I really wish there existed a central platform that tracks/links to all tech conference videos from past to present because YouTube just plain sucks for this and in general, to focus. They've had DECADES to polish this experience (in general for any educational content), at least under the premium tier and I've given up all hopes of them ever getting this right.
Off the top of my head, such a platform could:
1. Encourage and foster great discussions (and support markdown!)
2. Have a "community notes" kind of feature to highlight outdated info, errata, related talks etc.
3. Expose brand new conferences and lesser known ones
4. Allow people to share curated lists
5. Likes/dislikes restored
6. View count tracking from across multiple sources (some confs host on their site before YouTube upload)
7. Support for interactive viewing of decks, source code etc.
8. Speaker profiles (w/ verification)
9. Automation to help conferences/speakers/etc. to submit/update content they own/keep things in sync
etc.
I don't think such a platform exists today but would love to be wrong.
As a scientist, I would definitely be a paying customer, and on top I could deduct that membership from my taxes or have my lab pay for it like we (like many others) are paying Overleaf just under $1000 a year only to have LaTeX run in a Web browser to collaborate on papers (now my most important online service/app).
We usually know where to find the talks and recordings for the conference venues of our own specialist areas, but if there was a general "ScienceTube"-type Web site, you could also check out talks from neighboring disciplines. God knows, this might be as useful/addictive as HN.
Should you want to launch this & need someone for the scientific advisory board, please get in touch.
Ideally, this runs like wikipedia or Lichess, if I'm being honest. I don't think its a great business model for a VC backed startup[0]. Perhaps a more traditional business inception might work, if you are selling it to the big conference organizations / hosts and make it attractive enough for it to be their go to for posting videos and such.
I think it ends up imploding against the pressures that come with it with being a VC startup though.
[0]: I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for venture backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other places.
The hard part with going completely free is building enough of a community of strong contributors that they are able to effectively curate the contents for quality's sake, rather than the obvious commercial and career incentives to advertise their own work (or sneak in less educational content). That could be very hard to bootstrap without doing a ton of the curation yourself initially, and it requires an ongoing commitment to manage the community once it is established, which is also time consuming.
> I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for venture backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other places.
I don't agree with that characterization because there are plenty of viable and useful "start up" opportunities that require zero outside funding, or only enough to get started. Also, VC funding is literally just debt that can convert to equity (it's a loan that can have an extremely high effective interest rate if you're successful), so you actually want to avoid it as much as possible if you think you have a good shot at accomplishing your goals without it. I think a surprisingly large number of founders and people working in SV/startups don't fully understand that.
What you see as abuse some would see as user agency. User agency is a very powerful thing, and it's shortsighted to squash it just because your users aren't using it strictly to enhance your content in the way you want.
It's especially shortsighted to squash it just because they used it on some of your advertisers' content and your advertisers yelled at you about it.
I don't think this is about a niche but rather a broader need for lists, more specifically, integrated lists from users. Pinterest, for example, is built around lists, Amazon has wishlists, IMDb[1] provides movie rankings, etc.
From a data portability perspective, the real challenge is getting users to connect all these platforms to a kind of unified list, making it accessible for queries, machine learning, or other applications. This, in my view, is a traction problem rather than a technical one, independent of whether it justifies a business. FriendFeed[2] was a very interesting project where users could connect their profiles with many services and their followers saw their updates. It seems their Tornado web server keeps getting updated [3].
More than a decade ago, I explored some of these ideas [4][5], conceptualizing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) model where data operations could be performed at a global level, dynamically recalculating like a spreadsheet.
Going to more complex topics there are resources such as differential dataflows [6].
I know these are conferences that they track, but I happen to know the Scott's talk from FOSDEM titled "So You Think You Know Git?" is at 1.3m million views:
Really surprised at the lack of “big” names on the list. My gut reaction was “really, no PyCon?” But when I went to the PyCon channel, even the keynotes from last year barely cracked a thousand views.
Almost nobody cares about actually learning how to program anymore. These days, the majority of humans are solving for one question- "what do I need to say to someone for them to give me money?"
Depends on the language. Julia has a lot of cool stuff going on. And really small languages like Elm (when it was still being used) would probably involve a lot of discussion about programming language history and future considerations
I watched a little bit of the filesystems in rust talk and while it was a fairly straightforward talk, I was shocked at the q&a session. Emotionally hyperbolic ranting, jumping to conclusions, and wild accusations. I had no idea the linux community was so childish and reactionary towards rust.
What do you mean? That wasn't a Q&A session, they interrupted the speaker and ate all the time arguing. The speaker didn't get to finish his presentation.
This makes me think, whoever wrote these top 100 talks has either questionable tastes or just did a simple query and filter (SELECT * FROM youtube.video WHERE tag = tech SORT BY youtube.video.views LIMIT 100).
Wish Jon Blow would get back out there! He was asked on a recent stream and said he has turned down invites while trying to get Jai pushed out the door.
I do think that the `SOA` struct modifier keyword is maybe the most interesting thing out of Jai. Other languages would do well to think about adopting a mechanism to support something like it.
My understanding is that it's been moved to a convenience macro and is no longer a syntax-level thing. The original videos where Blow talked about SOA at the language level is very old now, and the language has gone through a lot of changes.
His methodology is to put his hands on the keyboard, write a function, a struct, make it compile, make it produce the correct output, make it faster, make it use less memory...
He’s stated that he doesn’t think open source helps produce high quality software and attracts a bunch of people that are less interested in building software and more interested in building policy.
However, he’s stated many times that he will release his language compiler and modules openly when they are ready and that he believes he’ll have to open-source it at some point if he wants broad adoption.
There are many rant videos available online - but in general the core of his software philosophy is based in minimal, clean, extremely optimized code. Open-source rarely results in any of those things. Jon is the last guy wandering in the desert, still devoted to concise code - I love him for it.
Having watched a lot of the goto talks, I'd say that they're like a good tech conference: ~5-10% of the talks could have a major impact on your work/career, 20-30% of the talks are interesting and slightly useful, and the remaining talks are basically product pitches / sponsor slots, which can be useful but are often biased.
As others have noted, there are some problems with the methodology of how this list has been created.
First, the list of "almost every" Software Engineering conference around the World[1] used, is just 72 items long. This feels light, and some conferences I would expect to see are missing: Brighton Ruby is very popular in the UK, but possibly a bit niche, so fine; but, FOSDEM however, seems more of a glaring oversight, perhaps explained by the fact that most of those talks are published not through a single channel.
The author has a mechanism to add confs to this. We could try and help them with that.
Then, the list seems to have ordered talks published by each conference's YouTube channel, by total views.
When one of those channels posts a talk twice (for example, the Linux Foundation's keynote of Linus talking to Dirk Hohndel), you end up with split user counts which means its lower down the list than you might expect.
I also think this means we're now measuring "most watched" in a slightly weird way: is this now just a reflection of marketing and subscriber reach? GOTO has 1.04M subscribers, ReactConf just 28.5K - is it any surprise that the list has more talks with more views from one of those over the other? Who is to say which conf had the better or more interesting talks?
Other engagement metrics (thumbs up, percentage of subs, number of comments, how many inbound links, and so on), might provide a better number to proxy for "quality" or "best" than just views, although the author isn't making a claim for quality, just views, so perhaps I'm asking for something beyond what is reasonable or what was promised.
This is a good start of an idea though, it wouldn't take much to make it better, so best of luck to the author or those who want to steal the idea: I'd love to see a better list in the future, and perhaps over a longer period of time than one year, too.
This sounds like survivor bias, fostered by all the "written in Rust" in project titles (HN is a major contributor!). C++ is very well alive, e.g. in graphics, game development, embedded systems, just to name a few. It's a nuanced language for sure, likely not the most user-friendly, but it's not going to die anytime soon.
I don’t like watching videos (or rather can’t watch at night, but can read). To date I haven’t found an AI that can produce a good article from a video. No, not just transcribe the video but actually produce a quality article with images and stuff from the video. Like a human who is instructed as “watch this video and produce a very high quality article that talks about the things talked about in the video”.
Has anyone has any luck with this?
It would be awesome if I can give this link to AI that will produce a PDF, each video being a chapter in the PDF.
> would be awesome if I can give this link to AI that will produce a PDF, each video being a chapter in the PDF
If you've got is slides+YouTube, then https://notebooklm.google [0] might work wonderfully well. It does for me. Though, it more Q&A than an article with illustration.
There was a post on HN that just got removed a minute ago about a Syrian tech conference. Inevitably someone asked if there were any women speakers of note. Out of curiosity I counted up the femme speakers in this list. By the time I finished counting the thread was deleted so I'm gonna post my findings here:
13 out of 100
There were a couple with multiple speakers but they were always all masc except for one that had like 10 speakers
I mean, I expect as time goes on the number of people who get the reference goes down. Things get diluted.
It slowly goes from a "Here's some very cool esoteric thing, that you can use" for people that write business systems in prolog, to "here's how to connect workaday language with workaday db in a slightly unique configuration".
edit: I looked at the videos. 10 years ago the talks were Rich Hickey and "Production prolog".
Did Douglas Hofstader ever speak at strangeloop? I know he doesn't actually like computers.
I got to see some of these in person, though at different conferences. If you're at all interested in Java, the talks by Venkat Subramaniam and Nicolai Parlog are worth a watch.
Why is it that every time the word Java comes up, some rando without any apparent insight into Java shows up to make weird Kotlin remarks.
1. There is no such thing as "strictly better syntax", that's impossible to objectivize.
2. Kotlin, while growing in popularity, doesn't even hit the 1% mark on the TIOBE index. It is currently less popular than Prolog. Java sits at 10%.
3. Don't yuck someone else's yum. It isn't constructive. It doesn't promote good discussion. And this just reeks of uninformed, subjective "java bad"-bandwagoning.
Seems like this over-indexes on a small handful of conferences (I had never heard of GOTO before this). It would be interesting to better understand the methodology here, particularly around discovering talks on YouTube.
I was never payed for a talk, and I have very rarely heared of people being payed by the conference itself -- appart from some "rock-star" keynotes.
Generally talks are sponsored by the person you currently work for - i.e. they pay for travel, and sponsor your time. If you work for a vendor in the space, this runs under marketing expense. If you work for a "regular" company this runs under personal development, employer branding & industry exchange.
Off the top of my head, such a platform could:
etc.I don't think such a platform exists today but would love to be wrong.