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Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#181

For reasons completely unrelated to the content, Identity 2.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrpajcAgR1E Watching that talk brought me over to the "a picture or a few words per slide" style of presentation, rather than the "wall of bullet points" style. It also helped me move from "stop talking, change slides, start talking again", to smooth transitions while talking.

I'm waiting for more people to discover the next level - the "no slides at all" style of presentation. Cory Doctorow did a nice keynote at 28C3 completely without slides, and it worked very well ("The coming war on general computation", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc). Not suitable for every type of talk, of course, but certainly there are many where the slides are a useless crutch or slides-for-the-sake-of-slides. If you're a good enough speaker you can hold people's attention without pointing at large words behind you.

(See Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint" for good arguments about why slides are a bad idea most of the time)

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#183
The Front-end Architecture Revolution by David Nolen: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/61483785

It completely changed the way I approach front-end development (Not that talk in particular though. I saw an earlier, similar talk on Youtube but this one has much higher quality).

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#184

"The Last Lecture", by Randy Pausch. While it's by a well-known CS professor (who was dying of cancer at the time), it's not a technical talk, but about life and work, and how to make the most of it. One of the most inspiring things I've ever seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo Another fantastic one is Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

o u said steve jobs: really his announcement of the ipod was an incredible speech .. it ties together tech+art+music+apple and his vision appears pretty fresh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#185
post #20

Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing by Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html Cybersecurity as Realpolitik by Dan Geer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt

I'll second "Y Not" by Jim Weirich. It's just such a charming talk. My programming teacher in high school was like that, and I think it's such an excellent way to teach. From the careful way he meanders to the solution to the fact it was a live coding session really grounds the explanation of how the Y combinator works.

To Dissect a Mockingbird is even better, though...

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#186
post #75

Lexical Scanning in Go by Rob Pike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE I love everything about this talk. It walks you through building a lexer from scratch in a simple and elegant way, through a very interesting use of coroutines. I appreciate the bits of humor in the talk as well.

Rob Pike is far more pleasant than his acolytes (for lack of a better word). Pike makes me want to clap: cat-v makes me want to vomit. It's the DJB people with none of the charm.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

#190
Peter Norvig on the "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs

I think it is so easy for us to discuss the impact of big data and quickly get into the weeds, but I think in this talk Norvig does an especially great job in making you truly appreciate the seismic impact that the availability of massive quantities of data can have on your way to think about problems. This is one of the first things I ever saw of him, and I've been in love ever since.

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