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Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?
729 points by sid6376 on Dec 25, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 170 comments
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858866

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18740939

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045859

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239

Ever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217762

It's been a weird year, wonder if there were still good tech talks in 2020.




For me, it was Art of Code by Dylan Beattie, but mostly because that talk has the best ending[0] I have seen. Also, introduced to me a side of programming that I instinctively knew existed but never sought out.

[0]: https://youtu.be/6avJHaC3C2U?t=3366


As an ex mathematician, I can't handle the part where he claims mathematicians have only been studying imaginary numbers "in recent decades" and then goes on to say that Mandelbrot is the first person to rigorously study these kinds of systems. Made me die inside.


And the whole "mathematicians are only interested in problems they can solve" bit. Mathematicians have been interested in unsolved problems as long as maths has existed!

Edit: Okay, now I've watched the whole talk. Overall it's great.


Gödel has entered the chat


Cauchy rolling over in his grave.


An excellent presentation. I find his other presentation, the Cost of Code, more important but less entertaining. "Fix it in software" is going to be growing in magnitude and impact, as software eats the world. (Boeing Max crashes, Uber pedestrian accident, Volkswagen emissions cheating)

The presentation from 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=001SxQCEuv8


I enjoyed his talk, but i can't help but feel like these style of talks always use the same examples: game of life, fractals, esolangs, and some sort of human-computer interactive art system (usually the last one has a lot of variety so maybe that should get a pass for this critique). I would love to see these sorts of programming as art talks with a different set of examples. Not that i don't love fractals and the Game of life, but there's got to be other stuff too.


If you liked the Game of Life running a Game of Life simulation you might enjoy the YT video[0] showing someone's functioning raycasting engine within the game world of Factorio using thousands of machines and parts provided by the game. It blew my mind.

What I also found quite amusing was the PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the Turing-completeness of PowerPoint animations[1].

I'll never get tired of this kind of tinkering walking the line between genius and a healthy portion of crazy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28UzqVz1r24

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8


I would also very highly recommend you watch this talk about PowerPoint’s Turing-completeness — https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc

It’s from the same person (Tom Wildenhain) as your video, but this is an hour long, there’s an actual audience (that’s supportive and spends most of the talk in disbelief), and the end with recursive slides / fractals is an absolute mind melt.

Strong recommend! :) Thanks for the suggestions/reminder!


That's an idea for a talk. Crazy place where people have implemented computers. My personal favorite is the pokemon red implementation in minecraft.

https://youtu.be/H-U96W89Z90


If you have a bit of interest in programming, math and art, this is 1 hour of pure joy. Thanks for this


Funny, because I've seen just one talk in 2020 and it was that one :) I'm not too much into talks and conference stuff, mostly because almost all the time I find the subjects of talks completely irrelevant, to specific, too general etc. That one was really entertaining and I was looking for something similar, but haven't found anything.


Such a great talk. The storytelling here is top-notch. I’m glad you reminded me of it.


I second that! It's such a great talk because it showcases some powerful concepts while being very entertaining.

That's one of these talks you can watch with an interested layman as well, which I very much enjoy and find valuable.


Yep. That's another thing that I really liked about the talk too. Its very approachable and shows how fun programming can be, especially since coding can appear a bit dry and mechanical to others.


I no longer know what a programming language is. I am confused.


Thanks for the suggestion, thoroughly enjoyed watching it


Jeremy Howard's "I Like Notebooks" JupyterCon 2020 Talk

Howard makes the case for why even "real" programmers should give notebook environments a chance. In addition to supporting literate programming ("code as literature") and exploratory programming ("code as scientific notebook") in a live coding environment, Howard explains how notebooks can improve documentation, learning and sharing, testing, and deployment. And add-ins and tools, like Howard's own nbdev, can help address what's missing in Jupyter Notebook. As an example, Howard notes how fastdoc even enabled him to write and publish "Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD using Jupyter Notebooks." Excellent, inspiring talk!

Jeremy Howard - Creating delightful libraries and books with nbdev and fastdoc | JupyterCon 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKt19-GsA1I


This talk is especially noteworthy as Jeremy apparently got accused very harshly of breaking a code of conduct[0].

[0] https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/


Jeezus. What is wrong with people? If this woke nonsense is not stopped we are going to chase away all the people who actually create things and be left only with the evil mediocrities that enforce COCs.


From the article:

"I would rather not have to write this post at all. However I know that people will ask about why my talk isn’t available on the JupyterCon site, so I felt that I should explain exactly what happened. In particular, I was concerned that if only partial information became available, the anti-CoC crowd might jump on this as an example of problems with codes of conduct more generally, or might point at this as part of “cancel culture” (a concept I vehemently disagree with, since what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”). Finally, I found that being on the “other side” of a code of conduct issue gave me additional insights into the process, and that it’s important that I should share those insights to help the community in the future."

With this quote in mind, I highly recommend that you take a look at the rest of the piece, it may challenge some of your views on the topic :)


I did, and if anything I am even more certain COC's have degenerated into a plaything for narcissist, useless fools and we are better off throwing the whole thing out until we can figure out how to keep the psychopathic nannies away. This guy, who could not be more decent, was treated horribly. One shudders to think what would happen to less virtuous or politically correct people. I much rather keep hearing from brilliant, irreverent, even disagreable people, even if I risk a little offense now and then, then live a world pre-sanitized by these humorless, self righteous, sterile nullities.


There's a whole lot of ad hominem in this argument. Are you scared that the CoC crowd is going to take all the funny away? That seems unlikely to me.


Scared is not the word. I am outraged that the community I belong to is so cowardly that it has allowed itself to be stifled and bullied by people with nothing to offer but their self-awarded moral virtue, a situation that I feel should be denounced loudly and often.


We can quibble over words for sure, but you're certainly implying that if nothing is done, these folks will bully people into having a bad sense of humor. Like I said, that seems unlikely. Folks like being seen as funny, and will strive to be funny in front of people


I think we are looking at this very differently. For me the lack of humor is just a canary in the mine for authoritarianism and ideological mono-culture - the very opposite of the values that always attracted me in the tech scene. It seems you think the situation is not that dire and that these folks are doing more good than harm. I suspect the difference in our perspectives is greatly informed by our own political leanings.


How about this quote: "The process has left me shattered" ?


In the context of the article, the author makes it VERY clear that they mean the specific process that they underwent. Is there another take I'm missing?


I think I would like to argue, that these processes have a significant tendency to create more harm than good. Since this is just one of many (e.g. the Drupal Conan Stuff) examples. Especially in combination with our current cancel culture, where an accusation is enough to get some fired from their job.


Ah I see, well in that case I can tell you that the author of that article disagrees with you. It's true that I don't share those same worries about cancel culture with you, my point is that this article is particularly weak evidence for your position.


I read this as the author realising that the mob that got him is still bloodthirsty, and must continue to be appeased lest they come for him again.


> the evil mediocrities that enforce COCs

Most "people who actually create things" like communities with an explicit, reasonable code of conduct. This is of course not to say that mistakes haven't ever been made in enforcement, or that some COCs are poorly designed.

People under-appreciate the difficulty of building a community that people want to participate in. The problem is a close analogue to maintaining a desired company culture as it scales.

The reason all these communities have "woke" guidelines for behavior is because the ones that didn't have reasonable guidelines no longer exist, or have remained at a size where a COC isn't necessary.

Again, there's a fine line to be walked, so mistakes will sometimes be made, but if you think the "free for all" approach works, then you should try it. It won't scale once your community gets past a certain size. A few bad apples will spoil the barrel.


There are people who like communities with codes of conduct, and there are people who like to be the ones in the community enforcing codes of conduct. I prefer to live in a country with laws, but I don't fancy being a police officer enforcing the law. And, while plenty of good folks do want to enforce the rules with the purest of intentions, there's no question that, as with any role of power, some people will try to get the job because they specifically want to exert that power and derive great joy out of doing so.

I don't think many people are against the concept of a code of conduct itself - "hey, be nice to each other" is perfectly uncontroversial. It's when a few enforcers want to embroil themselves in a loud crusade against evil and stretch vague codes of conduct for their own gratification that we start to have controversy.

A case like this one where the rule broken was basically "you were mean" but the "victim" didn't actually care, didn't support the investigation, and wasn't even aware there was an investigation, and a full inquisition complete with intimidation and public punishment was brought out nonetheless is a perfect example of a situation where some spectators can't help but wonder if the committee is truly out to do good, or if some members are acting rather recklessly for their own enjoyment and parading around a false banner of justice to get their next high.


I don't think we disagree. I'm not pro-bad-enforcement, and I'm sure the phenomenon you point out does exist to some extent, just as we see in law enforcement.

The "the evil mediocrities that enforce COCs" comment that I replied to is low-effort and worse than useless. The "all cops are bastards" phrase has a similar level of subtlety and utility. Describing all conference organisers and community moderators as "evil" is nigh on absurd, and yet that comment has been upvoted, and my reply is on -3. That's evidence enough that my reply was needed - as Jeremy mentioned in his blog post, there's an irrational destroy-all-COCs meme going around lately.


What would cause such a meme, as you call it, to replicate in a community as progressive as tech? How do you distinguish what you seem to think is collective irrationality from justified and entirely rational rejection of an idea, that no matter how well intended originally, continues to prove itself symbolically good but practically evil?


The occasional viral instance of poor enforcement would do the trick.

I don't actually think there's a majority in the "COCs are evil" camp - not even close, but there's a very vocal minority group that has a lot of energy and is always ready to pile into a thread that is in any way tangentially related to COCs and post comments like "Moderators are evil right guys? Remember that time it was badly enforced? That means COCs are bad!" And they get upvoted for that. It's kind of amazing.

Argue about the rules in COCs, or about the way they're enforced. Commenting things like "the evil mediocrities that enforce COCs" is just cringe-level bad.


If you're interested in this talk, watch this one first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U


This is the first talk I've considered listening at less than 1x speed.


Funnily enough, someone tells am after a minute he should "slow down and breath a little bit".


This is a great talk, thanks. There is so much potential in the idea of improving our artifacts. If you think about it it’s insane that we just use flat text for the most part.


I am not sure if this qualifies, but I found the discussion between Scott Hanselman and Dr. David Kellermann on "Effective Remote Teaching with intention and creativity" fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LaTamAIinc

They mix a number of fairly simple technologies to achieve some really cool new ways to teach remotely.

Also, Scott Hanselman makes a series of well-made videos on "Computer Stuff They Didn't Teach You". His presentation style is down-to-earth, low tech and surprisingly relatable. Check it out!


I found this to be very Microsoft specific, more of an ad for products. Not sure there was enough general ideas and advice about being effective in teaching remotely. It wasn't awful, but for the whole 2020 I think I saw more interesting suggestions in the comments here.


Thank you for this suggestion! Teaching is very challenging in of itself, remote makes things even more difficult. I hope to find some inspiration from this.


Very cool-should be required watching for educators (K-12+ teachers/administrators, MOOC instructors), as well as developers for Zoom, WebEx, Teams.


Here's a short (4.5 min) remote teaching demo by Kellermann - compare this to your average Zoom/Teams/WebEx meeting!

What comes after Zoom teaching? Surface Hub, Teams and XSplit demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ecT6inCio&list=PLHSIfioizV...


This is nearly exactly the same presentation he does with Hanselman, which makes it seem likes he's only got a small amount of content. This and the parent video are really just a tech demo. More interesting would be an actual class recording.


How excaty did you find "useful" [ one of the fine qualities to name it as best ] this video?


Paul Stamets, a legendagry mycologist and founder (A Scientist and entrepreneur that successfully founded a mushroom company that grew and grew and grew ). This talk is on psychedelic use, but there are multiple other sub-topic talks by him. Always a joy to hear about his new discoveries in mushrooms and an inspiration regardless of what you do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT-qQWOf98Y

You should check out all his talks if you like this one.

If you are pressed for time, check out his shorter TED prsentations (not necessarily 2020)


OMG I just realized Stamets in Star Trek is named after a real scientist


Not only that, but he revealed while on the Joe Rogan, he also was the brain behind some of the core ideas of the show.


Additionally the serial killer (character) in "Hannibal" who integrates fungi in his murders is named Stamets.


2020 is not over, rC3 (https://rc3.world/ https://media.ccc.de/c/rc3) starts on the 27 ;)


Since this is coming up in other comments, rC3 is this year's CCC (rC3 = "remote CCC")


They scheduled a conference for a European audience between Christmas and the New Year? Why?!


And somehow it pulls together 14000 people for a 4 day experience I can only describe as defcon and burningman having an illicit child they dropped off somewhere in germany.

Been going there since 2014 and it's a great experience.


Soo hard to get a ticket. I was there for 35c3. Worst part is that since you don't know if you will get a ticket or not and you book hotels/flights only after you nab a ticket, you are paying increased prices vs booking far in advance.

Defcon has CCC beat in this area because you know you will get a ticket at Defcon. On the flipside, Defcon 27 last year was a complete mess because there were so many people. It was more Linecon than Defcon. However I am thankful to DarkTangent and his crew's efforts. The Goons did the very best they could and I am glad they are still doing it.

At 35c3 I got totally ripped off by Leipzig Taxis and my hotel which was cheaper but further away and not on the train path(at least easily).

Was it worth it? YES. Was worth every last penny. I am so thankful to the Chaos Computer Club for their efforts in putting on such an amazing event year after year. If I manage to make it back there again I will be volunteering as an Angel. I just wish it was cheaper to make it to Leipzig from the US but I understand that they are stretched to the gills in terms of capacity.

I heard a rumor that they have already maxed out capacity at Leipzig and there is no bigger place in all of Germany?


> there is no bigger place in all of Germany

There are bigger exhibition grounds in Germany (obviously Hannover, probably Köln and Frankfurt, possibly more), but not for this budget.

By multiplying attendance numbers and average ticket prices, I estimated the total budget for the last Congress at 2.5 million €. Most of that is going to be spent on the venue and the transit pass included in the admission fee. So without any insight into how the budget is divided, it's fair to estimate 1.5 to 2 million going into the rent for the venue. Given that we're talking about an entire exhibition grounds for over two weeks (buildup starts around the 17th of December and teardown usually ends around the 2nd of January), that's an absolute steal. I find it highly unlikely they would be able to get as good a deal for a larger exhibition grounds.

And even if they did, you cannot scale up a conference just by moving to a larger venue. You also need to have the team to back it up. After seeing Congress move from Hamburg to Leipzig and grow into its current size (with over 3000 volunteers doing the bulk of the work), I'm somewhat skeptical they could do it again so soon. The inner circle of seasoned volunteers needs to be grown accordingly.

Besides that, it's an open question if Congress actually wants to grow further. Accomodating more and more attendees from more diverse backgrounds runs the risk of losing your own identity. Simply put, I wouldn't want Congress to be "yet another Burning Man". It's really good that we have had more representation from artists, activists and even public officials in recent years, but it should still be recognizable as a CCC event.


>There are bigger exhibition grounds in Germany (obviously Hannover, probably Köln and Frankfurt, possibly more), but not for this budget.

Oh ok thank you for the clarification. Your description just makes it so much more amazing that they have kept this up for 36 years now. Again, I was deeply thankful for all the amazing work the Angels and the greater Congress leadership did in making 35c3 such an unforgettable event.

I just wish it was a bit easier to get prepared to buy a ticket. It was very difficult and nerve wracking when I was up early to get in line for the ticket. The first sale caused the website to time out and so I thought there is no chance for me to compete with what I assume were automated ticket buyers.

The second sale is where I got lucky and grabbed a ticket as fast as possible. There must be some middle ground between this and having full open admission no? It is impossible to get perfect so I do not fault them for this.

>Besides that, it's an open question if Congress actually wants to grow further. Accomodating more and more attendees from more diverse backgrounds runs the risk of losing your own identity.

Yes absolutely. There is no perfect solution to this. One one hand it would be a joy to introduce the hacker spirit to as big of an audience as possible. It could only lead to a better world. On the other hand, you run into problems that Defcon is experiencing with its 30,000+ attendees.


>Soo hard to get a ticket. I was there for 35c3. Worst part is that since you don't know if you will get a ticket or not and you book hotels/flights only after you nab a ticket, you are paying increased prices vs booking far in advance.

Which is why you join one of the manymany assemblies and get into the voucher rounds.

>I just wish it was cheaper to make it to Leipzig from the US but I understand that they are stretched to the gills in terms of capacity.

My only recommendation here is to fly into Berlin and take the hourly train down to Leipzig. It' somewhat cheaper to fly into and the train ride is a nice ride.

>I heard a rumor that they have already maxed out capacity at Leipzig and there is no bigger place in all of Germany?

There is place for more people in leipzig, but AFAIK there are internal discussions how large they want it. Hamburg could be used, but not everyone can fit into the CCH. Heard rumors about them considering going for CCH and the large halls nearby. But I'm not privy to orga details so these are all rumors.


>Which is why you join one of the manymany assemblies and get into the voucher rounds.

Can you elaborate on this further? I do not know what this means. I was not part of any local assemblies as I am not German, nor do I speak German, and many of the assemblies at 35c3 seemed to be treating me very coldly as they are just local clubs from all over Germany. (Understandable, I do not fault them).

>My only recommendation here is to fly into Berlin and take the hourly train down to Leipzig. It' somewhat cheaper to fly into and the train ride is a nice ride.

yes. I was looking into this, Do you have a recommendation for a good website to explore train timetables and routes? What I have to be careful about is timing because if I need to stay overnight in Berlin then it may increase the cost such that if it wastes a lot of time, then it may not be worth saving the additional plane money(as many flights have stops in some other city on the way to Leipzig anyway).

Thank you for the response!


>Can you elaborate on this further? I do not know what this means. I was not part of any local assemblies as I am not German, nor do I speak German, and many of the assemblies at 35c3 seemed to be treating me very coldly as they are just local clubs from all over Germany. (Understandable, I do not fault them).

You don't need to be german. International hackerspaces also get vouchers for CCC and travel in groups. Check with your local hackerspace.

Think of assemblies as "interest groups" and several are quite approachable over IRC/Matrix.

A list from previous years: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2018/wiki/index.php/Static:As...

Feel free to also poke me next time you travel if you need people to chat with or hang around.

>yes. I was looking into this, Do you have a recommendation for a good website to explore train timetables and routes? What I have to be careful about is timing because if I need to stay overnight in Berlin then it may increase the cost such that if it wastes a lot of time, then it may not be worth saving the additional plane money(as many flights have stops in some other city on the way to Leipzig anyway).

Google maps covers most of the train transits in Europe. But the leipzig train went almost every hour except for in the middle of the night if i recall correctly. This isn't a transit that goes twice a day and should be easy to jump onto if you don't arrive in veryvery odd hours.


Its always during that time proabably because school and universities have off - so many younger people can attend and government folks won't. Lol

It's one of the best conferences - already curious how this year will be!


they do the same thing for the CCC conference. I think the reasoning is "only the people who are really into it will attend". I agree that it's a bit... dumb.


I think the main reason is the tradition. It was in the beginning a small get together of some nerds that had vacations due to Christmas but were bored.

Then it got bigger and bigger. And now there are many reasons to keep it that way. No competing events, free choice of the venue, free hotels, school holidays and so on.

I'd also say that there are more atheists in the hacker community then in the general population.


In what respect does the days from 27th to 30th matter for religious persons? That's just traditional "Family time".


Well the time before that matters as well. Someone has to prepare everything.


This is this year's CCC.


As far as I'm aware, the original argument was that this is the only time of the year when everyone is on vacation anyway.

When it's not taking place remotely (as it does this year), there's also an argument to be made for this time slot because exhibition halls are traditionally empty and thus cheap around this time of year.


Or CCC


Not sure if this fits the bill, but:

How To Speak by Patrick Winston [1]

I watched this 'talk' on 'how to give talks' last week. It was uploaded at the end of 2019 and recorded 2018 (Patrick Winston passed away in 2019) and it is really good. Anyone who gives talks can learn a few things from this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY


Seconding this, and also wanted to recommend the book "Make it Clear", which contains a lot of PHW's communication advice beyond just talks. https://www.amazon.com/Make-Clear-Speak-Persuade-Inform/dp/0...


Wonderful talk and I followed his guidelines in my public speaking this year


For me, it was the USENIX Security talk on intimate partner surveillance (https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentat...), which introduced me to the field of intimate partner violence (which is typically outside normal threat models) and the crypto keynote on crypto for the people (https://youtu.be/Ygq9ci0GFhA) which similarly introduced me to threats that I hadn't thought about before.


I don't want anything to do with cryptocurrencies but listening to the founder of Ethereum on the Lex Fridman podcast was fascinating.

The way that guy thinks is just impressive.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q


That was a great episode. I've been really enjoying all of Lex's podcast episodes. He has on many of the top thinkers across many different fields. AI and CS in particular.

https://youtube.com/c/lexfridman

Some more of my favorite episodes (not necessarily CS related) I've listened to are:

- Matthew W. Johnson on Psychedelics - Manolis Kellis on Biology and CS - Michael Malice on Anarchy - Michael Stevens on education

I haven't listened to anywhere near all of them, so I'm sure I'm missing many amazing episodes.


His interview with Jim Keller is pretty good.


Agreed, and I think Vitalik on Eric Weinstein's podcast is also super interesting and information-dense: https://youtu.be/8TwNNgiNZ7Y


I just realized Vitalik never finished college. That's even more impressive for what he's done.


He was a Thiel Fellow.

http://canadaam.ctvnews.ca/why-a-20-year-old-toronto-drop-ou...


Minor personal confession, and a minor shameless plug.

I really enjoyed the Online Lisp Meeting talks[0] that have happened throughout this year. They show a lot of amazing and recent developments that have been occurring in various parts of the worldwide Lisp landscape, despite how much energy seems to go into repeatedly proclaiming the Lisp family of languages dead, over and over and over.

It was a good choice to host these talks regularly after this year's European Lisp Symposium. I'm glad that I did the work related to that, and I'll be glad to do more of this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgq_B39Y_kKD9_sdCeE5S...

(Disclosure: two of the talks there are by me; my above comment, naturally, doesn't refer to them.)


I really enjoyed the talk on Linux kernel memory management from Chris Down that was held during this years Arch Conf. It's well structured, funny, and gives nice insight into how you scale when you can't throw more hardware on the problem.

https://media.ccc.de/v/arch-conf-online-2020-6390-linux-memo...

Disclaimer: I helped organize the conference.


This is great! Good resource to link people that worry too much about Resident Set (RSS) memory usage...


Worry beyond it not exceeding available memory?


I really enjoyed the RustConf 2020 Closing Keynote: https://youtu.be/RNsEsZbXE-4

It details how the Poikemon missingo glitches work. (In the context of how memory safe languages would prevent them)


While I quite enjoyed the tale of how several small memory safety bugs came together to create interesting outcomes, I was a little disappointed there was very little Rust content in a closing keynote of a Rust conference.


I don't know, I haven't watched most of them! But the best one I did watch this year was Alexis King's 'Effects for Less' (Haskell).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0jI-AlWEwYI


I Pressed ⌘B. You Wouldn't Believe What Happened Next - Marcin Wichary, Figma (Config) YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVD-sjtFoEI


That “I solved the mystery here” part made me laugh so hard. Thank you for sharing!


damn, that was really engaging. thanks for sharing :)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE


My favorite talk is the Live View twitter demo on my case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI.

Never before I've been so bluffed by a new technology, he's building a small twitter clone in 20min with live reload, browser sync and everything, this would take days with any other traditional tech I know.


This talk is what persuaded me to choose Elixir for our MMO game server. Best technical decision I’ve ever made. Saša Jurić’s book on Elixir is also great (although not strictly necessary considering how amazing the official Elixir intro tutorials are).


Clicked it because the hyperlink wasn't clear from the description.....

GOTO 2019 • The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić

This talk feels, as a coding analogy, a lot more like throwing ingredients into a recipe than architecting an abstract machine.


This is what sold me on Elixir. I promptly purchased his book which was also amazing.


I personally really enjoyed “HTTP Desync Attacks: Request Smuggling Reborn”[1]

This was technically very late 2019 but I didn’t see it in the previous 2019 thread.

[1] https://youtu.be/_A04msdplXs


"Recoil: State Management for Today's React - Dave McCabe aka @mcc_abe at @ReactEurope"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ISAA_Jt9kI

Disclaimer: I co-organize the conference


Second this. Enjoyed this talk a lot and I’m also enjoying using the Recoil library on my side projects at the moment. Definitely hits a sweet spot for me in terms of productivity and intuitive conceptualisation of what’s happening under the hood.


I came to post this. I was very impressed after seeing the recording.


I've heard a few good ones, especially for junior devs:

1.David Guttman: How to Get a Better Job Without Learning Another Framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voep4CX5lEE&t=3s&ab_channel=...

2. Junior to Senior Podcast w/ Eric Gradman: https://juniortosenior.io/7


Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orMtwOz6Db0

I don't take Roger's view about consciousness for granted but it is very interesting nevertheless.


Some recency bias but I was blown away by the RFC talk for adding server components to React by Dan Abramov and Lauren Tan:

https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react...


All Day DevOps happened online this year, all the talks are here: https://content.sonatype.com/2020addo

Maybe I'm weird, but I really like talks like Outcomes over Outputs (https://content.sonatype.com/2020addo-ct/addo2020-ct-rangana...). Basically: are the metrics you're tracking helping the business, or just your team? (Also I thought this one was well composed and presented!)


Ok, it wasnt technically this year but I have to share this one just incase anyone missed it, because it's quite possible the best conference talk I've ever seen.

https://youtu.be/r-A78RgMhZU


Not a talk per se, but a great conversation between Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind about the state of modern physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk48z8N-sl0 .


F# is a better python.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QnbV6CAWXc


Prof. Michael Levin's work, e.g. "Endogenous Bioelectric Networks & Regenerative Medicine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKWyB9qLP_s

Let's figure out how to regenerate limbs and organs, eh?


I personally enjoyed Halvarflake's 2020 OffensiveCon keynote: "Why I Love Offensive Work, Why I don't Love Offensive Work"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QRnOpjmneo


My favorite talk this year was Snapchat Keynote primarily because of how they produced it given it was totally virtual but gave a feeling of being at a big event : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfvubHha69k

Btw, I run this newsletter if you are interested in becoming a better technical presenter etc - breakdown great talks by tech speakers etc: http://tinyletter.com/suyash


Can I see an example of your newsletter without having to subscribe first?


Turn the newsletter into RSS: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/


sure, I'll be releasing first 1st week of Jan so you can check that webpage again. Here is a talk I gave if you like to know what one of the topics that will be covered extensively - storytelling for technical speakers : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCNDJ32JqMw


https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2020/


The database group at CMU has some great talks.


Not tech, but economics: Mark Carney, who is the former governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, is the BBCs Reith lecturer this year[1]. Plenty of interesting points, questions and topical discussion in the series.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000py8t


I came here to suggest that. There are some really cool old-school in-depth lectures in that series.

I heard both Jonathan Sumption's (2019) and Grayson Perry's (2013) this year and it's reminded me to go back through the archives:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/player


Basically anything by Prof. Chelsea Finn for the sole reason that they represent the cutting edge thinking around getting robots to act in intelligent ways in the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chelsea+finn&sp...


I'm going to humbly put my kubecon talk here because it's unlike any conference talk you've ever seen and I'm really happy with how it turned out. https://youtu.be/VtedIghTPzI


Really enjoyed that. I think I will also really enjoy a longer version that talks a little bit more concretely about the tech stack being used. Also, not sure if the qr code is just prop or not, scanning it didn't work.


Thanks! I was constrained by the talk length but intended it to be a starting point for future conversations if people are curious about details. Zach Bintliff has a reinvent talk in January going over some details of how we did deployments at Disney+ if you'd like some specific details about that part of the stack.

The QR code was intended to be functional and worked in editing but I never got it to work after uploading to youtube. It was just a link to justinplus.com


I am actually curious about the details, especially the cloud storage. What kind of storage makes sense in this kind of infrastructure ? Is it just regular block volumes being mounted as ext4, or is it something more k8s-ish solution like longhorn or openEBS? I recently started learning and maintaining a k8s cluster, so I tend to really enjoy this kind of content. Will be really looking forward for the January talk.

Also, Turkey Leg and Mmm The Peas are both masterpiece.


The storage animation goes through some of it but for the basics using something like an 80/20 rule for content popularity you can also apply that to data cost. Your most popular 20% of content needs to be as close to the client as possible and will probably be the most expensive for you to store (typically in 1 or many CDNs).

The next most popular 20% will probably be semi expensive but doesn't need to be as close. This can be a subset of CDNs (where it financially makes sense) or georeplicated s3 buckets.

The lower ~60% of your content probably doesn't get accessed very often (relative to "hot" content) and depending on your content and user demands can probably live in your own data centers or POP locations.

You'll want to make it as easy as possible to promote/demote content into these tiers. Content popularity happens seasonally and in different regions so keeping the APIs similar between tiers will help you a lot. S3 is a pretty good standard to build toward so you'll probably want something like that on-prem or in your k8s clusters (minio, swift, etc.). We're also talking about each movie having potentially thousands of assets to track (different encodings for video and audio and different DRM wrappers etc) and hundreds or thousands of terabytes for big catalogs. So using immutable object storage is going to save you a TON of time instead of sticking with POSIX based block or file storage.

During the file ingest (when your encoding it) you're probably going to be dealing with POSIX based files so the encoders can work on the file but you'll want as many systems after that dealing with object storage as soon as possible.


Hmm, makes sense. Does same principles also hold while rendering the movie? The 80/20 rule will be harder to maintain because assets can change frequently and unexpectedly during production. But I guess the need for the data to geographically replicated, with fast and easy access, remains (especially during these remote times). During those times, is s3 a still good enough choice or do you want something more robust so your rendering process is not bottlenecked by io.


Rendering is different because the assets are very interdependent and the tooling is very POSIX specific. Rendering a scene (especially with ray tracing) can use thousands of assets from the movie even if they aren't directly on screen. Artists draw and save files in tools like Autodesk Maya and renderers read files from disk and work on them while in memory.

For some assets and tooling FUSE mounted s3 can work but generally FUSE and other userspace mounters I've seen slow down artists and rendering measurably.

Think of rendering assets more like code files and git with trunk based development. You want all of your artists to use the latest assets which are daily being updated. All of the assets should be co-located and you don't want geo-replication because of latency. Even if your artists are located all over the world you'll want them to store the saved assets in one place. Where the rendering happens.

There will be different assets that are hot as the movie progresses. But you're more likely to try to keep the latest version of all assets hot rather than all versions of specific assets hot.

Most studios use HPC style environments. NFS + big compute servers connected with high bandwidth.


Interesting. Is Kubernetes ever used as the orchestrator in HPC workloads, or rather are even containers used there? Also what are some good resources to get better at kubernetes? Currently I am mostly playing with managed k8s like digital ocean's and thinking about transitioning to k3s based bare-metal solution. So, I would really like to learn what's the right way of doing this.


There are some HPC environments that use Kubernetes but they likely use custom schedulers optimized for batch workloads (e.g. https://github.com/volcano-sh/volcano).

"containers" are often used but not always docker containers. HPC environments I've seen will often use container primitives (e.g. cgroups, namespaces).

There's a lot you can learn with managed Kubernetes and it's a great place to start. You can learn a lot of the parts of Kubernetes with running through https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way or reading https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Running-Dive-Future-Infras...

I'll email you to follow-up since tracking HN comments isn't a great way to have a conversation.


I watched this in 2020 even though it's from EuroBSDCon 2019. I'm talking about Patricia Aas keynote "Embedded Ethics": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNIiitVFtc

Hasn't aged one bit. If anything Patricia is spot on pretty much everything. If you don't have time to spend on this, you may want to take a look at the slides: https://www.slideshare.net/PatriciaAas/embedded-ethics-eurob...


But it's just a rant, what are the real takeaways? She wants:

- A common ethics board

- To protect whistleblowers

And to achieve this, I should be "Annoying as a service"?

I don't feel like I learnt anything.


Just want to jump in on this - watch the video, read the slides. It's powerful stuff. No all the answers are not there, hell most of the questions are not there, but just take 2 minutes and read it.


My answer to the question "Where do you get all your ideas?"

https://youtu.be/MJmqaWq7PJY

Its about creativity and how to think about ideas.


I loved this!


The Leadership Guide for the Reluctant Leader: https://dev.tube/video/3PcL8UkorEg


It's not tech per se, but the "Golden Webinars in Astrophysics" series has a number of talks on a wide range of topics. The lectures are given by senior and well-respected people in their sub-fields. They are available in English and Spanish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsYCyopp4jY&list=PLnuCZ3n0pW...


Matti Picus' talk on Getting Involved with NumPy. It's one of the main libraries used in data science, so the talk is very useful. He discusses its start, development, governance, how to contribute and with an example of a pull request. It's a great resource on getting started with open source in python. https://youtu.be/lHJqOE5j6xE


I think the "talk" by Chris McCord should apply here "Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5", while not really a talk this year was special and the demo completely blew my mind.

it's available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI


Equilibrium over Space: The Canonical Urban Models with Dr. Edward Glaeser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMmXo1nHetE

This is a very "tech" way of looking at space.


> It's been a weird year, wonder if there were still good tech talks in 2020.

If anything there are likely more than ever, because a lot of the ones that used to be delivered in person and not recorded may have been recorded this year.


Linda Rising: Thinking Fast and Slow https://youtu.be/XjbTLIqnq-o

(Just saw that this is from 2019 but it was the best I've seen in 2020)


I cant recall if it was released this year but Lamport's Intro to TLA+ (uploaded on youtube) stands out for me.


I met him in person in 2019 in Palo Alto, as a consequence of me being a big fan of his work in the field of Computer Science. He seems to be a really nice and smart individual.


Definitely not from this year, also not really a talk.


Brexit talks :-)


Maaaan would it gave made for some weird TV to watch those talks.

I really hope some day, all political negociationswill be filmed, archived, and unclassified a few years after the end of mandates.


BBC's "Storyville: Brexit Behind Closed Doors" is exactly that, a surprisingly revealing documentary on the negotiations from Guy Verhofstadt's point-of-view. Highly recommended!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07RkzvN5X3Q


My favorite is Naval’s talk at Tim Ferriss:

https://tim.blog/2020/10/14/naval/amp/


It bugs me that everytime he goes on a talk show recently, he pegs himself up a horse with "I have stopped doing talk shows and I am doing it for you because ____". He comes across as an arrogant and self-serving. Most of his content is rehashing from other books. A lot of it straight from Feynman interviews on Youtube. Some spiritual stuff repeated verbatim from Jiddu Krishnamurthy.

The interesting thing about Naval is that he has a magnetic effect to new listeners and there is a cult-like following. I used to love his early talks and then the more I got to hear him, the more I realized he is just this narciscist rich guy without a shred of humbleness. He has a great sense of clarity in his thoughts and he speaks well. It's a shame really that his character puts me off more than anything else. I'd rather go read original sources with far more insight.

His repeated claims of "I can get rich even if I start over" - yes, Naval, go for it. Give up the name, money and everything you have and try working 2 jobs as a waiter and a nurse, raising kids and keeping your spouse happy while saving enough to go after your investor instincts. The whole thing comes across as out of touch with reality, compassion and thoughtful consideration; instead relies on his survivorship biases as a guiding beacon of life.


I partially agree and partially disagree with you.

I think most of the problem is people treating him (or Tim Ferriss) like a God, and his thoughts as the Holy Bible.

For example, tons of people in Silicon Valley praise "Sapiens" by Harari. When I finally read it, I quickly realized that I knew most of his stuff from other books. Surprised that Naval loved that book so much - but as a consequence, many people have bought and read and praised the book.

I don't know if he's a narcissist person, and I am not sure he's not humble. I think he partially suffers from the same problem that plagues Sam Altman: they both come across in a certain way, because they don't seem to have the social skills to present their persona and give justice to the nice parts. I think it happens when you think most other people are super smart and introverts like you.


I'm pretty sure I saw people getting banned on twitter for disagreeing/challenging him (in a civil way).


That would be strange - why would Twitter give him a preferential treatment? Any source you can provide?


I'm sorry, I did not mean "ban". What I meant was "block". On one occasion I'm pretty sure he responsed to somebody with "virtue signalling" followed by a block, which seemed ridiculous on a platform for exchanging views.


What’s it about? Why did you like it?


https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/

Overall I agree with much of the tone that they set and some of the things are long overdue.

---

Edit: duckduckgo censor the search query "the great reset" when you search for the first time. proof: https://imgur.com/UbsvTCz

Edit2: Changed from "sometimes" to "when you search for the first time" in response to the comment below.


FWIW I spent nearly two weeks marking "the great reset" on my twitter trends as "not interested", only for it to still show up, both in the forms I had already blocked and in new ones (#thegreatreset, "great reset", etc). You don't get that kind of trend persistence without some entity pushing hard for it via bots.

I don't know why DDG blocked that query, but I would bet it was due to bot spam.


Update: it appears that there is a reason for it.

DDG doesn't show results if there isn't an exact match for the query it seems. It requires you to search the same query again for some reason.

Maybe this is an experiment of some sort, I'm not sure. Again, this doesn't happen on a VPN, but happens on my ip address.

And no corporate settings interfere with the browser, it's the personal device I tried on.

Another thing: when you search for "names database" on DDG there doesn't appear to be any results. No matter how much you try. I haven't found another query that yielded the same results.


Why would that query be censored?


Especially on DDG. I was under the impression that only Google was meddling with your search results.


The founder of DDG was also the founder of a privacy invading company. This has been scrubbed off most parts of the internet.

Edit: changed from spyware to privacy invading


When? Which company? Let's see some business registrations or other primary sources.


What's the name of the spyware company he founded?

If you're referring to Names Database, how is that spyware?


Is there any evidence that the query is actually censored, beyond conspiracy theories?


I attached the proof pic.

edit: To the comment below saying I'm lying.

Yes it does query. The first time I query, it doesnt give results. Then I query it again and it shows all results (same query, pressing the search icon again). This is stealthy censorship and an unsuspecting person wouldn't notice.

This doesn't happen for any other query. And it only happens with my work ip address, not a VPN.

Edit2: Still not working for me, I have to query it twice to get the results. Maybe this is happening for selected ip addresses. This doesn't happen when I use a VPN.


Working flawlessly for me, no matter how many times I reload.

Ockham's razor encourages me to believe that this is just some minor technical issue on either side, rather than censorship.


That's proof that Duckduckgo didn't find any results for the great reset at that particular time. It is not evidence for censorship, as you say "sometimes", meaning it could be a thousand other reasons why that is happening.


> This doesn't happen when I use a VPN.

That points at your network (ISP, LAN) more than DDG. You might try other less popular search engines (maybe Bing) to see if this behavior happens there as well.


Works fine here, including the first time I tried.


Of course, all the queries in the world will be anectotal compared to your experience, but still : from my phone, a couple second ago, ddg censors the query so much that typing "the great" auto completes to "reset". And follows to giving pretty expected results.

I suppose I could come up with a few dozens scenario that would explain no results in your case (as a software engineer, I have heard a rumor that sometimes those " server" thingys have what they call "glitches".)

But I of course completely understand that the hypothesis of DDG specifically censoring the query for you looks more plausible.

You're probably a very important person that needed to be hidden the fact that the WMF had a conference about restarting the economy after the covid - which obviously means that the prince Charles of UK is behind a global conspiracy to manufacture viruses from scratch in order to overthrow capitalism. (I'm just kidding, I know that's not what you believe.)

Sincerely, i hope you have the best possible holiday season, and take care of yourselves.


FYI, I'm also a software developer/engineer. I do understand when glitches happen, but this seems too off.

If it works on a VPN, or a proxy server but not your own ip address. Are you really sure it's just a "glitch"?

And there are good reasons to think that way. Partially because there have been conspiracy theories about the "great reset", so this might be a way to stop the viral spread or whatever. I mean it's not too long ago when it came out that google censored queries to websites unless you typed the name directly in google.

When trust is broken, it's wise to be skeptical.

And yes, I did read the comments and rule out other things.


Couldn't repro. What's the censored part of your image? I don't see anything there, maybe it's relevant.


That's the location/country, if I am not wrong.


'sometimes' doesn't make sense. That would also just create more interest.


Is there a specific talk there that you are recommending?




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