c api

A 13-minute clip from This Week in Startups in which Chamath Palihapitiya describes venture capital as a Ponzi-like scheme driven by fees and inflated valuations among VCs.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

An RSA Animate video that illustrates a talk by geographer David Harvey on the crises of capitalism. It covers creative destruction, wage stagnation masked by credit, and the search for a more just economic order.

A BBC Politics Live interview in which Andrew Neil presses conservative commentator Ben Shapiro on his past statements and an incident involving Corey Lewandowski and a reporter. It is a tense, widely shared exchange.

MedCram's Dr. Roger Seheult summarizes a discussion with Dr. Michael Mina on cheap, paper-based at-home COVID-19 antigen tests. It explains why lower sensitivity can still work well for screening infectious people.

A TED talk by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer arguing that decades of 'greed is good' economic theory drove inequality and instability. He proposes an economics built on reciprocity and cooperation.

A short clip about DARPA's ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 gigapixel wide-area camera array flown on a Boeing unmanned helicopter. It produces a huge mosaic video that can watch a city-sized area from 20,000 feet.

A 1991 NeXT promotional video that stages a head-to-head programming contest between a NeXT computer and a Sun workstation. It shows NeXT's interface builder and object-oriented tooling producing an application far faster than traditional UNIX development.

Megan McArdle's AEI Vision Talk 'Capital and Poverty' argues that social and financial capital work differently in low-income communities, and that this explains barriers to reaching the middle class.

Essential Craftsman follows up on his earlier video about a DIY approach to sleep apnea. It centers on forcing nose breathing during sleep with mouth taping and nasal strips, and says to seek medical guidance.

Josh Kaufman's TEDx talk argues that you can reach practical competence in almost any skill with about 20 hours of focused practice, rather than the 10,000 hours often quoted. He describes how becoming a parent led him to rethink how adults learn, and lays out a short method for rapid skill acquisition.

Sociologist and comedian Harald Eia argues in a TEDxOslo talk that Nordic social democracies produce more rich people per capita than the US or UK. He credits high taxes, welfare and strong unions for creating a safety net that enables risk taking.

Kurzgesagt examines who is responsible for climate change, comparing historical, current and per-capita emissions by country. It argues that individual footprints are a distraction from larger responsibility.

About Here looks at the housing crisis and argues for non-market solutions such as co-op and social housing, drawing on Vancouver's situation. It discusses how public supply can hold down rents.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

CityNerd explains why traffic congestion grows nonlinearly as more cars use a road network, and why adding road capacity tends not to fix it. It covers the consequences for drivers, bus riders, cyclists and pedestrians, and discusses alternatives such as true bus rapid transit.

NFPA video in which wildfire researcher Jack Cohen explains that embers (firebrands), not the flame front, are the main cause of homes igniting in wildfires. He shows how landscaping and removing debris around the home reduce risk.

A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage. It frames Unix as a moonshot achievable by a small team.

Brian Peiris demonstrates RiftSketch, a web app where you write JavaScript with Three.js while wearing an Oculus Rift and watch the world around you change live. It runs on Firefox builds with WebVR.

Bruce Hauman live-codes Flappy Bird in ClojureScript in about six minutes, using figwheel to hot-reload changes into the running game. The demo shows game behavior being changed interactively without restarting.

Phoenix creator Chris McCord builds a real-time Twitter-style app live with Phoenix LiveView 1.5 in about 15 minutes. It shows interactive, real-time updates without writing JavaScript.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which senior partners hold an emergency meeting and decide to sell off toxic assets immediately. It is set at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

A short screencast tour of JSPM, SystemJS and ES6 features, building a small app with the then-new JavaScript module and package tooling. It shows how JSPM works as a package manager, bundler and loader.

Ben Felix explains how to compare renting and buying a home by looking at unrecoverable costs, and distills it into the 5% rule of thumb. It is framed for a Canadian audience but broadly applicable.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

An Economics Explained video on the different kinds of billionaires, from founders to oligarchs. It explains how wealth is held in illiquid stock and why diversification is a problem for some.

A short clip from the film The Gambler in which John Goodman's character gives a monologue about the 'position of fuck you': building enough financial security that you owe nobody anything. The scene is a compact statement of financial independence as freedom.

An episode of FunFunFunction explaining monads in JavaScript as functors that also implement flatMap. It builds on the preceding functor episode and works through code examples.

James Mickens delivers his comedic rant about JavaScript and web programming, in his usual dry, hyperbolic style. It includes his account of learning the language from the O'Reilly Definitive Guide.

Ben Felix explains how central bank money creation and quantitative easing actually work, and what they do and do not imply for asset prices and currency. He addresses the common belief that the Fed prints unlimited money and props up markets.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on payday loans and predatory lending, covering how they trap borrowers and target the elderly and military. It features Sarah Silverman.

Milton Friedman explains why the US tax code is enormously complex and why meaningful reform is unlikely. He argues that politicians profit from the complexity, since tax breaks are products they sell and the code works as a tool of reward and punishment. The clip is about 14 minutes from his lecture series.

Comedian Dominic Frisby gives a ten-minute explanation of land value tax. He argues it would fix problems of rent-seeking and the economics of land ownership.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Jen Simmons explains the difference between CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid, and when to use each. She makes the case that Grid does not replace Flexbox and most sites use both.

A mini-documentary by a Canadian living in Japan explaining how an average family can afford a new detached house in Tokyo. It covers how houses are treated as depreciating assets and how Japanese zoning and building practices keep prices low.

Aaron Francis walks through how PHP has changed from 2012 to 2023, covering traits, array destructuring, generators, typed properties and more. It is a quick chaptered tour of modern PHP features.

PolyMatter explains China's housing bubble and why around 50 million homes sit empty. It covers cultural and economic reasons behind the overbuilding and the government's bind.