I think Alan Kay's "Doing with Images makes Symbols" talk from 1987 might make my list:
http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987
It's mostly about the history of HCI up to that point.
Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
191–200 of 266 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#192By far my favorite talk is and has been for a very long time Bret Victor's inventing on principle, for me, nothing comes close, except for some of his other work I suppose. https://vimeo.com/36579366
Agreed. Was gonna post this if it wasn't up already. After this, The Birth and Death of Javascript: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... He could've taken the concept further tho. I think there are real hardware simplifications you could do if the OS is a jitting VM - no memory mapping unit and take out the expensive fully-associative TLBs.
I always have trouble when telling people in person to go watch this - how should I pronounce the "J" in Javascript?
* SPOILER ALERT, and seriously go watch it first *
If I pronounce "J" I do him an unjustice, and if I pronounce "Y" I ruin a great surprise that comes quite a few minutes into the talk.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#193Too many great talks to mention, but if I had to pick one it would be Ted Nelson's few minutes of demonstration of Xanadu. Demonstration is lacking, but what he said about the concept/idea is what stuck with me. Deep and referential(?) content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#194Ashton Kutcher--Startup School
I like it because it is the intersection of so many things. He starts slow, is very intimidated by the audience. The audience, obviously super skeptical of the clown from that 70s show giving any useful information, they could learn from. He finds his footing with a great morivational story (albeit laden with a few cliches) about a forgotten entrepreneur and how he built some lasting value.
For me, this is a great talk. The story is extremely motivational and has some interesting bits of history & entrepreneurial genius-- but the entire experience is extremely educational. About bias, drive & success.
I liked it for what it wasnt.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#195grin Here we go... For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m00s
As people usually point out when he comes up, just about any Bryan Cantrill talk is at least entertaining, and usually contains a good amount of technical, historical and personal information in various amounts.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#196Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" [1] or Rob Pike's "Concurrency Is Not Parallelism" [2].
[1] https://vimeo.com/36579366 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_DpYBzKso
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#197For 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-sak…
http://www.noslidesconf.net/
Quite feasible for a good keynote. Harder for a technical talk, since a good diagram can greatly improve an explanation.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#198"The Birth and Death of Javascript" by Gary Bernhardt (probably the most talented speaker on tech) at https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
I'd mention Bret Victor's work before (maybe Drawing Dynamic Visualizations?), but Bret cheats by writing a lot of amazing code for each of his talks, and most of the awesome comes from the code, not his (great nonetheless) ability as a speaker.
Then you have John Carmack's QuakeCon keynotes, which are just hours and hours of him talking about things that interest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff like when he tried shining a laser into his eyes to project an image, against the recommendations of... well, everyone): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#199Douglass Crockford's series of 8 videos, "Crockford on JavaScript" really helped me gain a understanding of the language and a better understanding of programming in general. If you don't like or understand JavaScript, this will definitely change that. He's an excellent speaker and the talks are quite enjoyable. Here is the first video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoB2r1QxIAY. If you like it, the other 7 are available in the suggested section.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?
#200Raymond Hettinger's talk about good code reviews -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M Carmack's talk about functional programming and Haskell -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0 All with a good sense of humor.
Yes, RH's Beyond PEP8 is great, even if you don't do Python. Will put the others in my queue. I'm reminded of Crockford's "Good Parts" of Javascript, I believe where he introduced me to the "Mother of all Demos."
Everything I've seen by Crockford is great!