Apparently my submission of this was a repost -- the author commented on the original post saying:

"Presentation author here. I should have taken this down before it popped up on HN or elsewhere. The video of this presentation is worth watching, because it's tongue-in-cheek through-out. But the slides are not worth reading, otherwise people take it seriously like it's happening here now. Cycle isn't the solution to everything, it's just one guy's ongoing experiment."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8819422

Anyways, I found the ideas interesting because I think that its use of Reactive Extensions solves a variety of frontend problems elegantly (and Rx works on backend problems too, making it even more compelling). I made a jsfiddle that explains a bit about Rx to hopefully provide enough context for "why would you use this?" http://jsfiddle.net/nmd88wum/

Anyways, sorry for the respost, and sorry to the author for dragging up something he apparently didn't want being dragged up again. :(

React doesn't try to do 'Reactive' programming structures; it does a view layer that's composable.

How that data gets into the components is your responsibility; you can easily use something like Baconjs/RxJS to do this.

Agreed. Although I do think that React is "borrowing" concepts from FRP, definitely. Funny how he points the VirtualDOM as if that's THE reason why React is good. It is not. I wrote about why I think you should use React here: http://waltfy.net/2015/04/01/one-reason-to-use-react.html