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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?

#191

Post by stretchwithme »

PeterisP wrote: post #178
dgreensp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And observe that if I forget to tell the computer to save my work, it loses it!" furious scribbling in the audience as everyone takes notes I'm so glad we're finally getting away from this paradigm after four decades. For example, the iPhone notepad (and now Mac TextEdit) doesn't wait for a cue from the user to write the few dozen bytes of new input to persistent storage.

After some incidents in my shool years, I've noticed that I unconciously tend to hit ctrl-s every few dozen keystrokes without even noticing it. Good software doesn't lose anything ever, but even with "average" (i.e., unacceptably bad if you think about it critically) tools I've had sudden power cuts where I lost just a few words because of this habit.

Totally necessary when the early PCs would just die on you because you pushed a key.

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

#192

Post by jules »

chubot wrote: post #190
jules wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure some kind of markup construct will exist in 100 years. But not HTML. I do not believe plain text will exist in 100 years, but that's another discussion. I am claiming something far weaker than what you seem to think I'm claiming. I do not think each and every website will be written from scratch on top of the VM. I'm simply claiming that the distribution mechanism for new features of the web will change. Current…

So either TBL is an idiot for designing HTML instead of a VM, or he's not and Alan Kay is an idiot for calling him such. Which is true? Maybe you are not defending Alan Kay's stance, but you haven't said that. Plain text has existed for 50+ years; I'm sure it will exist in 100. I'm pretty surprised you don't think so. Actually Taleb's Antifragile talks about this exact fact -- things that have stood the test of time…

I'm not calling anybody an idiot, and Alan Kay isn't either. You are the only one calling people idiots here I'm afraid.

The fact that some things stood the test of time has no predictive value. It's just confirmation bias. There are plenty of things that existed for far more than 50 years that did not stand the test of time. The horse cart, the abacus, and the spear for example. I believe that as IDEs and other programming tools become more sophisticated, it starts to make more and more sense for them to work directly on abstract syntax trees rather than plain text strings. But this is another discussion.

I'm well aware that the W3C has not have original started the standards (including the original HTML), but it's how they evolve, accumulate cruft, and it's how we get stuck with them. Standardization can only ever accumulate complexity on the web. Things cannot easily, or at all, be removed. With an organic model, as soon as things fall out of use they disappear from consideration.

Perhaps you can implement HTTP and HTML 1.0 in a few days if you are a hero programmer. I'm not sure what your point is. We are living in 2013 not 1989.

Yes, the client can't do as much high level optimization, and that's a good thing. That kind of optimization belongs be at the library level, not at the client level (and certainly not duplicated several times for every different browser vendor each with a slightly different and inconsistent implementation).

I agree that markup will be transmitted in 100 years, and I'm pretty sure so does Alan Kay. He, like I do, simply believes that the building blocks should be inverted. The thing that interprets the markup doesn't belong hard coded in the client. The client should simply be universal (i.e. Turing complete) and the thing that interprets and renders the markup should be built on top of that.

I agree that in 100 years we can still separate text into paragraphs and make things bold, but there are plenty of things that let you do that which are not HTML, and neither is the main point of HTML separating text into paragraphs and making things bold (certainly not in 2013). So this is no reason why HTML will exist in 100 years.

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

#193

Post by chubot »

jules wrote: post #192
chubot wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So either TBL is an idiot for designing HTML instead of a VM, or he's not and Alan Kay is an idiot for calling him such. Which is true? Maybe you are not defending Alan Kay's stance, but you haven't said that. Plain text has existed for 50+ years; I'm sure it will exist in 100. I'm pretty surprised you don't think so. Actually Taleb's Antifragile talks about this exact fact -- things that have stood the test of time…

I'm not calling anybody an idiot, and Alan Kay isn't either. You are the only one calling people idiots here I'm afraid. The fact that some things stood the test of time has no predictive value. It's just confirmation bias. There are plenty of things that existed for far more than 50 years that did not stand the test of time. The horse cart, the abacus, and the spear for example. I believe that as IDEs and other prog…

Sorry, you simply didn't watch the video then. He does this in the video linked, and also in Scaling and Computation (which are more than 10 years apart; it's something he deeply believes).

One quote is, "this is what happens when you let physicists play with computers" -- but that's not all. I am paraphrasing "idiot", but he certainly heaps scorn on them for not understanding something obvious and fundamental, when he is the one who doesn't understand something obvious and fundamental.

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

#194

Post by chubot »

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

I just watched it and thought it was great. She is well spoken and clear.

But I sort of thought this was common knowledge. I made a related comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677998 (and before the Ruby Gems YAML exploit, which maybe was kind of prescient)

Incidentally, I felt she sort of brushed off computational complexity when once person brought it up. Complexity is just as important as computability/decidability, and it fits very well with her formal language perspective (e.g. regular languages can be recognized in linear time and constant space).

Another thing was that she didn't give that many concrete examples. The x.509 certificates was one that seemed really good (didn't look into the details). But I would have liked to see an instance of a protocol that was not meant to be turing complete, but IS.

She gave the example of HTML5 + CSS which was a good one. But I don't think people have accidentally written Turing complete HTTP parsers or anything like that. How big a problem is it in practice? She's making the claim that most security bugs fall in the category of being caused by language errors?

And, like another comment, I'm not sure I agree with disavowal of the length field. I'll have to think about that. I believe delimiting and escaping is more complex and thus more fragile. I also believe it's slower, despite what she says in the talk. We have to consider the tools we have now; maybe in some future world we'll get better formal language tools.

EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs -- Related link to a design flaw in XML that is related to computational complexity, but not computability.

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

#195

Post by wladimir »

flipgimble wrote: post #173
ezy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sati…

As I understood it, the arguments against using an unbounded length field is that it makes the language recognizing it context-sensative. When processing some inner payload of a data packet you need to carry around the state of outer context-sensative protocol layers to make sure your inputs are well formed. The fact that it is trivial to maliciously craft the length field makes it cheap for the attacker to try to ex…

The fact that it is trivial to maliciously craft the length field makes it cheap for the attacker to try to exhaust receiver memory, overflow buffers or make DDoS attack more effective. If you use a delimiter, the attacker has to at least spend the required bandwidth to try to exhaust resources.

A length field doesn't mean that you have to pre-allocate that amount of memory. Never do that! Robust implementations use the length field only as a hint, as an hidden delimiter, and allocate memory as the data comes in.

That said, she does have a point. Though escaping is fraught with dangers, too (remember PHP in the beginnings? magic quotes, ugh).

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

#196

Post by Expez »

ricardobeat wrote: post #148
X4 wrote: post #145

Summary of the links shared here: http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023... http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/ http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-complete... http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business... http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012... http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-R... http://en…

And here are them with titles + thumbnails: http://bl.ocks.org/ricardobeat/raw/5343140/

Thank you so much for this!

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

#197

Post by jules »

chubot wrote: post #193
jules wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not calling anybody an idiot, and Alan Kay isn't either. You are the only one calling people idiots here I'm afraid. The fact that some things stood the test of time has no predictive value. It's just confirmation bias. There are plenty of things that existed for far more than 50 years that did not stand the test of time. The horse cart, the abacus, and the spear for example. I believe that as IDEs and other prog…

Sorry, you simply didn't watch the video then. He does this in the video linked, and also in Scaling and Computation (which are more than 10 years apart; it's something he deeply believes). One quote is, "this is what happens when you let physicists play with computers" -- but that's not all. I am paraphrasing "idiot", but he certainly heaps scorn on them for not understanding something obvious and fundamental, when…

A tongue in cheek remark and calling somebody an idiot are two very different things.

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

#198

Post by waqas- »

ricardobeat wrote: post #148
X4 wrote: post #145

Summary of the links shared here: http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023... http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/ http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-complete... http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business... http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012... http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-R... http://en…

And here are them with titles + thumbnails: http://bl.ocks.org/ricardobeat/raw/5343140/

how awesome are you? thanks

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

#200

Post by SonOfLilit »

Maybe John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

But I think the 3 minute talks we host at home once a month or two have among them the 3-5 best I've heard (we just started taking videos, but they're in Hebrew).

I highly recommend hosting your own 3 minute talk session. It's really easy and the format just inherently leads to amazing talks.

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