
Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk? - mngutterman
Simply put, what are your favorite talks or trainings? It could by a one-off lecture about a specific concept or a series of talks about a language. Maybe it&#x27;s a TED talk or a session from a con.  Either way, what&#x27;s that one talk that changed the way you think and you feel everyone needs to see?
======
Malic
_grin_ Here we go...

For "laughing at ourselves" and oddities of computer languages, there is "Wat"
by Gary Bernhardt:
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](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](https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m00s)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Oh god yes. And from the Manta talk, to paraphrase:

 _I believe that if you talk about Oracle without going into Nazi allegory,
than some understanding has been left on the table. In fact, I firmly believe
that if you were talking to someone who hadn 't heard of WWII but was an
Oracle customer, that you would explain the Nazis to them in Oracle allegory:_

 _Wow. Really?_

 _Yes, it 's true: Larry Ellison owned a whole country_

 _Oh god! The humanity! Just imagine the licences on that thing_

 _I know, it was terrible dude, just ask Poland_

Also, for another excellent talk by Bernhardt, this time about the differences
in philosophy between Python and Ruby, which gives a very fair critique of
them both: [https://vimeo.com/9471538](https://vimeo.com/9471538).

~~~
smoldyr86
I worked for Oracle Social as a software engineer for some Facebook Pages
WYSIWYG application, and this is their business model - as explained to me -
when I asked, "Who is going to be buying our product?"

My manager: "Oh, so we have all of these enterprise customers that purchase
software from us. Basically, they are presented with a list of all of our
various enterprise applications [FYI, there's a TON of them] with check boxes
next to each one. Our application licenses are sold using a subscription
model. Most companies don't bother reading the list and just pay for
everything, which will include ours."

WTF? I wrote some of the Ruby on Rails code for the application my team was
working on. Also, this was in 2012; Facebook Pages had just been released, and
no one even understood why a "Page" was the name given to a concept in which
businesses could establish Facebook accounts in order to promote their brand
and products, but a "Page" contained multiple "web pages" of content within
the larger "Page" object.

In short, our product sucked at every level and even I, a member of the
development team, didn't know how to use it. But because it was on the
almighty "Product List", it added millions of dollars to Oracle's net income,
despite the fact that I'm guessing hardly any customer knew what it was, let
alone knew how to use it.

I resigned shortly after the first release, so I have no idea what happened to
the product or how long it remained an official Oracle enterprise software
application, appearing on the "Product List".

While it was nice being 26 years old and making a $70,000 salary, receiving a
nearly-guaranteed $10,000 annual bonus, having a 401k package with company-
matched contributions, getting full healthcare benefits which included a FSA,
and being able to order all of the free snacks and beverages that one could
think of simply by telling the secretary to add them to the supply list . . .
I just couldn't work at a place where innovation didn't matter, the customer
didn't matter, and even the product didn't matter. Not to mention that, after
having worked there, with 100 other people, for 3 months, maybe 10 people knew
my name (and my product team consisted of 8 people - I'm only including 5 of
them in the 10). I happened to discover one day that I was the youngest
employee there, and I'm pretty sure that people didn't like me based on that
fact alone.

Oh well, I applied for a similar job at a digital marketing agency down the
street the next week, and soon thereafter, began working again, now earning a
salary which was $10,000 greater than what I made at Oracle (and which
included all of the same benefits).

~~~
joatmon-snoo
As a univerity senior, thank you for this. Oracle was already low on my list
of companies to apply to for a full-time job, and this put the nail in that
coffin.

~~~
senderista
If you're in the Seattle area, you still might want to consider Oracle Cloud
(I don't work there). They've poached a shit-ton of senior AWS engineering
talent, and from what I hear they're developing a kickass product.

------
peterkelly
"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](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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc)

~~~
qznc
The talks are awesome. I still downvoted this, because I consider it off
topic. Sorry.

~~~
sjnair96
And I upvoted you for explaining why you downvoted it. No point downvoting
you. Comparing the end results of both, we only have a higher chance of a net
benefit by upvoting you, regardless of whether I agree with you or not. I hope
the rest of the HN community also takes this approach before voting.

------
azeirah
By 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](https://vimeo.com/36579366)

~~~
acchow
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...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-
javascript)

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.

~~~
SonOfLilit
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.

~~~
natdempk
I always go with the "J" pronunciation. It maintains the expectation that the
talk makes a joke out of by breaking. I would rather give everyone that first
time experience of hearing the "Y" pronunciation than do Gary an injustice.

------
pacomerh
Rich Hickey "Simple Made Easy" [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-
Made-Easy](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy)

~~~
vram22
His "Hammock Driven Development" talk is good too:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/03/tech-video-rich-hickey-
ham...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/03/tech-video-rich-hickey-hammock-
driven.html)

A couple of comments there by me.

------
qwertyuiop924
Linus Torvalds on Git. It's funny, and it really does tell you a lot about why
Git is the way it is.

Bryan Cantrill's 2011(?) Lightning talk on ta(1). It's fascinating, but it
also shows you just long-lived software can be.

Randall Munroe's Talk on the JoCo cruise. Because it's effing hilarious, and
teaches everybody the important art of building a ball pit inside your house.

Finally, an honorable mention to three papers that don't qualify, but which I
think you should read anyway.

 _Reflections on Trusting Trust_ : This is required reading for... Everybody.
It describes a particularly insidious hack, and discusses its ramifications
for security.

 _In the Beginning Was The Command Line_ : If you want get into interface
design, programming, or ever work with computers, this is required. It's a
snapshot of the 90's, a discussion of operating systems, corporations, and
society as we know it. But more importantly, it's a crash course in
abstractions. Before you can contribute to the infinite stack of turtles we
programmers work with, you should probably understand why it's there, and what
it is.

Finally, The Lambda Papers. If you've ever wondered how abstractions work, and
how they're modeled... This won't really tell you, not totally, but they'll
give you something cool to think about, and give you the start of an answer.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Finally, an honorable mention to three papers that don't qualify, but which
> I think you should read anyway."

If we're going for papers, then I'm guessing books are allowed too. If so, for
anyone interested in giving themselves a grounding in the fundamentals, it's
worth checking out Code by Charles Petzold. I've been going through it, it's
excellently written, and has helped me fill in gaps in my understanding of how
computers work.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-
Sof...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-
Software/dp/0735611319)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
SICP, Land of Lisp, Exploding the Phone, and The Cuckoo's Egg, while I haven't
finished all of them, were all instrumental in making me who I am today.

------
arjunnarayan
> what's that one talk that changed the way you think and you feel everyone
> needs to see?

Growing a Language by Guy Steele.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0)

~~~
chubot
This is a great talk, but what he was advocating never came to pass. He wanted
to add 3 things to Java:

    
    
        - operator overloading
        - small value types on the stack (for vectors, rationals, etc.)
        - generic types
    

Generic types are the only feature that made it (not without some
controversy).

C++ has all three features. I suppose there is some success in games and
graphics using overloaded operators on vector types. But otherwise it doesn't
seem like a huge win, or something that is critical for the design of a
language.

Python has operator overloading. I never really use it, but I guess it did
allow NumPy and Pandas to exist. And TensorFlow uses it.

Perhaps it boils down to the fact that Java is more of a business language,
and C++ and Python have more mathematical applications, which require richer
algebraic expressions of many types. But I suppose if Java had gotten operator
overloading, it may have been used more for scientific computing.

Perl 6 and Racket seem to be the languages that really allow creating your own
language. But actually I heard Larry Wall say that they want to provide so
many little languages within Perl 6 that users don't need to invent their own.
Because this often makes it harder for others to read your program.

~~~
desdiv
Value types is coming to Java 10, and Guy Steele is one of guys making it
happen.

[http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/values/values-0.html](http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/values/values-0.html)

------
madmax108
I see a couple of Bret Victor videos here, but the one I loved the most was
"The Future of Programming":
[https://vimeo.com/71278954](https://vimeo.com/71278954)

Really set me on a path of re-examining older ideas (and research papers), for
applications that are much more contemporary. Absolute stunner of a talk (and
the whole 70's gag was really great).

"What would be really sad is if in 40 years we were still writing code in
procedures in text files" :(

~~~
CarlsJrMints
I really liked the message of each generation of programming considers the
next "not real programming". It makes me reconsider the pushback against node-
esque micro-packages: [http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-
forgotten-how...](http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-
how-to-program/). Maybe this is just the next logical evolution of
programming.

------
sebg
Some previous posts:

"Ask HN: What are your favorite videos relevant to entrepreneurs or startups?"
->
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7656003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7656003)

"Ask HN: Favorite talks [video] on software development?" ->
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105732)

------
rdtsc
Pretty much anything by David Beazley or Bryan Cantrill

Discovering Python (David Beazley)

[http://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-
python.html](http://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2014/discovering-python.html)

David finds himself in a dark vault, stuck for months sifting through
deliberately obfuscated pile of old code and manuals. All seems lost, but then
he finds Python on a vanilla Windows box.

Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos (Bryan Cantrill)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

History of Illumos, SunOS, Solaris, the horribleness of Oracle

These are not technical, but they are entertaining.

~~~
ra7
I'd also add Raymond Hettinger's talks on Python with my favorite one being
this famous one:

Beyond PEP 8 - Best practices for beautiful intelligible code

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-
BqAjZb8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M)

------
pdkl95
Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs](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](http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

Cybersecurity as Realpolitik by Dan Geer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-
TGvYOBpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI)
[http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt](http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt)

~~~
HCIdivision17
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.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
To Dissect a Mockingbird is even better, though...

------
corysama
Alan Kay is my favorite tech curmudgeon.

1) Alan Kay: _Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"_
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY)

Take note that he is not giving the talk using Window & PowerPoint, or even
Linux & OpenOffice. 100% of the software on his laptop are original products
of his group. Including the productivity suite, the OS, the compilers and the
languages being compiled.

2) Bret Victor: _The Future of Programming_
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMiCo2Ntsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGMiCo2Ntsc)

~~~
voltagex_
Note that Alan Kay's talk is freely (?) downloadable at
[https://vimeo.com/82301919](https://vimeo.com/82301919) (linked in the
YouTube video)

------
KhalilK
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
[https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366)

We can argue on some of the points he makes but we can all agree that the
demos are very impressive.

------
jjp
Hans Rosling's original Ted talk, which has so much passion about data
visualisation and making information accessible -
[http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...](http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen)

------
cgag
Simple made easy is my favorite but I'd also just generally recommend
everything by Rich Hickey, Gary Bernhardt, and Jonathan Blow.

~~~
slantedview
Agree. I've watched a ton of talks over the years on a variety of
topics/technologies, and Simple made Easy just feels like a classic, and is
timelessly relevant.

------
sssilver
Raymond Hettinger's talk about good code reviews --
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-
BqAjZb8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M)

Carmack's talk about functional programming and Haskell --
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A)

Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" \--
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0)

All with a good sense of humor.

~~~
mixmastamyk
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."

~~~
johnhenry
Everything I've seen by Crockford is great!

------
kethinov
My current favorite is Jake Archibald's offline-first progressive web apps
talk at Google I/O 2016:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmGr0RszHc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmGr0RszHc8)

It's a terrific window into the future of web application development.

~~~
avel
Every talk from Jake Archibald is insightful and entertaining. His talks about
offline caching were hilarious.

------
ChicagoBoy11
Peter Norvig on the "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs](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.

------
myth_buster
Richard Hamming's You and your research.

[https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw](https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw)

------
grose
Lexical Scanning in Go by Rob Pike

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE](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.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
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.

------
bajsejohannes
Jon Blow's "How to program independent games":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM)

It's about much more than games. To me, it's about identifying and not doing
unnecessary work.

The second half of this video is a Q&A session, which I would skip.

------
okket
Linus Torvalds talk about git

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8)

~~~
c0achmcguirk
Was going to post the same one. Great talk!

------
dcre
I already see a bunch of people posting and upvoting Bret Victor's "Inventing
on Principle", but I think his "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" is better.

[https://vimeo.com/67076984](https://vimeo.com/67076984)

------
unimpressive
These aren't necessarily my absolute favorite talks, but they're great mind-
altering talks a little off the beaten path so I'd like to highlight them:

"Writing A Thumb Drive From Scratch" by Travis Goodspeed -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Im0_KUEf8&nohtml5=False](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Im0_KUEf8&nohtml5=False)

Excellent talk on the hardware side of security, goes into some really cool
theoretical hard disk defense stuff, _incredibly_ insightful and introduces a
hardware security tech toy so fun you'll want to go out and order it the
moment you're done watching. The speaker is entertaining as all heck to boot.

"Programming and Scaling" by Alan Kay -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY&nohtml5=False](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY&nohtml5=False)

Interesting talk on the theoretical limits of code size and engineering versus
tinkering. Also talks a lot about Alan Kay's philosophy of computer science
which analogizes systems to biological systems, which are the systems with the
largest proven scaling on the planet.

"The Mother Of All Demos" by Douglas Engelbart -
[https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCn...](https://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect)

This talk is so prescient you won't believe your eyes. Given in 1968, Douglas
demonstrates just about every major computing concept in use today on a modern
machine, along with some ones that are still experimental or unevenly
distributed such as smooth remote desktop and collaborative editing.

------
kornish
Right now it's Boundaries, by Gary Bernhardt. He details the importance of
separating out pure business logic from the plumbing code that brings it input
and directs its output ("functional core, imperative shell").

[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries)

~~~
felixbr
I think Gary was way ahead of the industry when he did this talk in 2012.
Today it's common to look at Erlang, Haskell and other good but previously
unpopular languages and retrofit their ideas to your language of choice (or
build something like Elixir/Kotlin/Swift). But back then Ruby/Python/Java/etc
devs would usually not look at anything else because functional programming
was only something you might have heard in university and OOP was clearly the
only way to build practical software.

For me this talk was especially great as he only explains the problems,
possible solutions and their trade-offs and leaves the (clear?) conclusion to
the audience instead of shoving "you should really use X because it's awesome"
down their throat.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I think Gary was way ahead of the industry when he did this talk in 2012.
> Today it's common to look at Erlang, Haskell and other good but previously
> unpopular languages and retrofit their ideas to your language of choice (or
> build something like Elixir/Kotlin/Swift). But back then
> Ruby/Python/Java/etc devs would usually not look at anything else because
> functional programming was only something you might have heard in university
> and OOP was clearly the only way to build practical software.

Ruby and Python were incorporating things from FP long before 2012; the idea
that Ruby and Python were pure-OOP and not following inspiration from
languages with other primary paradigms before that is simply historically
inaccurate, Ruby and Python were never dominated by OOP-is-the-one-true-way
philosophy.

~~~
felixbr
I'm not talking about superficial syntax like map/filter for collections. The
notion of keeping the majority of your code side-effect-free with
immutability, built-in concurrency and message-passing as idiomatic parts of
the language/ecosystem is to this day uncommon and partially impossible in
Python/Ruby.

[http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/what-is-functional-
programm...](http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/what-is-functional-
programming.html)

------
dragonbonheur
The mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

How I met your girlfriend:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5xRRF5GfQs&t=66s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5xRRF5GfQs&t=66s)

~~~
rdegges
I had the pleasure of working with Samy back at Fonality (my first job!) He's
such a cool, smart, and just all around amazing dude. Anything he does is
always fun, interesting, and hacker-ish.

------
longboardcat
Wat:
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)

------
dudul
Big fan of Rich Hickey. I found most of his talks really great, and applicable
beyond the Clojure universe. My favorites: "Are we there yet?" and "Simple
made Easy".

~~~
dkasper
Simple Made Easy is one of those talks that never gets old to me. Never heard
anyone talk about the power of reducing complexity in such a clear way.

Here's the link for those who are interested.
[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-
Easy](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy)

~~~
cgag
This is my favorite. I also really like hammock-driven development
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc))

------
runT1ME
Propositions as Types:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOiZatlZtGU)

I think this can really really change how we look at everyday programming
tasks everywhere from the type of tooling we choose to how we approach
problems.

------
SonOfLilit
"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...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-
death-of-javascript)

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk)

------
anondon
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI)

This was the first time I watched pg give a talk. It was the talk that brought
about the biggest change in the way I think about the world, my ambitions. The
talk was the beginning, reading more about pg, I came across his essays and
then HN.

------
cconroy
Doing with Images Makes Symbols, Alan Kay.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2LZLYcu_JY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2LZLYcu_JY)

The title says it all. It's really a summary of several software systems with
good ideas abound. I believe all the software is 80s or prior.

Edit: I also forgot to mention some psychology and math.

------
mwcampbell
A few of Bryan Cantrill's talks have already been mentioned here, but this one
about DTrace, from 2007, is a gem:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8)

I especially like the part in the middle where he tells the story of how a an
awful GNOME applet was killing a Sun Ray server, and how he tracked down the
culprit with DTrace.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I missed this one. I should go watch it. Anything that bashes on GNOME is fine
with me.

------
archagon
I don't really have a favorite, but recently I really enjoyed "8 Bit & '8
Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box"[1]. The name didn't catch my eye, but then I
learned that it was a lecture by the very same Mark Ferrari who made these[2]
unbelievably beautiful color-cycling pixel art animations. Master of his art —
definitely worth listening to!

[1]: [http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8-Bitish-
Graphics](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8-Bitish-Graphics)

[2]:
[http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/](http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/)

------
nommm-nommm
Elevator hacking (seriously)
[https://youtu.be/oHf1vD5_b5I](https://youtu.be/oHf1vD5_b5I)

------
shahar2k
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8)
"the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the
exponential function"

not a high tech talk, or particularly technically complex, but it shows a
common blindspot in a way that is both clear, enlightening and frightening.

------
mrob
CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc)

Detailed discussion of how to get the most out of your memory cache and memory
bandwidth, focusing on games development. It's full of examples of how
understanding both the problem and the hardware, and working in a
straightforward way, can give you huge performance gains over using poorly
suited abstractions. It shows how low level thinking is still important even
with modern compilers. I recommend people interested in performance
optimization watch it.

------
lukewrites
Mine is "The Internet With A Human Face", by Maciej Cegłowski
[http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm)

It's what I direct non-technical people to when they ask what the big deal
about internet privacy is.

------
danblick
I think Alan Kay's "Doing with Images makes Symbols" talk from 1987 might make
my list:

[http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987](http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987)

It's mostly about the history of HCI up to that point.

------
monksy
Agile Is Dead: By Dave Thomas
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M)

I love his talks for a few reasons:

Often times...

    
    
      1. He's anti-hype
      2. He's contriversal
      3. He's right.

------
antouank
Rich Hickey - Simplicity Matters
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0)

------
pradeepchhetri
One of my favourite talks is by James Mickens at Monitorama 2015:
[https://vimeo.com/95066828](https://vimeo.com/95066828)

~~~
wrigby
I was going to post this one as well - it's my all time favorite. He does a
great job of making truly funny, yet incredibly intelligent jokes.

------
joeclark77
First, the "Mother of all Demos" by Doug Engelbart: [https://youtu.be/yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY) This was in 1968, at a time when most
people thought about computers as being machines for solving computation
problems, like processing payrolls or calculating rocket trajectories.
Engelbart and his students had the radical idea that computers could be used
for human "knowledge worker" productivity. In one 90 minute presentation, he
introduces everything from the idea of a GUI, to the mouse, to word
processing, hypertext, computer graphics, and (simulated) videoconferencing.
You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the audience that has
never seen this stuff before, and it'll blow you away.

Something more recent: Martin Fowler's great introduction to NoSQL:
[https://youtu.be/qI_g07C_Q5I](https://youtu.be/qI_g07C_Q5I) Not so technical,
this is a great overview of the reasons why (and when) NoSQL is valuable. He
crams a lot into a short speech, so it's one of the rare videos I've required
students in my database classes to watch.

Now, really getting away from the technical, I have to recommend watching the
IDEO shopping cart video: [https://youtu.be/taJOV-
YCieI](https://youtu.be/taJOV-YCieI) This is the classic introduction of
Design Thinking to the world, in 1999. If you're using the Lean Startup or an
Agile method, but have never heard of IDEO's shopping cart, you may be able to
get along fine at work, but you should be kind of embarrassed like a physicist
who's never read Newton.

------
VLM
Aside from the typical, I watched Damian Conway "Standing on the shoulders of
giants" from YAPC 2016 last week and found it interesting. Always fun to see a
modern feature full language collide with history and algorithms.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2HkAYbG5o&index=2&list=PLA...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2HkAYbG5o&index=2&list=PLA9_Hq3zhoFykB5TDa4OjI6uoTg9OtABT)

~~~
tiedmann
for lang { when Perl { say "Not interested" } }

------
intelekshual
How to Design A Good API and Why it Matters:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw)

Related slides:
[http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/32713.pdf)

------
Keyframe
Too 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA)

------
taeric
[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-
How-...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-
Compute) is by far my favorite technical talk right now.

Sussman goes over some interesting ideas on the provenance of calculations and
asserts that "exact" computation is possibly not worth the cost.

------
indexerror
My favourite talk is:

"What the heck is the event loop anyway?" by Philip Roberts

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ)

------
philbo
Joshua Bloch: How to design a good API and why it matters

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw)

------
petr_tik
1 Martin Thompson busting myths about hardware and explaining why it's
important to know. Mechanical sympathy makes you better, because you know how
the code actually runs on the machine and interacts with different layers of
memory

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC1EKLQ2Wmg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC1EKLQ2Wmg)

2 Matt Godbolt (the man behind GCC explorer) - Emulating a 6502 system in
Javascript

Great talk about BBC micro and much more

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WuRq-
Wmw5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WuRq-Wmw5o)

3 Matt Adereth - Clojure/typing

History of keyboards and a custom keyboard written in Clojure

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4)

I like the 3 for their content and how each speaker presented the background
and their project/hack/ideas.

Highly recommend

~~~
voltagex_
Your second link reminded me of
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLv_INgaLq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLv_INgaLq8)
(which definitely builds on some of Matt's work).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkNBP00wJE)
\- C++17 for the Commodore 64.

Probable language warnings for my other suggestions:

* Rescuing Prince of Persia from the Sands of Time [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8) (was this talk ever given elsewhere?)

* And You Shall Know Me By My Trail of Documentation - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEgHdHdUDaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEgHdHdUDaA)

* The History and Evolution of Computer Viruses - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2g9lgYrYJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2g9lgYrYJM)

------
x0x0
Cliff Click was the jvm architect at sun then spent a decade at azul systems
as their jvm architect. The talk is "A JVM Does That?"

It's well worth watching if you are interested in vms at all.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL2D3qzHtqY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL2D3qzHtqY)

------
jack9
What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True

[https://vimeo.com/9270320](https://vimeo.com/9270320)

------
agumonkey
After lots of talks I started going to the library and found out it's a lot
more effective to grow knowledge. Maybe I'm too ADHD-able when watching
videos.

~~~
maaaats
Talks are a great way to discover interesting ideas, technologies, concepts
etc. And if the talk inspired, one can then later invest in reading a book.

~~~
davidw
But brief summary type articles are an even faster way of discovering
interesting ideas, technologies, concepts, etc... You can skim them and jump
around and generally expose yourself to more ideas in the same amount of time.

------
agentultra
We Really Don't Know How To Compute! [0] is probably my top... next to the
christmas tree lectures.

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

------
recmend
People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it by Simon Sinek
[https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...](https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en)

------
0xmohit

      How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters [0]
      The Principles of Clean Architecture [1]
      The State of the Art in Microservices by Adrian Cockcroft [2]
      "The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong [3]
    

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TH-Y78tt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TH-Y78tt4)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwpxq9-uw_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwpxq9-uw_0)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4)

~~~
panic
On the subject of API design, this talk is also quite good:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ5_u8Lgvyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ5_u8Lgvyk)

------
beyondcompute
Bret Victor is pretty interesting though a bit philosophical.

The best practical talk is of course this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asLUTiJJqdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asLUTiJJqdE)
\- Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin, Clean Architecture and Design

------
simscitizen
"An Introduction to SQLite" by Richard Hipp (who wrote the library) is
actually a pretty good intro on to how to build your own DB engine.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giAMt8Tj-84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giAMt8Tj-84)

------
sideb0ard
I love the Ted Nelson "Computers For Cynics" series -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk)

He is kinda awesome in Herzog's recent 'Lo and Behold' too.

------
samcal
James Mickens at Monitorama:
[https://vimeo.com/95066828](https://vimeo.com/95066828)

Aside from the comedic aspect (which makes the talk incredible), Mickens is a
genuinely brilliant thinker and has a marvelous way with words.

------
evilgeneralist
Can I just say anything with Bryan Cantrill?

~~~
cheeseprocedure
His KVM Forum talk on porting KVM to SmartOS is probably my favourite:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o)

------
jonbaer
Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine (BBC Series, 1983) -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pYRn5j7oI&list=PL04B3F5636...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pYRn5j7oI&list=PL04B3F5636096478C)

------
kruhft
Growing a Language by Guy Steele (video and transcription):

[http://dropclickpaste.com/#7d1673d81ee5a0bb7994e80a4f394997c...](http://dropclickpaste.com/#7d1673d81ee5a0bb7994e80a4f394997c5729cf6)

~~~
kruhft
New, working link for above:

[http://dropclickpaste.com/#CYBgRgjA7AzAHANjMOwDGBODYCmYM4ICs...](http://dropclickpaste.com/#CYBgRgjA7AzAHANjMOwDGBODYCmYM4ICsaJAZjsEkUXDgExxEwZRA)

------
utefan001
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoDSv5KpEJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoDSv5KpEJk)

InfoSec talk. Best lines from talk..

"Basic lessons are not learned such as know thy network"

"You have to learn your network, you have to have skin in the game"

"Defense is hard, breaking stuff is easy"

"If you serve the God's of compliance you will fail"

"Compliance is not security"

"Perfect solution fallacy"

"People are falling over themselves not to change, shooting great ideas down."

"Perfect attacker fallacy, they don't exist, they are a myth!"

"Attackers are not that good because they don't need to be that good."

Speaker is Eric Conrad

------
mtmail
"Avoiding Burnout, and other essentials of Open Source Self-Care"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbeHBnWfXUc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbeHBnWfXUc)

------
raspasov
Are we there yet? - Rich Hickey

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

~~~
wedesoft
Of all talks by rich Hickey, this is my favourite.

------
Philipp__
Everything by Mr. Bryan Cantrill! This one is special:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-
Sc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-Sc)

------
IntelMiner
Not quite as low-level as some of the other talks, but I love watching
LazyGameReviews "Tech Tales" series when ever a new one comes out

It's fairly high level, but he really burrows into computer history and it's
simply fascinating to watch, helped by the fact the person is extremely
passionate about what he does
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB1vrRFJI1Q&list=PLbBZM9aUMs...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB1vrRFJI1Q&list=PLbBZM9aUMsjEVZPCDMl-
lXOx50rSBNFQC)

~~~
voltagex_
On that note you may also like Techmoan -
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN2yCnHTG_6qxmv_pdBxW...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN2yCnHTG_6qxmv_pdBxWxCPsbA1Cl2RI),
The 8 Bit Guy -
[https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22](https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22)
and Gaming Historian -
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbvPS_rXp4PC21PG2k1UVg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbvPS_rXp4PC21PG2k1UVg)

~~~
IntelMiner
I love 8-bit guy and Gaming Historian, I'm gonna plunge into Techmoan though!

------
dorianm
Aaron Patterson talks (aka @tenderlove):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3gYklsN9uc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3gYklsN9uc)

------
JoshTriplett
For reasons completely unrelated to the content, Identity 2.0:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrpajcAgR1E](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.

~~~
rhblake
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](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)

~~~
JoshTriplett
[http://www.noslidesconf.net/](http://www.noslidesconf.net/)

Quite feasible for a good keynote. Harder for a technical talk, since a good
diagram can greatly improve an explanation.

------
danpalmer
I find Simon Peyton Jones to be an excellent educator. He talks mostly about
Haskell and the GHC compiler, but his talks are very accessible to a wide
audience of programmers.

------
augustk
Edsger Dijkstra's Turing Award Speech:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sIlKP2LzbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sIlKP2LzbA)

------
jordanlev
As a web developer, my favorite _recent_ talk is "Modern Layouts: Getting Out
of Our Ruts" by Jen Simmons

[https://aneventapart.com/news/post/modern-layouts-getting-
ou...](https://aneventapart.com/news/post/modern-layouts-getting-out-of-our-
ruts-by-jen-simmons-an-event-apart-video)

...very inspiring if you're bored with the way websites have been looking for
the past few years.

------
romper
Secret history of silicon valley:
[https://youtu.be/hFSPHfZQpIQ](https://youtu.be/hFSPHfZQpIQ)

------
dantle
Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips.

Explains a lot of recent mass-market innovations that keep the semiconductor
manufacturing industry rolling, and goes into detail about the many tricks
used to ensure scaling down to the 22nm node.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4)

------
raglof
Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" [1] or Rob Pike's "Concurrency Is Not
Parallelism" [2].

[1] [https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366) [2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_DpYBzKso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_DpYBzKso)

------
exarne
It's an old talk but I really enjoyed it at the time, Paul Graham on Great
Hackers:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conv...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail188.html)

------
fivealarm
I'm relatively early in my career, and I feel like I've learned a ridiculous
amount of useful stuff from talks given by these people:

Brandon Rhodes

Raymond Hettinger

David Beazley

Sandi Metz

Avdi Grimm

------
makmanalp
Aside from a lot of the classics here, one that stands out is this AMAZING
live demo at pycon by David Beazley:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4)

The simple and followable progression to more and more complex ideas blows my
mind every time.

------
wyldfire
"Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken"

[1]
[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk)

[2]
[http://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf](http://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf)

------
andycroll
Slightly self-serving as the organiser but Sarah Mei's talk at Brighton Ruby
this year was terrific.

[http://brightonruby.com/2016/how-we-make-software-a-new-
theo...](http://brightonruby.com/2016/how-we-make-software-a-new-theory-of-
teams-sarah-mei/)

------
agconti
Mike Bostock's talk on visualizing algorithms is one of my favorites:
[https://vimeo.com/112319901](https://vimeo.com/112319901)

> Visualizing Algorithms – A look at the use of visualization and animation to
> understand, explain and debug algorithms.

------
cvwright
Gary McGraw: Cyber War, Cyber Peace, Stones, and Glass Houses
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCULzMa7iqs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCULzMa7iqs)

I like how this talk cuts through a lot of the BS in security. One of his
points is that the US and other rich Western countries have a lot more to lose
from a possible "cyber war" than our potential adversaries do.

Another key point is that we'll never make much progress unless we can somehow
start building better systems in the first place, with fewer vulnerabilities
for an adversary to exploit.

I think the second point has become a lot more widely accepted in recent years
since McGraw started giving this talk. Unfortunately it sounds like a lot of
government folks still haven't got the memo on point #1.

------
akkartik
Moxie Marlinspike at Blackhat 2010 on how we lost the war for privacy in spite
of winning the Crypto Wars of the 1990's-early 2000's:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unZZCykRa5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unZZCykRa5w)

------
vvanders
Herb Sutter, Modern C++ -
[https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661)

Great overview of value types, performance and how hardware that runs things
still matters.

------
anoother
"How to Speed up a Python Program 114,000 times." \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU)

Humour, serious technical insight and a good reminder of why being a
generalist is an advantage.

------
daveguy
Geoffrey Hinton "The Next Generation of Neural Networks". A google tech talk
from 2007 about this newfangled "deep neural network" thing:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M)

------
teamhappy
Keith Winstein presenting mosh at USENIX 2012 is easily the most entertaining
tech talk I've ever seen:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsIxNYl0oyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsIxNYl0oyU)

Scott Meyers' talks are fun to watch too.

------
drizze
David Beazley's, "Discovering Python":
[https://youtu.be/RZ4Sn-Y7AP8](https://youtu.be/RZ4Sn-Y7AP8)

A fascinating tale about using python during the discovery phase of a trial.
Very fun watch. Anything by David Beazley is great!

------
amelius
Rupert Sheldrake, "The Extended Mind, Experimental Evidence", Google Talks
2008,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hic18Xyk9is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hic18Xyk9is)

If you are in for something out of the ordinary.

------
ebcode
John Holland is always worth watching, and not very many people have seen this
one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_u_d-
KLEsE#t=1183.549186](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_u_d-
KLEsE#t=1183.549186)

------
ajankovic
I like this one because it's a good reality check: Opening Keynote: Greg Young
- Stop Over-Engenering
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRr4xeMn1uU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRr4xeMn1uU)

------
m0llusk
Google TechTalks Personal Growth Series: William Dement on Healthy Sleep and
Optimal Performance
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8)

------
lukego
Dynamic Languages Wizards panels.
[http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dynlangs/wizards-
panels.html](http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/dynlangs/wizards-panels.html)

------
vonklaus
Ashton 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.

------
thegeekpirate
Black Hat USA 2015 - The Memory Sinkhole Unleashing An X86 Design Flaw
Allowing Universal Privilege

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGuIGLz01hE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGuIGLz01hE)

~~~
loc_00000000
It's been a while since I've seen this talk. Hasn't this talk been accused of
being bullshit or am I remembering it wrong?

------
djfdev
I always enjoyed Ryan Dahl's casual at-home talk on the history of Node.JS:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAc0vQCC6UQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAc0vQCC6UQ)

------
geichel
Zed Shaw's presentation, it's Not You, It's Them: Why Programming Languages
Are Hard To Teach -- [https://vimeo.com/53062800](https://vimeo.com/53062800)

------
miiiiiike
Chuck Rossi - How Facebook releases software:
[https://vimeo.com/56362484](https://vimeo.com/56362484) I remember thinking
"Dr. Cox as release manager."

------
johnhenry
Douglass 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoB2r1QxIAY).
If you like it, the other 7 are available in the suggested section.

------
_rdbw
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM)

How Google backs up the internet.

At the time it changed how I thought about backups/reliability.

------
nicwest
The Clean Code Talks - "Global State and Singletons":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FRm3VPhseI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FRm3VPhseI)

------
wedesoft
Dr Meister: Using Lisp, LLVM, and C++ for molecular programming:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g)

------
glitcher
One in particular comes to mind that really changed the way I think about the
larger problem of security in computer science and what a mess our current
state of affairs seems to be in:

"The Science of Insecurity" by Meredith L. Patterson and Sergey Gordeychik
(2011)

[https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en-
the_science_of_insecurit...](https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en-
the_science_of_insecurity#video&t=2274)

Warning: speaker likes to use profanity (which I enjoy :) but possibly NSFW if
you're not on headphones

------
bluefox
Dynamic Languages Wizards Series - Panel on Runtime:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-
RtcSYUQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ)

------
oleksiyp
Google I/O 2009 - The Myth of the Genius Programmer

One of the best talks about code reviews and similiar things

[https://youtu.be/0SARbwvhupQ](https://youtu.be/0SARbwvhupQ)

------
peelle
Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style. He has several great talks.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs)

------
boulos
In addition to Linus's git talk, I really enjoyed Jeff Dean's EE380
retrospective on Building Systems at Google
([http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI)).
Many people have mentioned Jeff's basic premise elsewhere ("Design a system
for 10x your current need, but not 100x, rewrite it before then") but this
talk gave several useful examples where tipping points occurred (at least with
Search).

------
vayarajesh
TED talk - Elon musk -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgKWPdJWuBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgKWPdJWuBQ)

D10 conference - Steve jobs and Bill gates -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw8x7ASpRIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw8x7ASpRIY)

TED talk - Bill gates (Innovation to Zero) -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-
fq2Zn7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I)

------
verandaguy
I'm a fan of "Knocking my neighbors kids cruddy drone offline" by Robinson and
Mithcell from DEFCON 23.

    
    
        [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CzURm7OpAA

------
ciroduran
I love Kevlin Henney's talks, he's very entertaining and informative at the
same time, here's one called "Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Java
Programmers", very useful even if you don't use Java -
[https://vimeo.com/101084305](https://vimeo.com/101084305)

The rest of his channel is full of his talks
[https://vimeo.com/channels/761265](https://vimeo.com/channels/761265)

------
tboyd47
"Being Awesome By Being Boring"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iheymi5QFEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iheymi5QFEY)

------
1057x31337
Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4dlF0kcThQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4dlF0kcThQ)

------
michaelmcmillan
Fast test, slow test by Gary Bernhardt:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxiiRPHS9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxiiRPHS9k)

------
joshux
Damien Katz - CouchDB and Me: [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-
couchdb-and-me](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me)

The talk is about how Damien quit his job to hack on open source software. It
shows his struggle and doubt while embarking on the project and then finally
invented CouchDB. It's a passionate and human account of the process of
creating something significant. I recommend every hacker watch this.

------
sedachv
QueueTard's Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips at HOPE number nine:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4)

Guy Steele's How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! at Strange Loop
2011: [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-
Progra...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Programming)

------
stewartw
Lawrence Lessig's 'free culture' from OSCON 2002:-
[https://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/](https://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/)

Anything at all by Richard Feynman:-
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22richard+feynman%22&tbm=...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22richard+feynman%22&tbm=vid)

------
EvanAnderson
I very much enjoyed the talk John Graham-Cumming gave "The Great Railway
Caper: Big Data in 1955":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcBJfkE5UwU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcBJfkE5UwU)

Any of Jason Scott's talks given at various hacker cons are usually
historically informative and always a lot of laughs (but they're decidedly not
"technical").

------
lumannnn
by Dave Thomas (PragDave)

"LoneStarRuby 2015 - My Dog Taught Me to Code by Dave Thomas" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCBUsd52a3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCBUsd52a3s)

and

"GOTO 2015 • Agile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M)

------
neduma
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLyobOhtO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLyobOhtO4)

~~~
jack9
This is Linus Torvalds & git

------
zerognowl
Always refreshing to hear one of Haroon Meer's talks:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rarpym8JJXQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rarpym8JJXQ)

Jake Appelbaum's Digital Anti-Repression Workshop is _de rigeur_ listening
too:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHoJ9pQ0cn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHoJ9pQ0cn8)

------
lewisl9029
The Front-end Architecture Revolution by David Nolen:
[http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/61483785](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).

------
ericssmith
Not at all high-brow, but I revisit the in-the-trenches case study of "Scaling
Pinterest" on Infoq from time to time because I find their fighting through
the pain inspirational for my own scaling troubles.

[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest)

------
jagermo
"Pwned by the Owner"
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4oB28ksiIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4oB28ksiIo)),
a DefCon 18 talk about a stolen Mac that one day popped back up on the owners
DynDNS service, he was able to connect to it and had some fun afterward.

Not a technical deepdive, but entertaining.

------
exawsthrowaway
It's not publicly available, but it was an internal AWS talk and very-deep-
dive on the design & implementation of S3. A real eye opener for what it meant
to build at global scale.

It's worth joining a global-scale tech company (AWS, Google, Azure, Facebook)
just to have your mind blown by some of the internal materials.

------
davur
Cal Henderson "Why I Hate Django" DjangoCon 2008 Keynote -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk).
Not that it is the most educational talk, but it's really funny (edit: added
youtube link).

------
ruairidhwm
Hacking with Words and Smiles by James Lyne
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrNo0XpQxBk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrNo0XpQxBk)

He was a co-speaker at TEDxGlasgow with me and I thought his talk was
brilliant. Cyber-crime is a really interesting area.

------
jboynyc
I like all of Carin Meier's talks, but I think the one that made the most
lasting impression was "The Joy of Flying Robots with Clojure."

[http://gigasquidsoftware.com/speaking/](http://gigasquidsoftware.com/speaking/)

------
theviajerock
My favorite is this one about Drones and IA. One of the best:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/raffaello_d_andrea_the_astounding_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/raffaello_d_andrea_the_astounding_athletic_power_of_quadcopters)

------
antigremlin
Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine is another gem by Damian Conway:
[https://yow.eventer.com/events/1004/talks/1028](https://yow.eventer.com/events/1004/talks/1028)

------
jacques_chester
_Stop Building Products_ by David Edwards.

A deeply thoughtful discussion of the impact of metaphors on how we think
about software development.

Skip to 0:40 if you don't want to hear the MC.

[http://livestre.am/5qFUn](http://livestre.am/5qFUn)

------
c0l0
Artur Bergman, creator of the Fastly CDN, at Velocity 2011 - giving a (very)
short talk about SSDs:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7PJ1oeEyGg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7PJ1oeEyGg)

------
keane
What Makes Us Uniquely Human? by Erwin McManus:
[http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/What-Makes-Us-Uniquely-
Human-...](http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/What-Makes-Us-Uniquely-Human-Er)

------
peoplee
The Pixel Factory by Steven Wittens
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NkjLWAkYZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NkjLWAkYZ8)

For those how likes computer graphics (or want to learn), this is a gold
piece.

------
vinkelhake
"Desktop on the Linux" by Wolfgang Draxinger (guest appearance by Lennart
Poettering):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0)

------
superplussed
React-motion, the react animation package that boils all of the animations
down to one concept, a spring.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tavDv5hXpo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tavDv5hXpo)

------
unkoman
Eric Brandwine at AWS talking about how they solved the networking part of the
cloud:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qln2u1Vr2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qln2u1Vr2E)

------
nickysielicki
DEFCON 20: Owning Bad Guys {And Mafia} With Javascript Botnets
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QT4YJn7oVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QT4YJn7oVI)

This guy is just too funny.

------
jpetitto
Deconstructing Functional Programming by Gilad Bracha:

[https://www.infoq.com/presentations/functional-pros-
cons](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/functional-pros-cons)

~~~
hans
this is always a top one for me, he presents so well and kind of nails down
the concepts.

but even more so, he sounds like the architect in the matrix having dialogue
with some critics.

------
tehwebguy
That guy fat from the Bootstrap team - What Is Open Source & Why Do I Feel So
Guilty?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDb6VBO9os)

------
0xmohit
I have a list of interesting talks on Haskell/OCaml [0].

(Plan to organize and add more categories.)

[0] [https://github.com/0xmohit/talks](https://github.com/0xmohit/talks)

------
samblr
There is a sort of palpable energy in (Ryan Dahl) node.js original
presentation.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztspvPYybIY)

edit: +Ryan Dahl

------
krsna
"When We Build" by Wilson Miner:
[https://vimeo.com/34017777](https://vimeo.com/34017777)

It completely changed my perspective on how design shapes our world.

------
Boogiepop
Amateurs.
[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf)

------
sunils34
Resilience in Complex Adaptive systems by Richard Cook at Velocity Conf 2013:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60)

------
d1ffuz0r
Marketing Matters by Jesse Noller
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vZ_E1OO_PY&list=WL](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vZ_E1OO_PY&list=WL)

------
NetStrikeForce
ECCHacks - A gentle introduction to elliptic-curve cryptography [31c3]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jTFxQaUJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6jTFxQaUJA)

------
adrianbordinc
One of my favorites. dhh showing once again his ruthless pragmatism:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlhAkNWC1qo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlhAkNWC1qo)

------
simula67
"Greg Wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We
Believe It’s True"

[https://vimeo.com/9270320](https://vimeo.com/9270320)

------
rhgraysonii
Closure, by @steveklabnik

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWHVceDbFo)

So many lessons in short, beautiful piece.

------
zengr
My personal favorite is "The ACL is Dead" by Zed Shaw
[https://vimeo.com/2723800](https://vimeo.com/2723800)

------
jentulman
Dan Abromovich sort of introducing Redux in this talk.
[https://youtu.be/xsSnOQynTHs](https://youtu.be/xsSnOQynTHs)

------
andrey_utkin
Linus on Nvidia.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw)

------
fitzwatermellow
Well. There's enough quality content in this thread to start a dedicated cable
television channel, a la _Viceland_ ;)

Not sure if it's my _favorite_. And the subject is more technology than
"tech". But the talk that keeps haunting me is Michael Dearing's lecture from
the Reid Hoffman "Blitzscaling" class at Stanford:

Heroes of Capitalism From Beyond The Grave

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCdfa_aeI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCdfa_aeI8)

Dearing draws upon an obscure letter by Daniel McCallum, superintendant of the
New York and Erie Railroad, written to his bosses in the 1850s. In the report,
McCallum bemoans the stress and frustration of operating a railroad system
spanning thousands of miles. All of the joy and magic he used to revel in
whilst running a fifty mile stretch back in his home town has long since
dissipated. Furthermore, the unit cost per mile seems to be _exploding_ rather
counter-intuitively!

Dearing goes on to elucidate the absolute necessity of the railroads ("the
thing to know about the railroads is: they were startups once") themselves. As
guarantors of civilization and progress. Beacons bringing light and reason to
the dark swamps of ignorance and inhumanity. And not just in the physical
transport of goods, people and ideas across the continent. But as the wealth
created from that creative destruction remains the best cure for all of our
other inimical maladies: poverty, injustice, disease and stagnation.

So, no pressure. But civilization depends upon _you_!

Links to References in the Talk:

Estimates of World GDP: From One Million BC to the Present

[http://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf](http://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf)

The Process of Creative Destruction by Joseph Schumpeter

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CreativeDestruction.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CreativeDestruction.html)

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business by Alfred D.
Chandler, Jr.

[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674940529](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674940529)

Report of D. C. McCallum to the stockholders of the New York and Erie Railroad

[https://books.google.com/books?id=4Gc9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA33#v=one...](https://books.google.com/books?id=4Gc9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA33#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Things As They Are In America by William Chambers

[https://archive.org/details/thingsastheyare04chamgoog](https://archive.org/details/thingsastheyare04chamgoog)

------
hackaflocka
Paul Buchheit - Startup School Europe 2014

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5w-0H-hq6E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5w-0H-hq6E)

Anjana Vakil: Learning Functional Programming with JavaScript - JSUnconf 2016

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-5obm1G_FY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-5obm1G_FY)

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

[https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366)

Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway? | JSConf EU 2014

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ)

~~~
mattste
I definitely recommend Philip Roberts's talk. I watched it a couple of months
into learning Javascript and then everything "clicked."

------
rimantas
Anything by Sandi Metz.

------
RodericDay
I really liked "The Life and Death of Javascript" by Gary Bernhardt

