Ask HN: What talks do you consider real gems? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What talks do you consider real gems?

27 pointsdivan11 comments

What are the talks that you consider real gems? The kind that sticks with you for a long time either due to the exceptional content or delivery. Some insightful and impactful talks that have influenced your thinking or work.

These could be from YouTube, tech conferences, or any other source — preference for the fresh stuff from 2023, but not necessarily.

Please share your top picks and couple of words of why they stood out to you. Thanks!

View on HN

I know you said you have a preference for fresh stuff but I just have to post my all-time faves:

- Pushing Through Friction by Dan Na: https://youtu.be/8bxZuzDKoI0?si=FRVYc-XAK_HuRNs3. Great talk about how ideas get stalled in the big organisational machine, and what you can do about it.

- You Deserve Nice Things by Soroush Khanlou: https://youtu.be/CTZOjl6_NuY?si=a1pmGILQzGR9T4Wv. Eye opener about making nice-to-use data structures / APIs.

- The Most Important Design Guideline by Scott Meyers: https://youtu.be/sfLZ7v9gEnc?si=QFNdmcguaOHbmFfX. A fun exploration of badly designed software.

11 years old, a classic. "Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U Target audience is freelance designers.

Just rewatched this last month. valuable and entertaining at the same time. Monteiro is a king of drama-infused memorable communication and having his lawyer in the room was incredible.

Kevlin Henney - Refactoring to Immutability[1] from 2018, but addresses the key fact that when you add threading or cores, you change the laws of physics for your software. It was this talk that explained to me why the Rust people do the strange things they do with borrow checkers, etc.

Plain Text • Dylan Beattie • GOTO 2023[2] - Dylan explains in detail and with humor, that there really is no such thing as plain text. Well worth it. I watched an older version of the same talk, that finally convinced me why people care so much about Unicode.

Joe Rogan Experience - #2076 - Aza Raskin & Tristan Harris[3] - You really have no idea what LLMs are capable of until you hear them talk about it. No BS, no wild claims, just stuff that you likely haven't heard elsewhere.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APUCMSPiNh4

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mRxIgu9R70

[3] https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ZcBHvjhGMTTdGF3fIdvg9

MIT lecture by Patric Winston: How to speak is the lecture you need to watch about public speaking and presentation. The most awesome thing about the lecture that it is self describing it's tools and framework in an awesome way and built up exactly as it's content describe is should. It's on youtube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

Nearly all talks by James Mickens are a laugh a minute. The guy is the only computer science standup comedian I have ever encountered. He is also technically excellent.

This one is a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

The entire playlist of Learning to Learn by Richard Hamming is absolutely worth it [0], especially the introduction talk and "You and Your Research". They make you think hard about the effective ways to learn and ask important and pertinent questions.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

Pretty much all talks by Rich Hickey, Sandy Metz, Russ Olsen.

All these have the trifecta of important subject + essential concepts + brilliant teacher.

Russ Olsen’s talk about the U.S. moon landing program is one of my favorites. His childlike excitement and amazing storytelling get me every time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l3XwpSKqNZw

Any talk by Bryan Cantrill is worth your time.

A classic but Growing a Language by Guy Steel is extremely original https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

Jonathan Blow - Preventing The Collapse Of Civilization

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

Highly relevant to software development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com