conference talk

Captain Disillusion's comedic talk at the 2018 Blender Conference recounts how he uses Blender as a production tool for his VFX-debunking web series. It is part case study and part love letter to the Blender community.

A CBC satire sketch in which a self-proclaimed thought leader gives a talk full of empty gestures and nothing-saying inspiration. It parodies TED-style conference talks.

Ruby developer Avdi Grimm gives a seven-minute tour of Pharo Smalltalk's development environment, focusing on tools like search-by-example and the integrated, live coding experience.

An Onion Talks satire in which a young media professional pitches compost-powered cars, offering the idea itself and leaving all implementation to others.

Aditya Siram argues that functional programming has much to learn from Smalltalk's interactivity, using Pharo and Squeak to show live, visual, explorable programming environments.

Noel Rappin's MountainWest RubyConf talk introduces Smalltalk to Ruby programmers. He compares the two languages' object models, blocks, 1-based arrays, simple syntax and live programming environment, and walks through sample code.

A Harvard Business Review video with tactics for getting better at small talk and enjoying it, such as setting goals, allowing pauses, and starting and ending conversations.

A PyCon 2013 block of Friday evening lightning talks. It includes the debut of Hy, a Lisp dialect that compiles to Python AST, and Solomon Hykes's first public talk on Docker.

A Computer History Museum demonstration with Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk-76 running on a Xerox Alto, recorded in 2017. He shows the live environment and discusses the system.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

An Onion Talks satire in which a faux animal behaviorist gives a pompous TED-style talk about ducks quacking and chickens clucking. It parodies the vacuous style of TED talks.

Will Stephen's humorous six-minute TEDx talk shows presentation techniques that make you sound brilliant while saying essentially nothing.

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

Stephen Kell's Strange Loop talk argues that C and Unix already contain Smalltalk-like dynamism and introspection that can be exposed. He presents his liballocs research on bridging dynamic and compiled languages.

Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter visit Google's Mountain View headquarters in 2010 for a comedic Q&A. Conan jokes with the interviewer and the Google audience.

Neal Stephenson visits Google in 2008 to discuss his novel Anathem as part of the Authors@Google series. He talks about the book's world and takes audience questions.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 that university-style software engineering does not work, and asks what real software engineering would look like. He revisits the waterfall model and what engineering means in other fields.

A roughly two-hour demonstration by Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk running on the Computer History Museum's restored Xerox Alto. It shows the integrated environment and language designed at Xerox PARC as personal dynamic media.

A five-minute lightning talk from React.js Conf 2016 by Elie Rotenberg on protecting the DOM from tampering. It shows how React tree obfuscation (react-armor) can shuffle class names, tags and tree structure to defeat CSS-selector-based ad blocking.

A collection of lightning talks from the Surge 2015 conference on scalable systems, hosted by Geir Magnusson. HN mostly points to one segment, a Bryan Cantrill talk touching on madvise semantics.

Frank Abagnale, the real subject of Catch Me If You Can, speaks at Google about his life as a con man turned FBI fraud and cybersecurity expert, including advice on fraud, breaches and credit cards.

A short BBC HARDtalk clip from 2014 in which Senator John McCain says Putin aims to rebuild the Russian empire, starting with eastern Ukraine and then Moldova and the Baltics. He also criticizes Obama for not arming Ukraine.

Noam Chomsky gives a Talks at Google lecture covering his work on politics and language. It touches on his linguistic theory, including universal grammar, alongside his political criticism.

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, gives an Authors@Google talk in 2007 about the webcomic and his background, followed by audience Q&A. Donald Knuth and Guido van Rossum ask questions during the session.

Noam Chomsky speaks at Google Cambridge in 2017 about his political development and the control of information and media. It is a wide-ranging talk with audience discussion.

A four-minute Onion Talks parody in which a social media consultant pitches never putting any effort into social marketing. It lampoons TED-style talks and marketing consultants.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Conservancy speaks at the 2009 Law of the Commons Conference about free and open software as a model for a new intellectual commons. The talk covers the legal and social case for sharing knowledge.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks at Google about his book Antifragile, on systems that gain from disorder and volatility. It draws on themes from his earlier books.

Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, presents his innovation agenda at Google and takes questions from Eric Schmidt and employees in November 2007.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

A short clip of Steve Jobs at the 2010 D8 conference, interviewed by Walt Mossberg, defining privacy as people knowing what they are signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly. The discussion centered on location data.

Tracy Young, a former construction engineer and cofounder of PlanGrid, speaks at the 2015 Y Combinator Female Founders Conference. She talks about building software for construction superintendents and about customer success.

Press conference footage in which the suspects in the 2007 Boston Mooninite bomb scare answer questions about 1960s and 1970s hairstyles.

The full 2010 D8 conference interview of Steve Jobs by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. He discusses Flash, privacy, multitouch, payments and what motivates him.

The 2007 D5 conference joint interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, discussing the history of Apple and Microsoft, partnership, competition and computing's future.

Lawrence Lessig's Talks at Google presentation based on his book Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics corrupts Congress and eroded public trust, and outlining what could be done about it. It supports the argument with data on political donations.

John Ousterhout, Stanford professor and creator of Tcl, presents the ideas of his book A Philosophy of Software Design in a Talks at Google session. He covers managing complexity, deep modules and interfaces, and what he teaches in his Stanford software design course.

David Graeber's Talks at Google presentation on his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, covering the history of debt, the myth of barter and the Jubilee tradition.

A Google Tech Talk by Steve Weis that introduces modern cryptography and its use in practice and at Google. It covers proofs of security and security definitions and a special topic. HN commenters treat it as a talk on verifiable electronic voting.