Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard? - karamazov
======
ghotli
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>

~~~
coldtea
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.

~~~
marshray
So what's your favorite talk then?

~~~
coldtea
Fair question.

One that immediately pops to mind is this:

<http://vimeo.com/36579366>

~~~
anm8tr
Wow. Great video; good referral.

------
michael_nielsen
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!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos>

~~~
dgreensp
"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.

~~~
PeterisP
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.

~~~
akanster
> 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.

That is exactly how I learned too. Years later, ctrl-s is still a reflex
action.

------
mdkess
Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII>

~~~
msutherl
A friend of mine invited Bret to do this talk. He told me that Bret sent close
to 50 emails leading up to the event making sure that every aspect of the talk
was perfectly choreographed.

~~~
hbrundage
Mr Leavitt is the coolest.

------
jdietrich
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>

~~~
gnosis
I found the message in the talk persuasive, but the presentation of it sorely
lacking. Her delivery was stilted, probably because she was either very
nervous and/or hadn't practiced her presentation nearly often enough to sound
natural. On top of that, the talk was way too long. It could have been easily
cut in half, at the very least.

In a Boing Boing article[1] (which also, incidentally, calls her presentation
a "tour-de-force"), her points were summarized in these quotes:

    
    
      Hard-to-parse protocols require complex parsers. Complex, buggy
      parsers become weird machines for exploits to run on. Help stop weird
      machines today: Make your protocol context-free or regular!
    
      Protocols and file formats that are Turing-complete input languages
      are the worst offenders, because for them, recognizing valid or
      expected inputs is UNDECIDABLE: no amount of programming or testing
      will get it right.
    
      A Turing-complete input language destroys security for generations of
      users.  Avoid Turing-complete input languages!
    

Ok. I got that. Seems reasonable enough. It didn't take me 40 minutes read
that, and it shouldn't take 40 minutes to present basically the same thing.
Maybe half that if you thought you really had to fight hard to make your case.

A more concise presentation containing just the important/interesting bits
would have been less painful to watch and probably a lot easier to prepare
for.

That said, the Q&A period at the end was good. She seemed a lot more
comfortable there, and there was a lot more interesting and informative
content there than in the presentation proper.

[1] - [http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-
complete...](http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-
completene.html)

~~~
Udo
I'm watching it right now and there is nothing wrong with the delivery
whatsoever. I also didn't get the feeling that the talk was too long. Sure,
you can sum up pretty much anything with a TL;DR, but that's not the point of
giving a talk, right? I mean at its core a presentation is meant to inform or
entertain and this one here did both. So I _really_ don't get where the
criticism is coming from.

------
chollida1
Guy Steele's "Growing a Language". A very cool idea for a talk!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0>

~~~
kenjackson
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>

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

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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.

------
rustc
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...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey)

Simple Made Easy - <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy>

~~~
ravimbalgi
[http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-
Expert-R...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-Rich-
Hickey-and-Brian-Beckman-Inside-Clojure)

this one is so far the best by the Guru himself

------
jgon
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.

~~~
chubot
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, then he can't
possibly understand Tim Berner-Lee's principle of least privilege. And that
the web would have never become ubiquitous, e.g. made the jump from PCs to
mobile, in his bizarre universe.

~~~
jgon
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the
web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would
encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an
incredibly small portion of the overall talk.

I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have
either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of his
remarks. I will say that I think Kay explicitly agrees with the principle of
least privilege (Rule of Least Power according to wikipedia) and calls that
out in his talk. I see no way in which the ever-enlarging html,css, and
javascript standards embody what Berners-Lee was talking about, especially
when they still don't offer nearly the functionality that an OS offers
currently. You can tell this because there are really only 4 organizations
capable of creating a full browser and they happen to be mostly the largest
tech corporations on the planet. If you need those kinds of resources to be
able to implement the web today, how can this ever be considered "Least
Power"? I suspect that in 10 years the W3C will have added so much more
functionality to the various standards in an attempt to make them somewhat at
parity with native development that browsers will collapse under their own
weight as they try to implement what is basically an OS (this really became
explicit when Chrome started using processes to "protect" tabs. Sound
familiar?).

The web as it exists today is a huge pile of hodge-podge conflicting
standards, none of which are remotely close to offering the level of
development performance for apps rather than pages that you can get with any
desktop toolkit. Alan is fully behind the "idea" of the web, but is taking the
long-term, and I believe correct, view that this cannot continue as it is and
we would be well served by trying do something about it by conscious effort
rather than evolving half-heartedly in that direction.

~~~
dasil003
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.

~~~
jgon
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 confuse the workings of the internet with the workings of the web.
Right now we send documents that are interpreted, but there is nothing to say
we can't send objects which are "interpreted" (or JITed more likely). But his
point in the talk I posted was that the amount of accidental complexity that
is piling up on the web as we speak (and which will only get worse and worse)
will eventually collapse upon itself. You can already see the complexity of
things like javascript and css increasing as the web attempts to offer
applications, not just documents, and doing this by having a committee
standardize high-level behaviour like layout seems to be a poor approach in
the long run.

Most of the talk is focused on thinking in the long-term as well as working to
decrease the complexity of the software edifices we are currently creating,
before they become too large to improve in any revolutionary way.

Who knows, maybe the next web will be built on top of the web, the way the web
was built on top of the internet. The point of his comments in the talk is
that we should explicitly think about the design of what we are building
before we rush off to pile up code.

~~~
dasil003
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.

------
KaeseEs
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."

------
asdfs
"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>

~~~
brzed
"Inseperable from Magic: The Manufacture of Modern Semiconductors"

Hey that's me! Very cool and VERY humbling to be mentioned in such esteemable
company. I tried to cram way way to much into 50 minutes...

------
acemtp
Of course, the best technical talk is WAT by Gary Bernhardt!
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEgk1Hdze0>

~~~
aroman
I'm glad that someone posted this :) See also a longer spin of of this talk at
the more decent dotJS conference: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8xNAc2ic8>

------
stiff
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:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY>

~~~
stblack
Double thumbs-up to Google TechTalk on Git by Linus Torvalds.

------
Chris_Newton
_Designing and Evaluating Reusable Components_ by Casey Muratori. Slides PDF
and audio track available here:

<http://mollyrocket.com/9438>

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.

------
tterrace
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...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Keynote-
Bjarne-Stroustrup-Cpp11-Style) . 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.

------
Ovid
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"?

~~~
btilly
Seconded.

My favorite was his talk on SelfGOL, and I don't even like obfuscated code!
(See <http://libarynth.org/selfgol> for an explanation of what SelfGOL is.)

------
bmaeser
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>

------
maxjus
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

<https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat>

~~~
bttf
Definitely one of the more humorous talks I've seen, in person or online.

------
oskarth
Gerald Jay Sussman (of SICP): We Really Don't Know How To Compute!

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-
How-T...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-
Compute)

~~~
agentultra
I consider Sussman to be one of the eminent genius' of computing. This talk is
one of many that blew my mind. Time and again he demonstrates that his use of
Scheme is simply for demonstration (I mean to emphasize this because the
correlation with SICP/Sussman and Scheme is often regurgitated in FUD). It's
not the languages we use that are important -- it is the models by which we
compute things which is!

~~~
minikomi
His SICP lectures are also a delight. He seems genuinely happy to be talking
about computing - and turning people onto what he loves. A great teacher

~~~
taeric
Because these just got added to my watch list, here is a link for others. :)
Thanks for letting this ignorant programmer realize that these were available!

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-
spring-2005/video-lectures)

------
dmit
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>

~~~
ojilles
Seconded. Especially /not/ because it was presented well (it's way too busy,
etc) but man does the passion just jump off of your screen?!

------
alxbrun
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.

~~~
Jach
I second that and pretty much anything else Feynman did. His lectures on
quantum electrodynamics for the layman that later got put into his QED book
are also excellent.

------
riffraff
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...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Programming)

~~~
SwellJoe
I'm always impressed by Larry's talks. Every time I see him talk about Perl 6
it _really_ makes me want to work on and use Perl 6. So, I'm trying not to see
Larry talk, anymore.

------
Already__Taken
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.

<http://vimeo.com/9270320>

~~~
cpeterso
Greg Wilson expands on that topic in a book called "Making Software: What
Really Works, and Why We Believe It".

------
Associat0r
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>

------
programminggeek
Architecture: The Lost Years is a fantastic talk by Robert Martin
[http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-
architecture-the-lost-years)

~~~
alcuadrado
+1

------
deliminator
One of my favorites is Alan Kay "Programming and Scaling" <http://www.tele-
task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/>

~~~
espeed
Absolutely one the best talks I've seen.

Notice most of the talks people are referencing are about tech philosophies --
a vision/perspective -- not a particular technology.

------
jules
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.

------
JeroenKnoops
Baruco 2012 Keynote: The Top 10 Ways To Scam The Modern American Programmer,
by Zed A. Shaw

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neI_Pj558CY>

------
samatman
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.

------
adnam
ART && CODE Symposium: Hackety Hack, why the lucky stiff
<http://vimeo.com/5047563>

------
coolsunglasses
Rather fond of anything Hickey.

The Golang "Concurrency is not parallelism, it's better" is good too.

~~~
austinbirch
I agree – anything from Rich Hickey. Especially "Persistent Data
Structures"[1] and "Are We There Yet?"[2].

Though related to Clojure, they make you think about development in different
ways.

[1]: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-
Rich...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich-Hickey)

[2]: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-
Hic...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey)

~~~
adams601
'Simple Made Easy'[1] is one of my favorite Hickey talks.

[1]: <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy>

------
floor
That one at&t hacker guy high on acid talking about tor hidden services.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7nfN4bOOQI>

------
mixmastamyk
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.

<http://yuiblog.com/crockford/>

------
moioci
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>

------
elviejo
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.

------
espeed
Ron Avitzur's Google Tech Talk - "The Graphing Calculator Story"
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyg5ohTsVY>

------
thiagoandrade
MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System.

By Andrew Tanenbaum =^.~=

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3KuE7UjGA>

------
paulolc
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>

------
dawkins
Lexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike. I really loved it!
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE>

------
toutouastro
The Myth of the Genius Programmer

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ>

------
fiber
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/click-crash-course-modern-
hardware)

------
namin
<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.

------
serf
Feynman's lectures on physics. The stuff that skips most of the QED

[http://io9.com/watch-a-series-of-seven-brilliant-lectures-
by...](http://io9.com/watch-a-series-of-seven-brilliant-lectures-by-
richard-f-5894600)

------
kickingvegas
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"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad>

------
X4
Summary of the links shared here:

[http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-
macronomicon-597023...](http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-
macronomicon-5970233)

<http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/>

[http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-
complete...](http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-
completene.html)

[http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-
business...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business-of-
software-2009/)

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Keynote-
Bjarne-Stroustrup-Cpp11-Style)

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-
Expert-R...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-Rich-
Hickey-and-Brian-Beckman-Inside-Clojure)

<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...](http://io9.com/watch-a-series-of-seven-brilliant-lectures-by-
richard-f-5894600)

<http://libarynth.org/selfgol>

<http://mollyrocket.com/9438>

<https://github.com/PharkMillups/killer-talks>

[http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/radical-
simplicity/...](http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/java-jee/radical-
simplicity/js-2051)

[http://stufftohelpyouout.blogspot.com/2009/07/great-talk-
on-...](http://stufftohelpyouout.blogspot.com/2009/07/great-talk-on-ruby-
object-model.html)

<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://vimeo.com/10260548>

<http://vimeo.com/36579366>

<http://vimeo.com/5047563>

<http://vimeo.com/7088524>

<http://vimeo.com/9270320>

<http://vpri.org/html/writings.php>

[http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therap...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therapeutic-
refactoring)

[http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-
architecture-the-lost-years)

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf88b5_jean-pierre-serre-
wr...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf88b5_jean-pierre-serre-writing-
mathemati_tech)

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-
Hic...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey)

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-
modern...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-modern-
hardware)

<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/Thinking-Parallel-Programming)

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-
Rich...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich-Hickey)

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-
How-T...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-
Compute)

<http://www.mvcconf.com/videos>

<http://www.slideshare.net/fogus/the-macronomicon-10171952>

[http://www.slideshare.net/sriprasanna/introduction-to-
cluste...](http://www.slideshare.net/sriprasanna/introduction-to-cluster-
computing-and-map-reduce-from-google)

<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&amp;playnext=...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-
bdWKwXsU&amp;playnext=1&amp;list=PL20BE5B552A8ED54D&amp;feature=results_video)

<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>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDR433b0HJY>

<http://youtu.be/lQAV3bPOYHo>

<http://yuiblog.com/crockford/>

~~~
ricardobeat
And here are them with titles + thumbnails:

<http://bl.ocks.org/ricardobeat/raw/5343140/>

~~~
Expez
Thank you so much for this!

~~~
X4
This is cool :) Btw. the first link was somehow (re)moved. The blip.tv link is
now: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXhJyTo5V8>

------
gee_totes
Eric Pickup on scaling YouPorn [SFW]:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlkCdM_f3p4>

[edit] Spoiler alert: Everything's in Redis!

~~~
pseut
I think that's the first time I've seen "[SFW]", but I appreciate that you
made it explicit.

------
noblethrasher
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)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7viw2KXak>

------
viscanti
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.

~~~
kingkilr
Glad you enjoyed it!

------
kimtaro
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...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1071-cascadiaruby2012-therapeutic-
refactoring)

------
michaelwww
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)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8>

------
catwell
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.

------
capcah
The talk about strange machines by Sergey Bratus.

------
mallin
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...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-
Compute)

------
wavesounds
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...](http://www.slideshare.net/sriprasanna/introduction-to-cluster-
computing-and-map-reduce-from-google) You can find the links to the rest of
the videos and slides from there, theres 7 total I think.

------
onenine
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".

------
mzarate06
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.

------
ricardobeat
Compiled list of talks, including page titles, made with a quick node/coffee
crawler (source included):

<http://bl.ocks.org/ricardobeat/5343140/>

------
ahlatimer
"What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too" - Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin --
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0>

------
cju
The Macronomicon by Michael Fogus [http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-
macronomicon-597023...](http://blip.tv/clojure/michael-fogus-the-
macronomicon-5970233)

~~~
berdario
404, and searching for "macronomicon" doesn't dig up anything

~~~
npongratz
This worked for me:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JXhJyTo5V8>

Slides:

<http://blog.fogus.me/2011/11/15/the-macronomicon-slides/>

<http://www.slideshare.net/fogus/the-macronomicon-10171952>

------
jraines
Mark Phillups of Basho has a good list here:
<https://github.com/PharkMillups/killer-talks>

------
MrSane
"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).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M>

------
ParadisoShlee
Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk>

------
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.

------
stretchwithme
Hearing Scott Chacon explain how git works is pretty good.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDR433b0HJY>

------
bherms
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.

------
TallGuyShort
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.

------
munk801
GoingNative 2012 - Bjarne Stroustrup talks about C++ 11. Very good talk about
the ideas behind C++ 11

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-
bdWKwXsU&playnext=1...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB-
bdWKwXsU&playnext=1&list=PL20BE5B552A8ED54D&feature=results_video)

------
nswanberg
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.

------
garysweaver
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-...](http://stufftohelpyouout.blogspot.com/2009/07/great-talk-on-ruby-
object-model.html)

------
krmmalik
I watch very few technical talks but Ryan Dahl's introduction to Node.js is
one of my all time faves.

------
banachtarski
Not computer science, but a brilliant math lecture:

Jean Serre's "Writing Mathematics"
[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf88b5_jean-pierre-serre-
wr...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf88b5_jean-pierre-serre-writing-
mathemati_tech#.UWN1Oas4Xf4)

------
noblethrasher
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...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/06/don-norman-at-business-of-
software-2009/)

------
thibaultj
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...](http://www.paris-web.fr/2012/conferences/application-cache.php)

------
bemmu
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>

------
taoufix
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:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDN_EYUvUq0>

------
gingerlime
Hickey gives great talks, but I also really liked Jack Diederich's talk "stop
writing classes" at PyCon 2012

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0>

------
hexagonc
"A Universe from Nothing" lecture by Lawrence Krauss:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjaGktVQdNg>

------
Achshar
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.

~~~
Achshar
[https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977...](https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977&oid=9445547199&comments)

------
tamersalama
The paradox of choice - why more is less
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ELAkV2fC-I>

------
daigoba66
John Carmack at Quakecon 2012: <http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk>

------
ravimbalgi
not sure if essays too qualify here: You and your research by Richard Hammings
has been the most profound and deeply introspecting so far!

------
writebuffered
Cliff Click on Wait-free hashtables and another one on modern Hardware and
Processor Systems.

~~~
qznc
Probably this one: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ-719EGIts>

Anything from Cliff Click is quite good. This guy has a very deep
understanding of compilers, virtual-machines, CPUs, and their interactions.

A JVM does that? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL2D3qzHtqY>

Java on a 1000 Cores <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uljtqyBLxI>

------
bwlandstreet
not to be cliché, but, Steve Jobs.

~~~
NicoJuicy
A talk about expressions (c#), it's very usefull if you use the entity
framework a lot (like i do).

To bad the author lost the video files (everyone recorded their screen), other
video's of the virtual conference are available:
<http://www.mvcconf.com/videos> )

