HN Explorer

79 comments

[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] thread
geoffpado
I'm a particular fan of Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming". [1] It's a great look at the amazing number of ideas that the CS world has come up with and how we might be able to improve the act of building programs, even from "old" ideas.

[1] https://vimeo.com/71278954

CSMastermind
That was an absolute gem of a talk. Thank you so much for posting this.
kevinSuttle
One of my all-time favorites as well. Pretty much any of his talks are legendary.
pizza
Mark Fisher's talk about how capitalism makes it seem like the only game in town [0]

David Pearce on abolishing suffering [1]

Jurgen Schmidhuber "Universal AI and a formal theory of fun" [2]

Slavoj Žižek on "signs from the future" - also ties into [0] a bit because at one point he mentions how excess capital was found to actually reduce the efficiency of certain creative tasks [3]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deZgzw0YHQI

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VCb9sk6CTc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnbZzcruGu0

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-wbaSUMAY

griffinmmahon
Žižek on green consumerism is quite good as well, I find myself constantly thinking of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g.
pizza
Yes! I agree with him a lot that environmentalists today are too conservative - in the insistence that preternatural human effects on the environment can only be disturbing or jeopardize ecosystems. But, like Žižek likes to say: what if the opposite were true? What if we should instead aim for more radical reinterpretations of our relationship with nature, and to instead make ourselves more artificial, while also better stewards of nature - like Elon Musk's vision of humans as being a multiplanetary civilization, or getting people to realize that junk is not a disease, but a symptom of a system that enables mass rearranging of junk-substrate.
Klaperman
Is the Schmidhuber talk about his idea that benevolence and "fun" reduces to maximizing compression of sensory experience? I really wish he would stop peddling that.
danielvf
Rich Hickey's talk on simplicity is a must watch.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

And one of the most useful talks of all time for building organizations is by Ed Catmull (of Pixar)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc

michaelsbradley
I saw Simple Made Easy live, in person, in Saint Louis (where I live), back in Fall 2011. I remember the experience very well ~ forever changed the trajectory of my personal and professional efforts at software development.

I was so under-exposed to non C-family languages at the time that I asked the guy next to met whether the code used to demo the ideas "was Haskell or something else?" I felt embarrassed at the shocked look on his face; my grand exploration of Clojure (and other functional languages too!) began shortly thereafter. The previous evening, I'd accidentally had dinner with Dr. Gerald Sussman... what a conference, what an experience was Strange Loop 2011!

[+] https://thestrangeloop.com/2011/sessions.html

shahocean
Sir Ken Robinson's talk on Do schools kill creativity? Its worth watching.

https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...

wyclif
Yes, I forgot about this one but it's a TED Talks classic.
ironic_ali
Aaand... 2 hours gone watching all Ken Robinson's talks. Brilliant stuff!
posterboy
I didn't like the conclusion that switching to a school was a solution that supports a specific kind of creative activities, because the example was not convinving. A Dance Carreer is famous for competition so much so it was featured as a storyline on the Simpsons. OTOH the school might just have been exceptional, but then it proofs nothing. Edit: Still, I like that the problem is interesting enough for the talk to become prominent.
andrei_says_
While I agree with all of the above, I think the talk was masterfully crafted for success. I doubt it would've been nearly as successful without the mention of a mega celebrity or if it recommended unschooling.

Honestly I'd rather have 5+ million people or whatever the view count get exposed to thinking which puts school structure into question than have a talk providing better solutions.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
keyanp
Very surprised it hasn't already been mentioned, but Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture" is fantastic (although not technical):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

cableshaft
Just rewatched this. I was thinking "I remember this having a major effect on me emotionally last time, why isn't it this time?", then I got to the end, and it reminded me. Oh boy. Still choked up.
adgulacti
thanks a lot for sharing this, really inspiring!
Ace17
"7 minutes, 26 seconds, and the fundamental theorem of Agile Software Development", by JB Rainsberger. It's short and straight to the point. https://vimeo.com/79106557
patio11
If you like the business of running software companies, these are probably my two favorite business-oriented talks ever:

Long Slow SaaS Ramp of Death (Gail Goodman): http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...

Wide-ranging; covers why SaaS companies are brutally difficult to build and how ConstantContact very gradually achieved escape velocity while on the titular long slow SaaS ramp of death and eventually got to the fabled hockeystick growth land.

Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped [Software] Business (Jason Cohen): https://vimeo.com/74338272 Jason presents a framework for how to find a product which will get you to $10k in monthly recurring revenue.

(If you liked these two talks and just want More Like That Please go to the Microconf video page and queue up every talk by Rob Walling, preferably in order.)

And, on an entirely different subject, Developers, Entrepreneurs, and Depression (Greg Baugues): http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/11/developers-entrepreneu...