[OkayPhysicist]

If you don't care about the material, why on earth would anybody sit around for 15 minutes/30 minutes/an hour listening to you talk about the material. The sole reason for a presentation over a technical reference buried somewhere is because the presenter wants the audience to care about the thing they're presenting. If that isn't reflected in the presentation, it's not a worthwhile presentation.

[Cyph0n]

But this was a technical presentation at a conference dedicated to the technology in question. A person stumbling across this on HN does not magically make them part of the target audience.

[OkayPhysicist]

A technical presentation is a still a presentation, as opposed to a reference document. If you want to give someone a block of technical information, you do so in a reference document. You talk in front of a room full of people in order to convince them that this matters enough to bother.

[Cyph0n]

Sure, but I don’t think this is relevant to the comment thread we’re in, which started off by sharing generic advice that mostly applies to TED-style motivational talks or “keynotes” at large conferences etc.

[OkayPhysicist]

I definitely thought we were downstream of pinkmuffinere's critiques about not establishing a reason to be excited about the material. oops.