Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?
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.
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 talk!
Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle
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.
Guy Steele's "Growing a Language". A very cool idea for a talk!
Two great ones by Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure -
Are We There Yet? - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...
Simple Made Easy - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
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 standards for what is currently available.
I think this shift in outlook is important for technologists like us, because it easy to become immersed in the day to day goings-on of tech and become myopic in a way. Using the invention of the printing press and literacy, etc, etc is a great way to reorient your attitude towards technology and what it can/should do.
Real Software Engineering, by Glenn Vandenburg. Not a perfect talk (especially the conclusions IMO), but a very good exploration of how some of the common beliefs in the field of software "engineering" came to be, and how something resembling actual engineering practice might be beneficial and practical.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9AIUT9nos
Abstract: "Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all.
That's odd, because in every other field, the term "engineering" is reserved for methods that work.
What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this session, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being "anti-engineering" (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development."
"Inseperable from Magic: The Manufacture of Modern Semiconductors" — an overview of semiconductor fabrication (and its current challenges) by a former Intel engineer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
"The Atomic Level of Porn", by Jason Scott — a history of low-bandwidth pornography, from ham radio to telegraphs to BBSes. http://vimeo.com/7088524
How to build your own X-ray backscatter imager (aka "airport body scanner") by Ben Krasnow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUf75_MlOnw
"The Secret History of Silicon Valley" by Steve Blank. Other, more recent versions of this talk exist, but the audio quality is poor in them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo#t=1m42s
Of course, the best technical talk is WAT by Gary Bernhardt! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEgk1Hdze0
Single best is difficult, here are some favourites of mine:
"You and your research" by Richard Hamming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
"How to design a good API and why it matters" by Joschua Bloch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
Google TechTalk on Git by Linus Torvalds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
All talks ever given by Alan Kay, for example:
Designing and Evaluating Reusable Components by Casey Muratori. Slides PDF and audio track available here:
This is a talk about the practical realities of integrating with APIs over the lifetime of a project. In particular, it presents an insightful list of pitfalls API designers often fall into that hamper integration, and it suggests ways to avoid those pitfalls.
Sadly, a decade or so later, many of us are still making the same basic mistakes. If this talk were better known, perhaps we wouldn’t be, so it gets my vote.
Since everyone's already mentioned Rich Hickey's talks, I loved Bjarne Stroustrup's talk on C++11 style: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012... . He provides a crystal clear view of what he thinks C++ could do better and what steps are being taken to move in that direction. Also, I think he has a cool accent.
Anything by Damian Conway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAf9HK16F-A
I've watched him give talks in Klingon.
I've watched him explain how to build a supercomputer using laser printers.
And who can forget that classic talk, "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachines"?
3 awesome videos on very specific topics:
Dr James Grime / Numberphile - Encryption and HUGE numbers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7kEpw1tn50
Les Hazlewood - Designing a Beautiful REST+JSON API http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WXYw4J4QOU
classic: Douglas Crockford - JavaScript: The Good Parts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook
Maybe not the 'best', but there's a great short presentation called "Wat" that I really enjoyed that talks about weird behavior in programming languages when operations are performed on variables of different types.
Definitely worth a watch
Gerald Jay Sussman (of SICP): We Really Don't Know How To Compute!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...
I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
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 seem to remember the famous "Diligence, Patience, and Humility" bit by larry wall as reported in the "Open Sources" book was originally a speech. If so I'd vote for that.
Otherwise, at some time I really enjoyed Guy Steele's talks while he was working on Fortress, e.g.
How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Program...
No too sure about technical but Greg Wilsons "What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True" has greatly influenced how I approach everything I have to look at in life.
These talks are about the STEPS project from former PARC and ARPA guys, how a modern computing environment from the metal up can be reduced to a mere 20KLOC, about a factor of 1000 code reduction with the use of carefully designed DSLs
They also redefine what an OS and the Web (Hypercard style) means by removing as much accidental complexity as possible.
"Alan Kay: How Simply and Understandably Could The "Personal Computing Experience" Be Programmed?" http://vimeo.com/10260548
"Alan Kay: Extracting Energy from the Turing Tarpit" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt8jyPqsmxE
"Alan Kay: Programming and Scaling" http://www.tele-task.de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/
"Ian Piumarta - To trap a better mouse" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q
Papers here http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
Architecture: The Lost Years is a fantastic talk by Robert Martin http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...
One of my favorites is Alan Kay "Programming and Scaling" http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
The lectures by Leonard Susskind (one of the founders of string theory) are excellent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind#Lectures
He has a series of lectures that explain physics as understood by the modern theoretical physicist. He starts with classical mechanics, goes on to quantum mechanics, special & general relativity, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. The prerequisites are only high school mathematics, he explains the more advanced mathematics as he goes along. The physics that he teaches is condensed, but not dumbed down. It's really how a working theoretical physicist understands physics, "the real deal" as he says. Beware that it's very much a theoretician's viewpoint.
Baruco 2012 Keynote: The Top 10 Ways To Scam The Modern American Programmer, by Zed A. Shaw
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.
ART && CODE Symposium: Hackety Hack, why the lucky stiff http://vimeo.com/5047563
Rather fond of anything Hickey.
The Golang "Concurrency is not parallelism, it's better" is good too.
That one at&t hacker guy high on acid talking about tor hidden services.
I enjoyed the Crockford on Javascript talks. Even if you're not interested in JS, the first talk is about the history of computing/programming languages and is quite interesting.
Robert Lefkowitz's keynote from Pycon 2007: "The Importance of Programming Literacy" I was listening while driving home and had to keep driving around my neighborhood because I wasn't ready to turn it off. A similar talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Own-89vxYF8
The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet. Alan Kay. my summary: new tools are first used to do old things a new way. but the revolution is on doing new things and having new thoughts.
Ron Avitzur's Google Tech Talk - "The Graphing Calculator Story" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyg5ohTsVY
MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System.
By Andrew Tanenbaum =^.~=
I highly recommend substack's talk on node.js streams.
LXJS 2012 - James Halliday - Harnessing The Awesome Power Of Streams: http://youtu.be/lQAV3bPOYHo
substack@hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=substack
Lexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike. I really loved it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE
The Myth of the Genius Programmer
Cliff Click: A Crash Course in Modern Hardware is high up for me http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-modern...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren
miniKanren is an embedding of logic programming in Scheme. In this interactive presentation, William E. Byrd and Dan Friedman introduce miniKanren, from the basic building blocks to the methodology for translating regular programs to relational program, which can run "backwards". Their examples are fun and convincing: a relational environment-passing interpreter that can trivially generate quines, a relational type checker that doubles as a generator of well-typed terms and a type inferencer.
Feynman's lectures on physics. The stuff that skips most of the QED
http://io9.com/watch-a-series-of-seven-brilliant-lectures-by...
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"
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
http://io9.com/watch-a-series-of-seven-brilliant-lectures-by...
https://github.com/PharkMillups/killer-talks
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/radical-simplicity/...
http://stufftohelpyouout.blogspot.com/2009/07/great-talk-on-...
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXhJyTo5V8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlkCdM_f3p4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therap...
http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf88b5_jean-pierre-serre-wr...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-modern...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Program...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich...
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...
http://www.slideshare.net/fogus/the-macronomicon-10171952
http://www.slideshare.net/sriprasanna/introduction-to-cluste...
http://www.tele-task.de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/
http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WXYw4J4QOU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agw-wlHGi0E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7viw2KXak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cidchWg74Y4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjaGktVQdNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8xNAc2ic8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEgk1Hdze0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7kEpw1tn50
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neI_Pj558CY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG66hIhUdEU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nii1n8PYLrc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9AIUT9nos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-bdWKwXsU&playnext=...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCZMoY3q2uM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Own-89vxYF8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlzM3zcd-lk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx082gDwGcM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7nfN4bOOQI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt8jyPqsmxE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUf75_MlOnw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjPBkvYh-ss
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAf9HK16F-A
Eric Pickup on scaling YouPorn [SFW]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlkCdM_f3p4
[edit] Spoiler alert: Everything's in Redis!
MIT's Dynamic Languages Wizards series from 2001 is pretty informative.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agw-wlHGi0E (features pg)
Guido did a talk at Uber, about the reasons behind the decisions/trade-offs in how cPython is implemented. The pypy guys were there, and it was interesting to hear how different groups could implemented such different interpreters for the same language. It was much deeper than most of the technical talks I've heard in the bay area.
Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen is a talk I keep going back to for inspiration. It's a well written and funny talk that instills optimism when faced with tricky code.
http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therap...
I wouldn't want to use the term "best" because there are so many good ones in various areas, but this talk by Steve Yegge was both entertaining and informative.
Stanford Seminar - Google's Steve Yegge on GROK (large scale source code analysis)
This is not really a "talk" but rather a whole course. In 2009 Gérard Berry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gérard_Berry) gave a class in French at Collège de France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collège_de_France) on CS fundamentals: http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/gerard-berry/#course
This class is still, to my eyes, the best I have ever seen on this topic.
He has given another one recently on time and computing which I have not yet seen, but which is promising too.
The talk about strange machines by Sergey Bratus.
Gerald Sussman: We Really Don't Know How To Compute (Strange Loop 2011) [1h04]
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...
So much for getting anything done today... :-)
I really liked googles map reduce lectures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjPBkvYh-ss Wish google would update the quality and fix the link to the slides - heres a copy on slide share: http://www.slideshare.net/sriprasanna/introduction-to-cluste... You can find the links to the rest of the videos and slides from there, theres 7 total I think.
Human Computation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlzM3zcd-lk
Captcha creator on how we can trick humans into doing useful work via "games with a purpose".
As a passionate web developer, Can We Get There From Here? at Google IO 2008, by Alex Russell (before he joined Google), will always be paramount.
It's a technical view of the web platform, the problems attached to it (especially when we try to push its boundries), and questions why they're not being answered by the standards process and browser vendors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG66hIhUdEU
Looking back, it's amazing how far the web platform has come, but also in the problems that still plague it.
Compiled list of talks, including page titles, made with a quick node/coffee crawler (source included):
"What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too" - Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0
The Macronomicon by Michael Fogus http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-macronomicon-597023...
Mark Phillups of Basho has a good list here: https://github.com/PharkMillups/killer-talks
"The Next Generation of Neural Networks" -- a Google TechTalk by Geoffrey Hinton in 2007. I have never been able to sit through 60 minutes of lectures without fidgeting constantly, however this one managed to keep my attention until the end.
Truly an amazingly great talk and worth watching through (even if you only only peripherally care about ANNs).
Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
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.
Hearing Scott Chacon explain how git works is pretty good.
Steve Souders @ HTML5 Dev Conf 2012... Really great material and I actually _learned_ a ton, which is fairly rare from most of the talks I've seen.
Andrew Tanenbaum presenting on Minix 3's architecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA.
Regardless of one's opinions on microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, it's a very interesting but accessible talk for those interested in lower-level systems and fault-tolerant architectures.
GoingNative 2012 - Bjarne Stroustrup talks about C++ 11. Very good talk about the ideas behind C++ 11
Richard Feynman's talk Computers from the Inside Out (titled on Youtube as Computer Heuristics) is a wonderful description of how computers work and what they can and cannot compute using a file clerk metaphor. He gets bonus points for wearing a Thinking Machines t-shirt.
One of the best I've heard was Dave Thomas's talk on the Ruby Object Model at Scotland on Rails 2009: http://stufftohelpyouout.blogspot.com/2009/07/great-talk-on-...
I watch very few technical talks but Ryan Dahl's introduction to Node.js is one of my all time faves.
Not computer science, but a brilliant math lecture:
Jean Serre's "Writing Mathematics" http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf88b5_jean-pierre-serre-wr...
Don Norman's 2009 Business of Software talk on product and service/system design is excellent.
http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business...
Application cache, by Jake Archibald. Never thought one could laught so much watching a technical talk.
http://www.paris-web.fr/2012/conferences/application-cache.p...
I remember there being a better version of this, but Luis von Ahn's talk on "Human Computation" was great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx082gDwGcM
Advanced Topics in Programming Languages: Java Puzzlers
I might not be the best I've heard, but it's the one I enjoyed the most:
Hickey gives great talks, but I also really liked Jack Diederich's talk "stop writing classes" at PyCon 2012
"A Universe from Nothing" lecture by Lawrence Krauss: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjaGktVQdNg
Has to be the facebook lead talking about how they deploy code to main site. Absolute fun to watch and learned a ton of cool stuff. Dont have a link, sorry.
The paradox of choice - why more is less http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ELAkV2fC-I
John Carmack at Quakecon 2012: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk
not sure if essays too qualify here: You and your research by Richard Hammings has been the most profound and deeply introspecting so far!
Cliff Click on Wait-free hashtables and another one on modern Hardware and Processor Systems.
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The fact that Greg Wilson's talk hasn't been mentioned is troubling.
Greg Wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True
not to be cliché, but, Steve Jobs.