case study

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

Chubbyemu narrates the true case of a professor who spilled two drops of dimethylmercury on her hand and suffered fatal neurological damage.

Psychology professor Marty Lobdell gives a one-hour lecture on how to study effectively, covering short focused sessions with breaks, study environment, note-taking and memory techniques. It was aimed at students who cram without improving.

Casey Neistat's early viral short in which he gets ticketed for not using a bike lane in New York, then shows how often the lanes are blocked by cars and other obstacles. It runs about three minutes.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.

Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.

FortNine explains how Harley-Davidson ended up in decline, from a narrow lifestyle niche and an aging customer base to the pandemic hitting a company already in trouble.

Chubbyemu presents a case study of a man who followed AI health advice, replaced salt with sodium bromide and developed bromism with severe neurological effects. It is told as a dramatized medical case by a doctor.

LegalEagle analyzes Katko v. Briney, the Iowa case about a homeowner whose shotgun booby trap injured a burglar, and the limits on deadly force in defending property.

Yegor Denisov-Blanch of Stanford presents a study of nearly 100,000 developers at hundreds of companies, measuring how AI affects productivity from commit data. It finds an average boost of about 20% with wide variance by codebase, task complexity and stack.

John Ousterhout lectures on the Raft consensus algorithm, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It covers leader election and log repair.

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

Casey Neistat's social experiment in New York City where he tries to 'steal' his own bike with various tools, showing how little stops passers-by from helping.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

John Ousterhout's slides-and-voiceover lecture on Paxos, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It is a full introduction to the Paxos consensus algorithm.

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

HERO is a short animated film made entirely in Blender to showcase the Grease Pencil 2D animation tools in Blender 2.8. It mixes hand-drawn 2D with a full 3D pipeline.

A short RepresentUs explainer arguing that US politics is shaped by money, citing the Gilens and Page Princeton study on how little average citizens influence policy.

Josh Bloch and Jeremy Manson present the eighth installment of Java Puzzlers at Google I/O 2011, a set of surprising corner cases in the Java language and libraries. It includes puzzlers on traps such as regular expression performance.

Lex Fridman interviews MIT physicist Max Tegmark, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, about the case for pausing giant AI experiments and the risks of advanced AI.

A two-minute clip from a 1979 Phil Donahue interview in which Milton Friedman makes the free-market case for taxing pollution. He treats pollution as an externality that can be given a price.

Forgotten Weapons examines the Heckler & Koch G11, a West German experimental rifle built around a caseless cartridge. The video covers the G11K2 and its unusual technology before its cancellation for political and economic reasons.

A roughly three-minute Onion News Network satire in which a host consoles a severely depressed zoologist who spent his whole life studying anteaters. It is a short comedy sketch about wasted effort and misplaced obsession.

ITS Tactical demonstrates how a ballpoint pen can open a zippered suitcase without leaving a trace, bypassing its lock, and suggests countermeasures.

Casey Muratori's long talk arguing that modern software has ballooned to tens of millions of lines because of hardware and OS diversity. He proposes a stable ISA for entire system-on-a-chip packages and recalls when games shipped with their own boot disk.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Casey Muratori's lecture, originally given at the Technical University of Madrid, arguing that Conway's Law is the only viable candidate for a true law of software architecture. He explains how software mimics the organization over time, using examples like Windows' multiple volume controls.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

A short clip of Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, answering why humanity should go to Mars. He argues that societies grow by challenging themselves and that exploration inspires young people.

A live mock programmer interview in which Casey Muratori interviews game developer Shawn McGrath using a less confrontational format devised by Chris Hecker. It gets deep into technical details while showing how the candidate actually thinks and works.

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

Casey Muratori gives a fast tour of the RemedyBG debugger for Windows, which he uses daily. He shows its speed and features, especially the watch window.

Day 1 of Handmade Hero's introduction to C on Windows, covering setting up Visual Studio, creating a Win32 project, the WinMain entry point and writing a first function. It is the starting point for Casey Muratori's from-scratch game series.

Jason Calacanis interviews investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses what makes a founder, his investments such as Kickstarter, and his personal story of losing money and recovering.

Day 1 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a live-coded game built from scratch in C on Windows. It reviews C on Windows, sets up a minimal build system and WinMain entry point, and shows a first MessageBox.

Casey Muratori responds on-stream to a dismissive Twitter post by demonstrating how slow Visual Studio's startup and debugger watch window are, comparing it to much older software and machines. It is a long rant about software performance and bloat.

An 8-minute National Geographic short film about David Bamberger, who bought 5,500 overgrazed acres in the Texas Hill Country and restored the land and its aquifers over about 50 years.

Part two of Jason Calacanis's long interview with investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses his investments in Facebook, Twitter and Uber, and how he hustled his way to the top.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.