Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?
Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk</a><p>On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8</a><p>Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI</a><p>At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo</a><p>This one ("moving away from defensive programming") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj3lzsr0_I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj3lzsr0_I</a><p>Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsD-3jtXz0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsD-3jtXz0</a><p>Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ</a><p>Everybody should understand procedural generation: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU</a><p>Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=narjui3em1k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=narjui3em1k</a><p>More hypertext history: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8</a><p>Even more hypertext / UX stuff: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs</a><p>A great explanation of Fourier transforms: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY</a><p>Allison Parrish does mindblowing things with corpus statistics by treating term vector spaces as generalizations of 2d image formats: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc</a><p>Finally, these aren't tech talks but instead UI demo reels. If you have any interest in UI or UX, you should watch them. They are wonderfully cheesy, mostly doable, and despite being more than 20 years old, nobody has bothered actually implementing the useful features shown: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M</a>