I agree. The problem is that modern slide design says that slides shouldn't be done in a way that lets them work independently of the presentation. That is, slides are there to provide structure and illustrate things that are difficult to describe verbally, but aren't meant to repeat what the presenter is saying.

It would be very nice if these online slide presentations came with the speaker's notes that actually cover the main points of what they're saying (with explanation). This assumes that these notes exist, but I feel that the slides by themselves are not very valuable.

(No disrespect meant to Armin Ronacher — I use his work every day and I'm a big fan of what he's done for the Python community.)

That would be more of an essay - which would certainly be valuable, but takes a considerable amount of time.

Really, the problem is that a live presentation and an online slide deck all by itself are two very different things, and trying to make a single slide deck that works for both is pretty much doomed for failure.

I've said it before elsewhere, but for me reading the slides to a presentation I haven't seen is sort of like watching tv in a different language. I mostly know what's going on, and I can follow, but I'm pretty sure I'm missing the main points.

That being said, seeing these presentation decks has often piqued my interest about some concept or other, and prompted me to learn it on my own. shrug

My personal take on that is that there should be a point in actually attending a conference versus just looking at the slides :-)

Then let's not spam the slides out to non-attendees.

I, a non-attendee, posted it to hackernews because I found bits of it looked interesting and relevant. Sure, I'd rather see the talk and I didn't expect it to float around on hackernews for this long but it shows there was some interest. I'm sure you don't find everything relevant and interesting on hackernews normally do you?

I enjoyed it. As a non-professional tinker, knowing even basic words and concepts (e.g. Twisted Python used for networking, something I didn't know before) gives me a key where to look.

Not all slide dumps are useful, but this was interesting to me.

Sure that it would add value to have the speaker's note but I found it actually helpful.

The duck typing part interested me as it seems a good fit for the problem I'm trying to solve: I have to work with a bunch of objects retrieved from a key/value store, some keys are simple attribute but others define the object class, required keys, value constraints, etc. while keeping the code generic. Are there any good references on this ?

the more extreme code talks tend to have really great slides - in this case slides are a better format than a blog post really because you can direct the audience's attention through the important bits of the code with your slide transitions, as opposed to just throwing gists at them. here's an example from a talk i just gave, the slides came out well imo[1], its basically the material's i'd use to teach my colleagues this stuff.

[1] http://www.dustingetz.com/2012/09/24/StrangeLoop2012-monads-...

really i think it comes down to, for a lot of talks, slides aren't value-add to the audience, they're just a loose outline for the speaker

This was clearly posted to rabble rouse and poke a finger in the eye of people who've been criticizing the language on HN; see slide 99. Classy!

>Do these postings of slides ever help anyone? I never seem to get anything out of just clicking through slides with no explanations.

Huh? I picked at least 5 different points and techniques I can use from this specific slides, some of them with code.