87 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] thread
The Soul of Erlang and Elixir, by Sasa Juric

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

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20942767

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization, by Jonathan Blow

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452

+1 for both talks

Saša Jurić is fantastic at condensing lots of information in a 1 hour talk without losing the audience, he gave another great talk this year called Parsing from first principles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzoerDljjo).

Jonathan Blow's talk was the first one I thought of.
Shit talk. I find it's funny to look at dude that say 1 hour 1 sentence but can't say clear about alternative / solving this.
Professor Mark Blythe: Gobal Trumpism and the Future of the Global Economy

https://youtu.be/KGuaoARJYU0

I love anything by Professor Blythe. If you enjoy his lectures you should check out Adam Tooze
>check out Adam Tooze

I purchased his book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World without really knowing much about it (or him) and found it to be a great, semi-technical story about the financial crisis (and its politics) from the global perspective.

(comment deleted)
<fangirl>

I don't know if Bryan Cantrill has done any speeches this year, whenever i see some speech featuring him on youtube I watch it regardless of the year.

That man is a gold mine. And I always learn something interesting.

</fangirl>

you might enjoy their new podcast https://oxide.computer/blog/categories/on-the-metal/

new startup with Brian, jess frazzle and Steve tuck.

I'm pretty excited about that company. I'd like apply for a gig there myself.
yup, that's already in my feedreader.

I've already heard some fantastic stories from their guests, particularly the guy who used to work at intel.

Not a talk from 2019, but discovered it this year: "1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD)" https://youtu.be/bRcu-ysocX4

Excellent informative and hilarious talk about his (at-the-time) new scientific hypothesis to explain the end of the Bronze Age ca. 1200 BC.

Multiple civilizations collapsed within a few decades of each other with the ability to read, write and make high buildings being lost all across the Eastern Mediterranean simultaneously. The Bronze Age is magical and interesting of itself, the talk gives a great introduction as to why we know much more about it than we think.. definitely recommended.

Duration ~1 hour (feels like 20 minutes)

I thought this was a pretty good one

https://youtu.be/jyNqHsN3pEc

Composing music functionally, aka functional composition :)

Same here. I started watching because I misinterpreted the title and stayed for the wow effect :)

Also, after seeing what kind of magic he can do with the right representation, I wondered how many "business domain" models I know could be expressed with models that "click" in the same way (i.e. are expressed by simple concepts and compose as well).

I feel as if many of us often give up way too early in the search for good models for our data. Myself included, of course.

Rich Harris - Rethinking Reactivity

Talk about Svelte v3 and the (possible) future of frontend frameworks

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao

HN discussion regarding Svelte 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719118

I quite enjoyed this talk. I’ve seen Svelte with an eye of skepticism but this helped me understand some bits better. That hairstyle tho!
Rethinking Reactivity is a must-watch for anyone interested in Svelte v3 (and what Harris regards as the limitations of React).
Most people in this thread are posting a link and a title of the talk. I think it would be useful to hear why you thought the talk was the best.
“Why isn’t functional programming the norm?” by Richard Feldman. Spoiler: not on the basis of merits. https://youtu.be/QyJZzq0v7Z4

“React to the future” by Jordan Walke. Why ReasonML is a logical extension of ReactJS’ programming paradigm. https://youtu.be/5fG_lyNuEAw

“Typing the untyped: soundness in gradual type systems” by Ben Weissmann. The trade offs that various gradual type systems make based on their language constraints. https://youtu.be/uJHD2xyv7xo

“Let’s program like it’s 1999” by Lee Byron. How the mutual feedback loop of abstraction, syntax and mental model drives the evolution of web technologies. https://youtu.be/vG8WpLr6y_U

> Why isn’t functional programming the norm?

This talk is very good. It's one of the few talks that I've overheard classmates talk about. It not only asks a question a lot of people exposed to functional programming at university asks, but also answers it in a way where you learn more about the world of programming and programming languages than you expected.

Maybe I'm missing something but I'm more than halfway through the "Why isn't functional programming the norm?" and it just seems to be a kind of haphazard recollection of programming language history. A lot of which isn't what I'd call entirely correct. Python's killer app was arguably first CGI scripts then data science. Java succeeded due to offering GC in a non scripting language, the JVM and possibly lots of marketing. PHP is having a mild renaissance with Laravel (not that I'd advocate for PHP, but people do seem to love Laravel).

There was quite a bit of time in between the invention of implementation inheritance and the whole "prefer composition to inheritance". It's quite possible OOP became popular due to implementation inheritance then realized it was dumb.

This info is still useful, but what I'd really love from a talk with that title is an analysis of functional programming languages and how they each missed the boat through either syntax, lack of tooling, or purity. And compare it to functional-ish languages like Rust, JavaScript, Swift and Kotlin. Then chart a way forward for function programming language adoption. Maybe that happens at the end of the talk.

A complete digress, but OOPS still shines in the domain of GUI widgets programming where there are a limited number of interfaces and a huge number of widgets (implementations) working with that interface. FP works conversely, on a limited data and a huge set of functions. Maybe in the context of now with limited gui programming, FL is more suitable?
Functional ui is arguably saner, as react is slowly proving to junior programmers worldwide.
> seems to be a kind of haphazard recollection of programming language history

Agree. The talk is very thin on the real differences between OOP and functional languages.

This old comment [0] points out that functional languages tend to make it far harder to reason about low-level details, for instance.

Personally I think it's more fundamental, and isn't about any such technical limitations. People have a strong intuition for time, which is emphasised in imperative languages (including OOP), which have the semicolon operator or an implicit equivalent. The concepts at play in the fundamentals of Haskell are simply harder, and 'more mathematical', than the sequenced mutation-based statements of imperative/OOP languages.

To put that more provocatively: does anyone doubt that the average Haskell programmer is smarter than the average JavaScript programmer? I'm not convinced this is just because only the curious bother to learn Haskell.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281004

David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit - YC Startup School

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LNQxT9LvM0

I learned so much for this talk. I had a much different idea of the point of iterating rapidly and what product-market fit meant before this video.

Yes, this talk is very good.
Append only development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXuvCMG21Ss

Shameless plug since I'm the speaker. The reason I'm posting this in "best talks of 2019" is not because I think it was a good talk (my ego isn't that big yet) but because I think very few talks exist on the subject of Behavioral Programming, and it's a subject I'm hoping can get more attention.

I thought this talk about Async in Rust was pretty cool (RustLatam 2019 - Without Boats: Zero-Cost Async IO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skos4B5x7qE
Why I thought it was cool: Gives a good overview of Async implementations without getting too deep in the weeds. Talks about "greenthreads" in other languages vs a zero-cost abstraction in Rust.
Paul Stamets 2019:

not, the survival of the fittest. it is:

the extension of generosity of surplus

to other members in the ecological community

to build biodiversity

not the individual that survives but the community that survives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBkg70fhV2A

A bunch of the best talks of the year may still be to come when 36C3 takes place from the 27th to 30th. The schedule is already up [1]. Speakers include David Graeber, Edward Snowden, Daniel J. Bernstein, Moxie Marlinspike, and over a hundred others.

All talks will be livestreamed (and usually become available for download one day later) at [2].

[1] https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2019/Fahrplan/

[2] https://media.ccc.de/

They’ll also be live-translated from German to English (and vice versa) by volunteers – and often into a third language too!
A [1] video essay about modern art by Jacob Geller. For me, it completely reversed my opinion on modern art and it's worth.

This [2] talk about building worlds in Blender by Ian Hubert.

[1] https://youtu.be/v5DqmTtCPiQ

[2] https://youtu.be/whPWKecazgM

I just watched [2]. Can thoroughly recommend, very watchable presenter & I feel like although I had no idea what he was doing half the time it was very cool. Technological Magic!