4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2017–2025score 5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters recommend it as a fun, short talk that shows how HDR photography actually works through an absurdly playful implementation.
A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.
“It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers.” (HN, 2025)
You should definitely check out !!con. They have really fascinating and weird talks about all sorts of interesting CS and design topics. Plus, it's pay what you can and is located in New York, so there's lots of interesting stuff to do nearby. My favorite talk from this year was about implementing an algorithm for HDR photography purely in Microsoft Excel - [this video]
Talk implementing HDR photography algorithm purely in Excel
I did my PhD in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics, and despite "optical" being part of that I realized midway that I didn't know enough about how regular cameras worked! It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be extremely important in the work I did during the early days at Waymo and later at Motional. I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that discusses HDR: [this video] . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers. Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: [link] . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).
On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [link] Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper [link] HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! [this video] Zebras All the Way Down [link] Solving Layout Problems with CSS Grid and Friends [link] Console Security - Switch [link] Let's move SMM out of firmware and into the kernel [link] Bringing Linux back to server boot ROMs with NERF and Heads [link] Sharing the Chisel [link] (looks like the actual conference video wasn't released)
My favourite (ab)use of Excel, which is already on your list, is using it for HDR photography[0]. While I'd never use it for day-to-day anything, things like this are a really interesting way to show how things like HDR photography actually work. Excel can be very approachable for stuff like this. [0] [this video]
Shows how HDR photography works by implementing it in Excel.
I just watched a talk this morning about doing high dynamic range photography in Excel ( [this video] ). Looks like now I've got something to watch tomorrow!
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