Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?

Never went to it as a student (it was only 3 hours away, how did I miss this?) but lots of my friends did, one even ran the thing for a year I think.

BTW, does somebody know of (or have) a better quality version of this talk? The one on YouTube has some annoying audio cuts. There used to be a copy on Google Video[1], which i don't remember having the same issues.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359174

Bryan Cantrill's 2011(?) Lightning talk on ta(1). It's fascinating, but it also shows you just long-lived software can be.

Randall Munroe's Talk on the JoCo cruise. Because it's effing hilarious, and teaches everybody the important art of building a ball pit inside your house.

Finally, an honorable mention to three papers that don't qualify, but which I think you should read anyway.

Reflections on Trusting Trust: This is required reading for... Everybody. It describes a particularly insidious hack, and discusses its ramifications for security.

In the Beginning Was The Command Line: If you want get into interface design, programming, or ever work with computers, this is required. It's a snapshot of the 90's, a discussion of operating systems, corporations, and society as we know it. But more importantly, it's a crash course in abstractions. Before you can contribute to the infinite stack of turtles we programmers work with, you should probably understand why it's there, and what it is.

Finally, The Lambda Papers. If you've ever wondered how abstractions work, and how they're modeled... This won't really tell you, not totally, but they'll give you something cool to think about, and give you the start of an answer.

If we're going for papers, then I'm guessing books are allowed too. If so, for anyone interested in giving themselves a grounding in the fundamentals, it's worth checking out Code by Charles Petzold. I've been going through it, it's excellently written, and has helped me fill in gaps in my understanding of how computers work.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Sof...

Really set me on a path of re-examining older ideas (and research papers), for applications that are much more contemporary. Absolute stunner of a talk (and the whole 70's gag was really great).

"What would be really sad is if in 40 years we were still writing code in procedures in text files" :(

I like how this talk cuts through a lot of the BS in security. One of his points is that the US and other rich Western countries have a lot more to lose from a possible "cyber war" than our potential adversaries do.

Another key point is that we'll never make much progress unless we can somehow start building better systems in the first place, with fewer vulnerabilities for an adversary to exploit.

I think the second point has become a lot more widely accepted in recent years since McGraw started giving this talk. Unfortunately it sounds like a lot of government folks still haven't got the memo on point #1.

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

I love everything about this talk. It walks you through building a lexer from scratch in a simple and elegant way, through a very interesting use of coroutines. I appreciate the bits of humor in the talk as well.

> Visualizing Algorithms – A look at the use of visualization and animation to understand, explain and debug algorithms.

This was the first time I watched pg give a talk. It was the talk that brought about the biggest change in the way I think about the world, my ambitions. The talk was the beginning, reading more about pg, I came across his essays and then HN.

The title says it all. It's really a summary of several software systems with good ideas abound. I believe all the software is 80s or prior.

Edit: I also forgot to mention some psychology and math.

Watching that talk brought me over to the "a picture or a few words per slide" style of presentation, rather than the "wall of bullet points" style. It also helped me move from "stop talking, change slides, start talking again", to smooth transitions while talking.

With a book, it's easy to speed up and slow down as needs be.

I'm reminded of Crockford's "Good Parts" of Javascript, I believe where he introduced me to the "Mother of all Demos."

InfoSec talk. Best lines from talk..

"Basic lessons are not learned such as know thy network"

"You have to learn your network, you have to have skin in the game"

"Defense is hard, breaking stuff is easy"

"If you serve the God's of compliance you will fail"

"Compliance is not security"

"Perfect solution fallacy"

"People are falling over themselves not to change, shooting great ideas down."

"Perfect attacker fallacy, they don't exist, they are a myth!"

"Attackers are not that good because they don't need to be that good."

Speaker is Eric Conrad

Aside from the comedic aspect (which makes the talk incredible), Mickens is a genuinely brilliant thinker and has a marvelous way with words.

"The Science of Insecurity" by Meredith L. Patterson and Sergey Gordeychik (2011)

https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en-the_science_of_insecurit...

Warning: speaker likes to use profanity (which I enjoy :) but possibly NSFW if you're not on headphones

that'd be "Simple Made Easy"