Ask HN: What tech talk does everyone need to see?
Any lecture, TED talk or anything that one's talk that changed the way you think and you feel everyone needs to see?
1. The first journey starts with an ancient Egyptian multiplication algorithm. When we think about what is required for it to work, we are immediately lead to the axioms of a semi-group, and various examples are considered.
2. The second journey starts with division, and then Euclid GCD algorithm. We extend it to polynomials and beyond, and are led to the definition of a ring & euclidean domain. A surprising application to permutation algorithms is given as well!
3. The third journey is about the peano axioms and has a bit of logic and compatibility theory, then the peano axioms are weakened a bit to produce the notion of an iterator from programming.
Abstract algebra really seems like a much more relevant 'mathematics of everyday programming' than the usual subject CS students take, which seem to appear in domain specific technical work. By contrast, abstract algebra is to some extent elementary arithmetic and algebra, but extended to non-numerical data, of the kind that appears all time in general-purpose computing.
I'm tired of talks. I would much rather most hackers organize their thoughts and set them down for posterity in the form of essays, white papers, and the like, rather than succumb to the temptation of listening to oneself speak. If one must present, either set it down in written form also (slides don't count), or have something so mindblowing to present that no writing can do it justice (as Engelbart did). Otherwise, making me sit through a video instead of reading what you're trying to say is simply wasting my time.
The curse of "documentation by talk" -- which I hope more Hackernews will join me in excoriating -- has become particularly pernicious, especially among millennial and younger programmers.
Sometimes I like to listen to a talk when I'm doing something else. Busy coding, listening to someone chatting on a topic, and when something really piques my interest I can temporarily put aside what I'm doing.
Apart from that, there's clearly an audience for these talks. Oftentimes they take pages and pages of undecipherable technical documentation and put it into an easy-to-swallow form such that people can twig about things that they didn't know interested them.
Excoriation, that's a bit far and, if I might say, a little elitist. There's place for long-form written content and there's place for presentations.
It's on picking the right problems. When I heard him give it I was shocked that he criticized Einstein for working on a unified field theory (of course unlike me, he was actually qualified to offer such criticism). His point for that example was that the necessary tools to attack the problem hadn't yet been developed so it was a fruitless endeavor. While many very important problems are tractable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
He gave this talk several times (I heard it at NASA in 84). Here's a good transcript: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
My favorite is https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...
Media for Thinking the Unthinkable: http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/
The Future of Programming: http://worrydream.com/dbx/
A powerful idea about ideas https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_kay_shares_a_powerful_idea_ab...