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Show HN: TechYaks – Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals
- mongol 8y agoNice idea. Would like to see extended to broader topics. For example on talks about history.
- yaj54 8y agoDo you mean history outside of tech? Or history of (software / CS) tech? A lot of times my favorite talks are historical perspective (tech) talks, so I would also like to get more of those in there. A "history" topic filter would be sweet even on the talks I'm already searching but categorizing by topic is not something I've tackled here yet.
- mongol 8y agoI mean "regular history". About ancient civilizations, bronze age collapse, Napoleon, the Russian revolution, things like that. It is a personal preference for me to listen to such talks, but I think there could be interest in many other topics as well. I have come to the conclusion that apart from literature, talks in academic settings are more likely to be interesting, compared with documentaries produced for television.
- yaj54 8y agoCool. The hard part is collecting the list relevant talks, the easy part is ranking them. If there is a way to get the right set of academic history talks it wouldn't be that hard to go from there. I haven't watched much historical lectures, but I do enjoy documentaries and historical fiction. Another idea I've kicked around is a site that organizes a bunch of historical documentaries and historical fiction into a geo-timeline visualization. And include the ability for people to comment on and discuss the historically accuracy of the films. But that's a different project...
- christudor 8y agoWhat kind of stuff do you listen to at the moment? Where do you go to find these kind of talks?
- garysieling 8y agoI built something with a broader dataset but a different ranking technique, basically a bunch of cruder custom ranking rules. https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com
- mongol 8y agoSeems quite popular right now!
- garysieling 8y agoOops, back up now!
- mongol 8y agoThe links in search result don't work on Android (neither Chrome nor Firefox).
- dstick 8y agoNice! Is it possible to implement some kind of search based filter? Just a simple string match would be awesome :)
- icc97 8y agoExcellent set of links, plus I love the simple UI.
- platz 8y agoIt's telling that 95% of the most upvoted talks from 'all time' are all after 2010
- comboy 8y agoThe good stuff is here[1]. But it sucks that the paper[2] is from 1927 and I still have to pay to get access to it.. 1. https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating... 2. Probable Inference, the Law of Succession, and Statistical Inference Edwin B. Wilson
- Agnu 8y agoThe paper is available on Sci-Hub.
- dmos62 8y agoAlso Library Genesis (http://libgen.io/ http://libgen.io/) should be on everyone's list of places where papers (and books) can be found for free.
- yesenadam 8y agohttp://libgen.io/scimag/index.php?s=Probable%20Inference,%20the%20Law%20of%20Succession,%20and%20Statistical%20Inference http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php?s=Probable%20Inference,%20...
- sleavey 8y agoWhile I wholeheartedly agree about academic paywalls sucking, the paper PDF was literally the first result on DuckDuckGo [1, 2], at least for me! [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Probable+Inference%2C+the+Law+of+Succession%2C+and+Statistical+Inference+Edwin+B.+Wilson https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Probable+Inference%2C+the+Law+of+S... [2] http://www.barestatistics.nl/uploads/1/1/7/9/11797954/wilson_1927.pdf http://www.barestatistics.nl/uploads/1/1/7/9/11797954/wilson...
- yaj54 8y agoHey HN, here’s the result of gathering as many tech talks as I could find and then trying a bunch of ranking heuristics to find one that produced reasonable results. I’m currently using the lower bound of each talk’s Wilson score confidence interval based on likes and dislikes. I find good tech talks to be a combo of entertainment and broadening my toolbox of programming concepts. When I hit good talk I generally do a double take, “wha, I have not thought that way before.” There are definitely some good talks in this list. There are a few great “Awesome Talks” lists that I’ve enjoyed perusing, but I’ve found that talk title intrigue does not seem to correlate with talk quality. So in lists of 50+ talks I have a hard time finding the “next best talk”. I’m keen to get feedback on the site as is but also if there is interest in a “top tech talks” in the last month (or X unit of time) style of digest. Hopefully there is a talk in here that gives you a double take. Enjoy, ~yaj
- chrisweekly 8y ago>"interest in a “top tech talks” in the last month (or X unit of time) style of digest." Yes!
- comboy 8y agoDo you know of some generalization that instead of just positive and negative ratings would work with real numbers? E.g. rating could be anything between 0 and 1. Great job btw.
- yaj54 8y agoMy current ranking stuff knowledge is coming from Evan Miller's blog, here's a post that deals with star ratings: https://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.html https://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.h...
- jules 8y agoHave you tried the simple Bayesian approach with a Beta prior? [1] I'd be interested to learn how it does. pretend_upvotes = 4 pretend_downvotes = 4 def score(item_upvotes, item_downvotes): upvotes = item_upvotes + pretend_upvotes downvotes = item_downvotes + pretend_downvotes return upvotes / float(upvotes + downvotes) [1] http://julesjacobs.github.io/2015/08/17/bayesian-scoring-of-ratings.html http://julesjacobs.github.io/2015/08/17/bayesian-scoring-of-...
- wolco 8y agoThis is great. The formula to determine the best is going to miss the most recent talks if likes/dislikes are what is used.
- yaj54 8y agoTrue-ish. Since the formula uses confidence intervals[0] it does better with recent talks than a simple (likes - dislikes). But you're right, breaking into "all time" status is tough because there are a number of talks with many hundreds of likes and 1 or 2 dislikes. 0: https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
- angersock 8y agoUncle Bob's stuff missing on purpose? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkDN78P884 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkDN78P884 was kinda a classic for the Rails community.
- yaj54 8y agoNot on purpose at all, I've learned a lot from Uncle Bob. 50k talks is certainly not all of the talks ever, and there are many good talks not included in the 6 lists I've generated (which is a total of only about 230 talks). I'd like to add more filters to be able to hone in on top talks for different contexts.
- suyash 8y agoWhat is "50k"? What's your criteria on selecting talks?
- yaj54 8y ago50k is 50,000. Which is a lot of talks, but certainly not all of them. My abstract criteria for a talk being considered a "tech talk" is a live lecture given from the front of a room to a live multi-person audience with a subject matter related to computing. The 50k is just the number my hacky talk finder script found.
- suyash 8y agoso your pool is limited 50k talks ?
- zerr 8y agoAny 70s/80s/90s talks?
- angel_j 8y agoOne thing I wonder about ratings is, are you measuring a user's individual interests, or whether they think the content is good / bad / shareable? And what do the users think they are ranking? Personally, I'd rather be ranking for what interests me, so that I get more of that; but I feel most networks are trying to extract a different signal, and that this produces crappy recommendations and useless rankings.
- robax 8y agoThis looks awesome! I haven’t heard of most of these talks so I’m excited to dive in this weekend. Also, kudos on the UI. It’s minimal, easy to use, and works as advertised. Good software!
- O_H_E 8y ago> It’s minimal, easy to use, and works as advertised. Good software It sucks that these are rare nowadays. Maybe I could start a suckless list :)
- aviv 8y agoToo many people get hung up on the perfect scalable tech stack. Most people don't need to waste more time watching another tech talk. What they need is more business skills and how to make money.
- th0ma5 8y agoI was about to complain that my PyOhio video about dot matrix printers was missing, but it is in the 2-month Python section. So now that I'm ashamed of my ego... there were several talks that were much better from that conference and it is a shame they didn't get more views. Mine was picked up by Hack-a-Day so it got a boost, but many of the other talks were better in all kinds of measures like amount of content, social relevancy, etc... It sucks that we still don't have a good system other than view count! Great project, however, well done regardless.
- sweezyjeezy 8y agoThe disguise on your self-plug is pretty thin man...
- bastijn 8y agoHe didn't link it. That's bonus to the stealth check. The DM approves.
- graysonk 8y agoCongrats! You also made my “Top 50k worst ways to organically self-promote yourself online” list
- rb808 8y agoawesome awesome. I've given up going to meetups and conferences, looking at youtube is so much better for finding good content. I'd love other languages and software topics too.
- DerSaidin 8y agoWould be awesome if they were tagged, so I could look at topics I'm interested in.
- whitedeveloper 8y agoThis is one of the best test comments ever. Its bigly.
- ILikeConemowk 8y agoNice! Which sources did you focus on?
- drexlspivey 8y agoThat David Beasley talk at no 6 is sick. Dude is a wizard.