This reminds me of a comment on a book titled ‘Discrete mathematics and its application’ by Kenneth Rosen which was along the lines of how smart the author was at the same time not being able to explain the concepts to someone else in an easy manner and to be honest I had the same feeling. I understood those concepts from other texts which definitely means that it isn’t me who was was inadequate or not upto the task. I was willing to learn but the smartest of the texts in the field left me feeling stupid. Can somebody else chip in on this argument?
I TA'd a fist year University course using, I believe, that textbook during my final two years of undergrad.
The material itself is difficult to learn and harder to teach well. At my University, it seemed that the Prof had to teach the subject for 3 or 4 years before they could reasonably get half the class to pass the final exam.
At the same time, I've often felt like I would have no harder of a time teaching the subject to 11 year olds. It's just a weird topic.
Yeah, there's unity to it and no system other than "break the problem apart, look for these properties, think hard, and match them to the identity that also has these properties".
A lot of interpretation and intellectual confidence involved, difficult things to communicate.
Most of science is bridging gaps. Between a person ans a phenomonon, then between others persons.
It should be told every semester or so that if you wish to understand something, don't stop until you found something that match your own idiosyncrasies.
Define "technical". But when it comes to programming I always enjoy Sandi Metz's talks. I can highly recomend this talk she made at the RailsConf in 2014, about taking an ugly beast of code and turning it to something more digestable and beautiful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
Totally agree, Sandi is awesome, all of her talks are worth watching. I quite like the the one where she tells the future https://youtu.be/JOM5_V5jLAs . I feel that kind of step change will shortly be with us (if we're not already in the middle of it)
Yep, I thought Inventing on Principle was the best computer-related talk I've ever watched. Not easy to describe what it's about! Design, tools, art, UI, visualization, invention, life.
It's like he has caught on to a kind of a zen thing. It is almost as if he isn't even there, while presenting about a technological topic at all. That is just the media for him to get an expanded wisdom across. What that message is is hard to identify. But there is a glance of it at the end of inventing on principle. It's a lot more profound than what the talk seems to be at the surface.
I really wish he would publish more frequently
He has inspired me greatly.
Yeah, I was marvelling half the time at the wisdom, it makes other speakers seem merely knowedgeable, clever, brilliant etc. I missed most of it in my summary before. I love the
this is a cool way to live your life, according to some principle - this is mine; these are some other amazing people who had their own
aspect of it. His creators should be able to see and control what they're doing as they do it principle is awesome, and he's maybe uniquely well-equipped to do something about that. I wanna get the synth he designed!
what is curious to me is that that synth is famous for being extremely unfriendly to program. its usability is pretty bad and goes against many of his principles. i love bret victor's thinking and work since he became independent though.
The Mike Acton talk is really valuable to anyone interested in efficient software, and doesn't have so much C++ as to be a barrier: I found out about it from a Go developer.
Yes, I agree. It is more about a mindset rather than C++ specifically. I watch again now and then just to remind myself of the lessons that can be learned from it.
Probably one of the best introduction/starter to network programming with Golang. I love this talk. The speaker doesn't just throw a bunch of terms and theory at you, or slides, he just gets into the code and solves the problems as they arise. Pretty good talk even if you are not interested in the network programming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afSiVelXDTQ&t=1208s
It's funny that you do go to the trouble of commenting this, which probably takes longer and more effort than clicking the link. I do get your point though.
I love this video and have watched it multiple times to refresh my sheer awe at how insecure the world is when you dig even slightly under the surface.
Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site by John Adams (then from Twitter)at Velocity 2009 (Velocity 2009 was really an incredibly pivotal and influential conference in the DevOps movement).
Bootstrapping an Infrastructure by Steve Traugott at Lisa 1998. I don't know of any videos of the talk, but the related paper eventually lead to Puppet and the beginning of the modern configuration management software
"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
How did I know that I'd find this talk at the top when I poked my head in here :). I must rewatch that segment at least once every 6 months even when not prompted by people linking to Brian's other, often more technically rewarding talks.
If that's the best technical talk you've ever seen, I have to feel sorry for you. Cantrill may rant all he wants about Oracle but he's not exactly doing better, with all the peddling of node.js to the masses. It is rare for me to see someone come up with so much bullshit in one talk:
https://vimeo.com/230142234
Since I don't want to end with a negative note, here is a personal favorite as far as best technical talks go:
Here is the expanded URL of the tinyurl link to halve the changes of getting a 404 or similar in the far future, and maybe allow finding the content via the Wayback Machine in case infoq also disappears.
Would you mind be slightly more specific about the "bullshit" in the talk you linked to? In particular, that talk is emphatically not "peddling node.js to the masses", but rather explaining why we are moving away from node.js (and attempting to do so in a way that is thoughtful and reflective rather than reactionary and dismissive).
Although not strictly technical, this is a great talk. Bryan effectively communicates both the history and the mindset of Sun Microsystems and its open-source software heroes, and the bitter disappointment of being taken over by Oracle.
I love this quote (about 33:15) summarizing Sun Microsystems:
"It makes me very proud to have worked for a company for whom that is completely accurate. We should all be so lucky as to have that be our epitaph. That is all I want out of my life. That and my family. [...] That is Sun. But that's not Oracle." --Bryan Cantrill. (A very excellent Oracle rant follows immediately after.)
Oh Bryan Cantrill... (don't worry, not criticizing him below)
This is someone whose mind seems to be going at 500mph all the time. I used to love his (and counterparts') early talks on ZFS, but yeah, I've found that pretty much any talk by him is packed with interesting info, but you may have to watch it at .5x speed (even if you're a native english speaker).
His talks on dtrace, ZFS, containers, are all very interesting (most on YouTube).
Java Puzzlers by Joshua Bloch and Jeremy Manson are pretty entertaining. For a pretty bog standard language, Java has some more exotic corners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbp-3BJWsU8
Not the best I've seen but definitively one I would like to recover the link to : a Googler presentation where she explain how they took about 2 years developing a memory optimisation (circa 2007~2009 IIRC) and manage to finish a few months before it became indispensable because they were about to have an hardware shortage. They were consuming hardware faster than the industry could produce. I just can't remember who she was nor the link. Does it rings a bell to anyone ?
Many years ago, I had the privilege of having Prof Peter Saunders as my MSc adviser while at King's College London. Peter Saunders was (apart from being a great educationalist), the person who did the maths behind James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. He was far and away the best maths teacher I ever had.
Anyway, he also taught a dynamical systems (chaos theory) class to a mixture of MSc students and final year undergrads. On this occasion, he was explaining some principle, and was busy talking while writing on the board.
He turns round, and there is a sea of blank looking faces in front of him. No one has understood.
"Well it's obvious" he says, and turns back to the board.
2 minutes later, he turns back. Now there is a sea of bored looking faces in front of him. Why?
John Carmack's talks, especially the ones from his id days at QuakeCon.
Watching somebody get on stage and just talk for hours in detail without notes about a whole range of technical topics that they mastered and enjoy is pretty inspiring.
I’m by no means a gamer but have always admired Carmack for his sheer brilliance. I stumbled over one of his talks while doing something else and jumped to various points in the talk. _Every. Single. Time._ he was talking about something profound and the talk is friggin several hours long.
To make him more impressive, he had a pretty significant speech impediment when he was younger. So he was never some natural orator, he had to work extremely hard to sound like one.
I feel it was a huge loss that he no longer holds talks in any capacity. We get a detailed and incredibly interesting blog post from him like every 12 months, but otherwise, nothin'.
Nearly all of Rich Hickey's talks are worth giving a watch. He's an incredibly gifted speaker. The Value of Values and The Language of the System are also among his best.
"Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" by Karsten Nohl and Nemanja Nikodijevic from CCC 2016. It exposes how insanely ancient and insecure the global flight booking system is, allowing for stealing of personal information and even other people's flight tickets.
175 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadThe material itself is difficult to learn and harder to teach well. At my University, it seemed that the Prof had to teach the subject for 3 or 4 years before they could reasonably get half the class to pass the final exam.
At the same time, I've often felt like I would have no harder of a time teaching the subject to 11 year olds. It's just a weird topic.
A lot of interpretation and intellectual confidence involved, difficult things to communicate.
It should be told every semester or so that if you wish to understand something, don't stop until you found something that match your own idiosyncrasies.
- Inventing on Principal https://vimeo.com/36579366
- Stop Drawing Dead Fish https://vimeo.com/64895205
I really wish he would publish more frequently He has inspired me greatly.
this is a cool way to live your life, according to some principle - this is mine; these are some other amazing people who had their own
aspect of it. His creators should be able to see and control what they're doing as they do it principle is awesome, and he's maybe uniquely well-equipped to do something about that. I wanna get the synth he designed!
http://worrydream.com/Home2007/electronics.html
Brev Victor - The Future Of Programming https://vimeo.com/71278954
on another, they're down right scary and overwhelming, or at least dumbfounding and perplexing
..thinking specifically about The Humane Representation of Thought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg I had to stop it half way through.. :-/
see also Seeing Spaces https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klTjiXjqHrQ and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUaOucZRlmE
code::dive conference 2014 - Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDIkqP4JbkE
CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
They're mostly about C++ and cache aware/data oriented programming.
https://youtu.be/4YYvBLAF4T8
About physical security.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4
Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site by John Adams (then from Twitter)at Velocity 2009 (Velocity 2009 was really an incredibly pivotal and influential conference in the DevOps movement).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X_ed6GPofQ&t=26s
Bootstrapping an Infrastructure by Steve Traugott at Lisa 1998. I don't know of any videos of the talk, but the related paper eventually lead to Puppet and the beginning of the modern configuration management software
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Bootstrapping-an-Infra...
There is no talent shortage by Andrew Schaefer, co-founder of Puppet from Velocity NYC 2013.
https://vimeo.com/75670082
(edited for consistant formatting)
e.g. What we actually know about Software Development and why we know it's true.
https://vimeo.com/9270320
Seriously, what was the point of your comment?
Covers many things but I specifically got to understand how they use Redis to manage stuff like photo updates to follower / following lists.
Quote copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
Since I don't want to end with a negative note, here is a personal favorite as far as best technical talks go:
https://tinyurl.com/hzpccxj
Direct download link for slides: https://github.com/strangeloop/2011-slides/raw/master/Sussma...
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill
I love this quote (about 33:15) summarizing Sun Microsystems:
Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computing forever.
"It makes me very proud to have worked for a company for whom that is completely accurate. We should all be so lucky as to have that be our epitaph. That is all I want out of my life. That and my family. [...] That is Sun. But that's not Oracle." --Bryan Cantrill. (A very excellent Oracle rant follows immediately after.)
This is someone whose mind seems to be going at 500mph all the time. I used to love his (and counterparts') early talks on ZFS, but yeah, I've found that pretty much any talk by him is packed with interesting info, but you may have to watch it at .5x speed (even if you're a native english speaker).
His talks on dtrace, ZFS, containers, are all very interesting (most on YouTube).
I can’t even say how many times I recommended someone to watch it - even today, 5 years after.
From a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17988464
A lot of talks here do show up in the feed.
Anyway, he also taught a dynamical systems (chaos theory) class to a mixture of MSc students and final year undergrads. On this occasion, he was explaining some principle, and was busy talking while writing on the board.
He turns round, and there is a sea of blank looking faces in front of him. No one has understood.
"Well it's obvious" he says, and turns back to the board.
2 minutes later, he turns back. Now there is a sea of bored looking faces in front of him. Why?
Well it's obvious...
Everyone understood completely. Genius at work
Watching somebody get on stage and just talk for hours in detail without notes about a whole range of technical topics that they mastered and enjoy is pretty inspiring.
How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
Agile Methods The Good, the Hype and the Ugly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffkIQrq-m34&t=420s
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8WVo-YLyAg