Kenneth Friedman
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2015–2025
51:07 · 145K views · Aug 10, 2015
Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.
HN repeatedly cites it as a thought-provoking talk on reducing software complexity and on the state of computing research.
19 comments from Hacker News
Completely unrelated: Alan Kay - the power of simplicity this video Easily over of the most thought provoking presentations I have seen recently.
Highly recommend his talk on the power of simplicity. This was one of those lightbulb moments for me when I was a younger programmer: this video
In his "Power of Simplicity"[1] talk, Alan Kay had a great illustration of this specific phenomenon using astronomy: Before Johannes Kepler had the insight of describing the orbits of the planets with ellipsis, peoples were using the (conceptually simpler) circles which didn't completely match the observed movement of celestial body such as Mars, thus resulted in complicated circle-within-circles orbits to try to model reality. By introducing a more complex basic shape (ellipsis instead of circle) which happened to match the underlying reality more, the overall description of orbits got greatly simplified. It's a phenomenon I've seen a few time in my career so far: that while often there's complex code because there are actually complex hedge case to handle (essential complexity), sometime it's really because the data structure used to model the thing you're handling is slightly missing the mark, making things fit almost-but-not-quite, and many operation done around to handle data can be greatly simplified (if not avoided altogether) by changing the underlying data-structure. (Also, Alan Kay apparently did another talk called "Is it really complex, or did we just make it complicated"[2] that seems pertinent to the thread, though I haven't watch it yet) [1] this video [2] [LINK]
I'm not Alan, but I saw one of his talks[1] about how they did invent all those things we're using now, which you are very much referring to. What he said was important was to have a big horizon, at least 10 years. Anything less would not do. Then envision what should be possible in that time. "It would be ridiculous if $X wasn't possible in $Y years" and then backtrack on what would technically be required to make that happen. Rinse repeat. He said that with good company support and a good team, you often found yourself delivering at half that time none the less (but again, you should never constrain yourself to that little, or else you will stress towards performing, instead of thinking properly about the problems needing to be solved). Alan: Hope I didn't butcher your message too much :) [1] I think it might be this one, but I honestly haven't checked. See it anyway. It's a good talk. this video
Bret Victor - Inventing on principle [LINK] Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity this video Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different) [LINK] Robert Cialdini - On Influence [LINK] Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future) [LINK] Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast) [LINK] Josh Wolfe - On "This is who you are up against" podcast [LINK] Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine [LINK] Paul Graham - Startup school (2008) [LINK] James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary) <No link> Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC) [LINK] Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture [LINK] Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity? [LINK] Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience [LINK]