Show HN: TechYaks – Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals

Hey 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.<p>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.<p>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”.<p>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.<p>Hopefully there is a talk in here that gives you a double take.<p>Enjoy, ~yaj

The 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..<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.evanmiller.org&#x2F;how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.evanmiller.org&#x2F;how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...</a><p>2. Probable Inference, the Law of Succession, and Statistical Inference Edwin B. Wilson

Too many people get hung up on the perfect scalable tech stack. Most people don&#x27;t need to waste more time watching another tech talk. What they need is more business skills and how to make money.

I was about to complain that my PyOhio video about dot matrix printers was missing, but it is in the 2-month Python section.<p>So now that I&#x27;m ashamed of my ego... there were several talks that were much better from that conference and it is a shame they didn&#x27;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&#x27;t have a good system other than view count!<p>Great project, however, well done regardless.

This looks awesome! I haven’t heard of most of these talks so I’m excited to dive in this weekend.<p>Also, kudos on the UI. It’s minimal, easy to use, and works as advertised. Good software!

Nice idea. Would like to see extended to broader topics. For example on talks about history.

One thing I wonder about ratings is, are you measuring a user&#x27;s individual interests, or whether they think the content is good &#x2F; bad &#x2F; shareable?<p>And what do the users think they are ranking?<p>Personally, I&#x27;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.

Excellent set of links, plus I love the simple UI.

This is great. The formula to determine the best is going to miss the most recent talks if likes&#x2F;dislikes are what is used.

It&#x27;s telling that 95% of the most upvoted talks from &#x27;all time&#x27; are all after 2010

Would be awesome if they were tagged, so I could look at topics I&#x27;m interested in.

Any 70s&#x2F;80s&#x2F;90s talks?

Uncle Bob&#x27;s stuff missing on purpose?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WpkDN78P884" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WpkDN78P884</a> was kinda a classic for the Rails community.

Nice! Is it possible to implement some kind of search based filter?<p>Just a simple string match would be awesome :)

awesome awesome. I&#x27;ve given up going to meetups and conferences, looking at youtube is so much better for finding good content.<p>I&#x27;d love other languages and software topics too.

That David Beasley talk at no 6 is sick. Dude is a wizard.

Nice!<p>Which sources did you focus on?