algorithms

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2014 talk on writing fast C++, explaining why data structure choice and memory layout matter more than clever algorithms. It covers why standard containers like unordered_map perform poorly on modern CPUs.

Glenn Vanderburg presents Cló, a Clojure library that reimplements TeX's core typesetting algorithms as composable functions. He shows what translating procedural, literate-programming code into functional form teaches.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

Guy Steele presents a small geometric problem and compares four computational approaches: a classic sequential solution and three parallel-friendly ones. Each is illustrated pictorially and with working code, weighing total work against time to solution.

Bryan Cantrill presents the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) paper by Megiddo and Modha at Papers We Love. He opens with a survey of caching strategies before digging into the self-tuning LRU/MFU design.

Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.

Edward Kmett's 2013 talk at Prezi in Budapest on succinct data structures, which store data in close to the information-theoretic minimum space while supporting fast queries. It ties together the research and walks through his Haskell succinct library.

Martin Kleppmann's QCon London 2018 talk on keeping data consistent in distributed systems without a central leader. It surveys CRDT algorithms for syncing devices and collaborative editing over peer-to-peer networks.

Stephan T. Lavavej's CppCon 2019 talk on implementing floating-point to_chars and from_chars in Microsoft's C++ STL. It covers the history of float-string conversion and the algorithms that make it much faster.

Martin Kleppmann surveys current research on CRDTs, the algorithms for merging concurrent edits across offline replicas. He covers the hard parts such as rich text, moves and merge results that are technically correct but poor.

Tom Scott's Royal Institution discourse on science communication in the age of social media, how recommendation algorithms shape popularity, and why view counts can matter more than truth. It includes a segment on parasocial relationships.

Andrei Alexandrescu's ACCU 2016 talk previews material from his book on writing fast code, with a focus on optimization techniques such as sentinels and faster search.

Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.

Matt Kulukundis explains how Google designed SwissTable, a fast, cache-friendly hash table, step by step from std::unordered_map. The talk covers open addressing, SIMD probing and the tradeoffs of changing a fundamental data structure.

Python core developer Raymond Hettinger explains how Python's dictionary implementation evolved into the compact, ordered dict in Python 3.6. He uses pictures and small bits of pure Python, and covers key-sharing, compaction and versioning.

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Cliff Click of Azul Systems presents a lock-free concurrent hash table that scales to 768 CPUs. He explains why it is correct by reasoning in a different way than usual happens-before and memory-order arguments.

Lee Byron of Facebook explains how persistent immutable data structures work and how to use them in React apps with Immutable.js. He covers memoization benefits and avoiding coupling through shared mutable state.

James Long's dotJS 2019 talk on how CRDTs enable local-first apps and how simple they can be to implement. He shows how to use them to build robust offline-capable frontends.

Sean Parent's CppCon 2015 talk on better use of standard containers and the goal of having no incidental data structures. It argues that proper containers can greatly simplify code.

Redis Labs and Tim Davis present RedisGraph, which uses GraphBLAS to treat graph queries in Cypher as sparse linear algebra for lower latency.

Elasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.

Sean Parent's GoingNative 2013 talk surveys new and overlooked C++ features and shows how to use them for simple, correct, clear code. It stresses using standard algorithms rather than raw loops.

Neil Fraser of Google presents Differential Synchronization, the algorithm behind MobWrite, for keeping multiple copies of a document in sync in real time. The talk argues the approach is robust, convergent and efficient.

Aaron Hsu shows how to manipulate and transform tree data in APL using arrays and inverted tables instead of pointers. He claims much smaller code, better performance and easier parallelisation.

Daniel Lemire's QCon talk on how simdjson parses gigabytes of JSON per second. It covers SIMD vectorization, branch prediction and the lessons learned building a fast parser.

Matt Kulukundis reviews two years of Abseil's Swiss table hashtable, covering post-release optimizations, lessons from rolling it out across Google, design choices, and what global monitoring revealed.

Malte Skarupke's C++Now 2018 talk on hash table performance, explaining why std::unordered_map is slow and memory hungry and presenting faster designs, including his bytell hash map.

A Microsoft Research talk on BetrFS, a file system built on B-epsilon trees, a write-optimized data structure. It covers WODS such as LSM-trees, how to design a file system around them, and benchmark wins over ext4 and xfs.

Uber Engineering's Joseph Gilley explains why Uber uses hexagons for geospatial indexing and introduces H3, its open source hierarchical grid system. He covers use cases and how distortion is handled.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk on designing hybrid data structures for performance. He covers cache locality, working-set size and allocation overhead, and why standard C++ containers fall short.

A one-minute clip of Peter Norvig saying that Google found programming contest success correlates negatively or poorly with job performance. The description links to a blog post discussing it.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

Writer and artist James Bridle shows how strange and disturbing children's videos on YouTube, from surprise eggs to algorithmic mashups, are produced for ad revenue. He argues they reveal problems in a data-driven internet.

In a TEDGlobal talk, Raffaello D'Andrea demonstrates quadcopters that play catch, balance, learn and coordinate, using algorithms that treat them like athletes. It includes Kinect-controlled quads.

An 88-minute Microsoft Research talk that explains how quantum computers beat classical ones using basic linear algebra, qubits, superposition and gates. It works through the Deutsch oracle problem and ends with entanglement, teleportation and a live demo.

Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange survey recent highlights in post-quantum cryptography at 35C3, covering the NIST competition, network protocol experiments, and broken candidates.