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 Have a "community notes" kind of feature to highlight outdated info, errata, related talks etc.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.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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.
EDIT: typo fixed
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.
Why? It leads to a lot of abuse.
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.
https://github.com/PaulSec/awesome-sec-talks
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].
[1] My movies ranking: https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
[3] https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado
[4] https://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration...
[5] https://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/
[6] https://timelydataflow.github.io/differential-dataflow/intro...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY
I think it's pretty cool we're hearing from more voices though.
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).
Dead Comment
- Jerry Liu on Agentic RAG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAyuLc_f3Q
- Emil Eifrem on GraphRAG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knDDGYHnnSI&t=2s
- Justine Tunney on LlamaFile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mRi-B3t6fA
- Daniel Han on Low Level Technicals of LLMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRM_P6UfdIc&t=5094s
theres a long tail of others that didnt get the views but i consider quality. we also do AI Engineering Management talks now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiq95JYpBGY&list=PLcfpQ4tk2k...
List of conferences the author covers
Deleted Comment
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.
[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences
They just did an algorithm to list a bunch of popular/nice talks for software engineers. I'll watch a bunch of them.
I'd like to see my fellow hacker news members to point to good talks that aren't present in the list.
https://youtu.be/vQPHtAxOZZw