useful or enlightening way of thinking about the world.

I know OOP has a different definition than what he intended with SmallTalk, but he didn't invent modularity. For example, Unix is highly modular but not object-oriented, and it predates his ideas.

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

#160

Post by dasil003 »

jgon wrote: post #98
dasil003 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.

Well I'm not wringing my hands, and I don't think you really have the ability to comment on my body language. Let's keep this debate focused solely on the contents of the talk. The ubiquity and deployability of the web is not an inherent quality of the design of html, css or javascript. The ubiquity and deployability seem to me to be largely due to the internet which is one of the comments that Kay makes. People conf…

You'll have to forgive me not watching the talk yet. I'm not in a position to comment on Kay's entire vision.

My comment was aimed squarely at the refrain that we've been hearing from serious engineers for a long time about the utter unsuitability of the web for apps. I find this tiresome because technology doesn't win by being better, it wins by being adopted. Of course there's no technical reason we can't have a better basis than the web for internet apps. It's not about technical limitations, it's about the adoption curve. The perfect cross-platform GUI toolkit in 1992 would have still failed if it required you to write C++ to render your class schedule.

The fact that any person with almost no technical expertise can access an app from any computer they sit down at anywhere in the world without requiring installation is actually an amazing achievement that far outweighs the kludginess of the apparatus.

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