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Mathologer uses continued fractions to show why the golden ratio is the most irrational number, comparing it with root 2, e and pi and pointing to where this shows up in nature.

Martin Kleppmann's Strange Loop talk on database transactions, covering why they were dropped by NoSQL, their reputation for being slow, and newer algorithms that make serializable transactions perform and scale. It touches on consistency, linearizability and the CAP theorem.

Extra Credits explains from a game developer's perspective why AAA games have stayed at $60 despite inflation, and how that pressure drives DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.

Chandler Carruth argues in a CppCon 2019 talk that C++ has no truly zero-cost abstractions. Using examples like unique_ptr, ABI constraints and compile-time costs, he shows that abstractions cost runtime, compile time or human effort.

Jesse Newland describes how GitHub uses Hubot, its chat bot, to run operations such as deployment, monitoring, graphing and provisioning from chat rooms. He explains how this improves shared awareness and remote work culture.

Max Brunsfeld of GitHub presents Tree-sitter, a parsing system for programming tools that supports incremental, error-tolerant parsing. He demos its integration into GitHub.com and Atom for syntax highlighting and code navigation.

Numberphile's Ben Sparks shows why the golden ratio is the most irrational number, using seeds, continued fractions and rational approximations. He also explains why plants use it for spacing leaves and seeds.

Scott Chacon introduces Git by showing what happens under the hood for basic commands: staging, committing, data storage, branching, merging and pushing. He contrasts it with Subversion and shows history viewing with log.

A Jimquisition episode examining the human cost of predatory videogame monetization, focusing on loot boxes and microtransactions. It features testimonials from people harmed by gambling-style game mechanics.

A very short clip of Carl Sagan saying that to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe. It illustrates how everything depends on a chain of prior things.

A two-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, conducted by Paul McJones in 2015. It covers his youth, education at Aarhus and Cambridge, his career at Bell Labs and elsewhere, and the design and evolution of C++.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas critiques Fortnite's monetization, arguing it uses manufactured discontent, such as shop design and skins, to push spending. The video dissects the psychological techniques behind the game's business model.

Without Boats, a Rust language team member, explains the design of Rust's async/await at RustLatam 2019. He covers the history and constraints behind zero-cost, allocation-free async state machines.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

Mark Rober builds a glitter-bomb booby-trapped package to take revenge on porch pirates, filming the thieves' reactions. Some reactions were later acknowledged as partially staged.

Thunderf00t presents high-speed camera footage of alkali metals such as sodium and NaK reacting with water. The footage shows that the explosion is not caused by hydrogen ignition, as the usual explanation says. It is a Coulomb explosion driven by electrons leaving the metal.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's Git Merge 2016 talk on how the Linux kernel is developed, how fast it moves, and how git and email workflows keep it manageable. He is the stable kernel maintainer.

FreeBSD developer Benno Rice traces the history of init and bootstrap systems at linux.conf.au 2019 to explain why systemd was seen as necessary and why it provokes such strong reactions. He also discusses why change is scary.

Rick Houlihan's AWS re:Invent 2018 deep dive on advanced DynamoDB design patterns. It covers index overloading, GSI sharding, composite keys, graph processing and transactions.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

Chris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.

Rich Hickey's long presentation on Clojure and concurrency covers locking and immutability, then goes in depth on refs, transactions and agents. It ends with a multithreaded ant colony simulation demo.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems asks what a JVM is supposed to do, in a Google Tech Talk from 2011. He covers the services a JVM provides, such as garbage collection and compilation, and the messy reality beneath the abstractions.

Simon Peyton Jones explains nested data parallelism and Data Parallel Haskell, an approach to exploiting multicore and distributed hardware while keeping a simple single-control-flow programming model.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on municipal violations. It shows how small fines and fees escalate for people who cannot pay and how private probation and ticket revenue can ruin lives.

Anders Brownworth gives a basic visual introduction to blockchain using an interactive web demo, covering SHA256 hashes, blocks, chains, distribution, tokens and coinbase transactions.

Armin Ronacher's EuroPython 2017 keynote examining how the CPython interpreter's leaky abstractions affect language design and how Python could evolve, drawing on JavaScript and Rust experience.

The first episode of a screencast series building djb's redo build system from scratch in Haskell. It explains the purpose of redo, writes initial code and sets up a GitHub repository.

George Hotz gives a SXSW 2019 talk on the idea that we live in a simulation and asks what actions would be available from inside it. He takes a hacker's view of whether it could be escaped.

Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's 2018 Elm Europe talk on how to define success for an open source project and language community. It argues against judging projects by GitHub activity and touches on community expectations.

A documentary on how GraphQL came to be at Facebook, featuring its co-creators Lee Byron, Dan Schafer and Nick Schrock. It covers the problems it solved and its adoption at companies like Twitter, Airbnb and GitHub.

An 8-minute explainer on the Lightning Network and how it relates to Segwit, Bitcoin and Litecoin. It covers how off-chain payment channels route payments to scale blockchain transactions.

Gary Bernhardt argues that software history moves in reactions to earlier tools, and that new tools are not simply better in every way. He distinguishes capability (what a tool allows) from suitability (what it fits), and warns against repeating past mistaken reactions.

Geoff Hinton's 2010 Google Tech Talk on deep belief networks, learning layers of representation one at a time from unlabeled data, and extending them with multiplicative interactions.

Veritasium's Derek Muller spends an hour in a silent, dark anechoic chamber at BYU to test the claim that 45 minutes is the most anyone can bear. He reports on his experience and other people's reactions.

A Google Ventures talk on how unconscious biases shape product decisions, hiring and workplace interactions. It draws on research, including work by Google scientists, on how to counter them.

The earliest existing concert video of Kraftwerk, from a 1970 performance shortly after the band formed. It shows the band in its original setup and the audience's reactions.

Numberphile's James Grime makes the case for base 12 (dozenal) over base 10, showing how twelve's many divisors make arithmetic and everyday fractions easier.