The first time I watched Simple Made Easy, I didn't like it, even though I'd written quite a few situated programs in my day. A year later, I'd learned Clojure and re-watched it, and it all made so much sense. It's now one of my favorite tech talks.
Gerry Sussman talk is awesome and reflects very well the currently state of computer programming. It's a shame. The worse part: there is people around us with a lot of pride ABOUT DON'T KNOWING TO COMPUTE BUT STILL DOING [INNEFICIENT] THINGS. (sorry for the caps, good bye)
It might not sound like much from the title, but it's really worth a watch. Thrimbleby talks about UX (captivatingly, even though I'm not usually particularly interested in it) and the many, many bad examples within healthcare tech that leads, directly, to people dying—such as his mother. He also has some really interesting points about tires at one point. I'm not sure if I'm selling it.
Cybernetics for the Masses is great, and Lepht has some really interesting ideas. It's too bad they seem to have dropped off the grid. Does anybody know what happened?
They blog (intermittently) at Sapiens Anonym.[1] They went dark for a bit due to what I gather were various medical, educational and relationship issues, but things have been picking up again lately.[2]
While the exact approach described there didn't end up being necessary (restricted Boltzmann machines), all the summaries of the competition results made me realize machine image and voice recognition was going to accelerate massively and rival humans in many areas in the very near term.
This one made me realize how gene manipulation would be a near term thing and how big of an impact it would have. They used mostly old techniques but all the in situ modifications of cells in mammals were something I hadn't been aware were possible to that degree. One of the guys from his lab, Feng Zhang, went on to be one of the major forces behind CRISPR.
New design for a tokamak fusion reactor, made much cheaper by new super conductors that use liquid nitrogen instead of helium/etc. and which have more structural strength by being bound into a metallic ribbon. This one made me really optimistic (it hasn't been borne out like the others yet, but they recently raised $50 million).
That transaction talk is really good, thank you. I can now finally name the effect that I had noticed but had trouble explaining and referring to, write skews.
It's interesting that he doesn't mention phantom reads as the difference between repeatable read/snapshot isolation, and serializable, which is what other sources tend to do.
Snapshot isolation always seemed to me like cheating the intended meaning of repeatable read, insofar as some databases refer to their snapshot isolation level as repeatable read.
That is, in the strictest sense, if you read a row twice, you get the same value with snapshot isolation, but you don't actually know that the value will be the same when you commit, which as I understand is a case of a write skew.
In fact, if one thinks of the definition of these levels in terms of locking semantics, one would expect a repeatable read to have the same meaning as obtaining a read lock on the row you read, which I understand would prevent at least some types of write skew, since no modification would be possible on that row, because it would need a write lock. There could still be hazards related to phantom reads (and possibly other effects), such as making a decision based on a computed aggregate that can change if new rows are inserted. Still, this meaning of repeatable reads would already provide a useful isolation level for various cases, except that it doesn't work with snapshot isolation.
I have a suspicion that applications out there made incorrect assumptions as to the actual isolation provided by the DB they use.
Clasp: Common Lisp using LLVM and C++ for Molecular Metaprogramming.
ABSTRACT
This talk describes our unique approach to constructing large, atomically precise molecules (called "Molecular Lego" or "spiroligomers") that could act as new therapeutics, new catalysts (molecules that make new chemical reactions happen faster) and ultimately to construct atomically precise molecular devices. Then I describe Clasp and CANDO, a new implementation of the powerful language Common Lisp. Clasp is a Common Lisp compiler that uses LLVM to generate fast machine code and it interoperates with C++. CANDO is a molecular design tool that uses Clasp as its programming language. Together I believe that these are the hardware (molecules) and the software (the CANDO/Clasp compiler) that will enable the development of sophisticated molecular nanotechnology.
Meta-comment regarding the videos posted on this thread:
It’s concerning to me that 90%+ of these videos are hosted by a single entity. The significance to me (and I assume many others here) is a cultural one. These videos relflect on our livelihoods and our day-to-day interests and pursuits.
My advice is to not get complacent about always having access to this content. Use youtube-dl and keep a local backup of what’s important to you.
I'm not sure why you're singling out YouTube here. YouTube is the main go to place for videos on the web, so it shouldn't be surprising that most of the videos posted here are hosted by YouTube.
Concerning, maybe, but the same could be said of a lot of other centralized mediums (such as Medium, WordPress, even HN threads itself).
When you rely on someone else to host your stuff, you always run the risk of it disappearing. Important stuff should always be backed up, whether it's video stored on YouTube or an amazing blog post on medium.
If YouTube disappeared tomorrow and all these videos disappeared, I'm sure within a week or month, people will have reuploaded many of the really great talks posted in this thread on some other site.
He starts with a nice history of SunOS and Solaris, goes into open source, then midway through (33:00) he goes into a brutally honest rant against Oracle. Even better is that Oracle was one of the sponsors of the conference.
So glad someone posted this. Basically everything Bret Victor does is gold. His website [1] has a bunch of great things he's written/done; two of my favorites are The Ladder of Abstraction [2] and Learnable Programming [3].
The essence of it is that constraints actually allow for easier composition and more modularity. It had a real impact on the way I think about the design of systems.
I'm rather early in my career doing mostly Ruby, Python and JavaScript things. As you might expect, I consume mainly Ruby, Python and JavaScript related talks.
There are many other presenters who I have a good opinion of:
- Raymond Hettinger: his presentation/teaching style is something I'd like to model my own after, also he gave the first talk on writing proper threaded/concurrent python that I was able to understand and make use of.
- Brandon Rhoades: another speaker with a presentation style that I've found easy to follow, also he takes a little shot at the dd utility about 18 minutes into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Hmys8ojno)
- Sandi Metz: I started out in Python land and moved to Ruby land, where I was introduced to Sandi's talks. She doesn't talk about incredibly complex topics, but she's got insight into some really basic things that's helpful to new people who can't see the forest through the trees.
- Robert Martin: I gather that his OO principles are not universally revered, but I find his talks useful.
- Gary Bernhardt: his talks are interesting and entertaining in ways that most are not
The list goes on, but I can't think of them all right now.
He gives a history of SunOS, Solaris, and OpenSolaris up to the Oracle acquisition, and then onto post acquisition and the creation of illumos. It's a brilliant talk and a must-watch for any Unix enthusiast or historian. Bryan is an incredibly engaging speaker.
Watching this now. It's great. Thanks! Not only are there some nice restatements of powerful high-level insights in to network effects in general (which I am considering with respect to physical logistics requirements in our current business), but some great historical tidbits too.
The resounding rejection of packet switching by period communications experts at https://youtu.be/8Z685OF-PS8?t=21m0s is awesome. Oh how the mighty have fallen!
This is an excellent series of short videos on the physics behind quantum computers. It begins with the molecular structure of carbon materials and gradually works its way up to quantum computers: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/caging-schrodingers-cat-qua...
i rewatch this one now and then just to hear Joe Armstrong speak of another author's complex compiler code and the singular comment " and now for the tricky bit"
Alex Evan's talk on developing the renderer for Dreams:
He's given several versions of this talk (including the Advancements in Real-time Rendering course at Siggraph), but here's one available online:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
One of my favourites I watched recently was Dan Abramov introducing React hot loading, Redux and Redux Dev Tools in the same 30 minute talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs
Every time people think a technology will solve all their problems (remember guys from NOSQL back in the days?), they need to see this talk. The speaker also did this talk as a keynote a couple of times during other conferences.
Anything by Bryan Cantrill, David Beazley or Joe Armstrong
Bryan Cantrill - Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers ((but really about Larry Ellison being a lawnmower...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI
Joe Armstrong - React 2014 : Joe Armstrong - K things I know about building Resilient Reactive Systems ("What is on the wire?" Talks about protocols and other interesting things) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQIE22e0cW8
"Bufferbloat from the plumber's point of view." I haven't found a better explanation of the problem. Because of the way it is explained, the idea to solve it becomes obvious.
This talk was an interesting thought experiment by PhK of FreeBSD on how if he were tasked by some agency to sabotage open source projects and standards how he would go about doing it https://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk
A talk by Robert Harper at OPLSS in 2017 is really good as well, covering the basics of programming language background https://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/summerschool/summer17/to... "concrete syntax is where computer science meets psychology.... at the moment it's all a matter of opinion"
Neil is completely colour blind; he sees no colour at all. So he implanted an antenna on his skull that detects the information he choses (like colour) and converts it to vibrations on his skull. So not only can he now perceive colour, he can even perceive more colours than regular humans, since the antenna can be augmented.
Tridge - Linux powered coffee roaster. Tridge (of Samba and rsync fame) walks through the process he used to reverse engineer a USB thermometer live during the talk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LQr4At5Z5Q
"Console hacking 2010"[0][1] - The story and history of the different hacks and security bypasses around the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console. Absolutely brilliant.
Genius.com CEO gives talk about how the worst possible thing you can think of, is in fact the best thing.
I like this video because I tend to get stuck in my own head, or get carried away on useless features/ideas that don't really contribute to the overall progress of the product.
John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless.
I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code.
Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM.
I didn't watch the whole serie yet, but the first two are pretty solid and still fun. The first part doest not cover JS at all, but is rather a brief history of computing.
This talk took place before he started at Yahoo. In the latter half he goes over a number of potential moral quandaries and how ethically to respond to them. One matches the later Yahoo incident almost exactly.
The overall point is that it’s important to consider these scenarios beforehand, because it’s easier to do the wrong thing if you have to make decisions on the fly.
Bootstrapped to over half a billion dollars in revenue. Worth many multiples of that. Built it Atlanta, not a startup city. B2B, but with a more creative ethos than most VC-backed startups in SF. Just an extraordinary story, well worth the hour it takes to watch.
Uniting Church and State: OO and FP Together by Noel Welsh
If you are interested in functional programing this little gem has some great insights into how to translate between data and behavior correctly. Not quite the level of Rich Hickey or Philip Wadler, but very good.
It may not be so "wow" now, but at the time it happened the Photosynth TED talk with Notre Dame blew my mind and has stuck with me https://youtu.be/M-8k8GEGZPM
Remember at the time of this talk things like Google Maps were still very new, and nowhere near this level of performance.
This talk is both inspiring and funny, I got introduced to David Beazley by this talk and although every time I listen to him my barin melts, I enjoy his talks the most.
One of my favorite talks. Very quick, very to the point. I'm not saying I agree with this in 100% of cases, but in many cases I think it's the right call
I was going to mention Growing a Language, but since it's already been posted, here is Alan Kay's "Doing with Images Makes Symbols": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2LZLYcu_JY.
Anything from Armin Ronacher (the_mitsuhiko) or Raymond Hettinger, but I especially like "Thinking outside the box" [0] because it was such an eye-opener.
beside the nostaligia alan kay talks about sketchpad, sutherland and all that;
one of my top talks is dan friedman + will byrd doing evalo in minikanren.
similarly there's an old talk by sean parent about reversible computing while he was at Adobe R&D (kinda like relational programming of friedman and byrd, except, in cpp)
I also greatly enjoy anything chuck moore on forth / ga144
And recently the talk about the values of APL
Oh and Gary Bernhardt. Wat and the unix chainsaw. beautiful.
Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk
On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8
Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo
Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ
Allison Parrish does mindblowing things with corpus statistics by treating term vector spaces as generalizations of 2d image formats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc
Zebras All the Way Down: Bryan Cantrill - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE2KDzZaxvE
Jonathan Blow on Deep Work: Jonathan Blow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ej_3NKA3pk
Simple Made Easy: Rich Hickey - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure: Rich Hickey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU&t=845s
The Last Thing D Needs: Scott Meyers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ