problem solving

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist, explains therapeutic fasting as a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes. He frames it around the two-compartment problem of fat storage and insulin resistance.

Vsauce's Michael Stevens stages a realistic version of the trolley problem with unsuspecting subjects who believe they must decide a life-or-death outcome. The Mind Field episode compares what people say they would do with what they actually do.

Rick Hudson's GopherCon 2015 talk on Go 1.5's new low-latency concurrent garbage collector. It covers the motivation, performance numbers, technical challenges and why the approach fits Go.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course. He discusses how great scientists pick important problems and build careers, drawing on his years at Bell Labs.

Database pioneer Michael Stonebraker argues that 'big data' is really at least four different problems: big volumes with small analytics, big analytics, velocity, and variety. He comments on where each market is heading.

The final lecture of Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn course, from 1995, based on his well-known talk 'You and Your Research'. It covers how to do important work and build a career.

A Clojure/conj 2016 talk demoing Barliman, a prototype smart editor that does program synthesis. Given a partial program and tests, it completes the program using a relational interpreter written in miniKanren.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

A philosophy video critiquing the concept of human rights from a Marxist perspective, drawing on Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Rawls. It examines what human rights actually mean and presuppose.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

Rick Falkvinge responds to viewer feedback on his earlier Lightning Network video and raises a flaw he says was not previously discussed. The main thread is the network's unsolved routing problem.

An Al Jazeera investigation into Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, featuring current and former engineers who voice safety concerns. It covers quality control problems at the South Carolina plant and the roots of the battery problems that grounded the plane.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

An Al Jazeera English People & Power investigation from 2010 into safety problems with the Boeing 737NG, featuring whistleblowers on cracking parts, hand-made structural components and an alleged cover-up.

A Google I/O 2013 talk by Android audio engineers on why reliable, low-latency audio is hard on the platform. It covers problem areas across the stack, platform work underway and techniques apps can use.

Gary Bernhardt's Cascadia Ruby Conference 2011 talk on using the Unix shell for practical problem solving. He builds pipelines interactively by iterative refinement, using small tools as levers.

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.

Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.

A 1953 US Navy training film explaining the basic mechanisms in mechanical fire control computers aboard ships. It shows how gears, differentials and cams solved mathematical problems in permanent mechanical form.

Gil Tene of Azul Systems explains common pitfalls in measuring latency and response time, including why averages mislead and the problem of coordinated omission. He introduces open source tools like HdrHistogram for better measurement and reporting.

Brian Will makes the case for procedural programming over object-oriented programming, arguing that OOP's promised encapsulation and decoupling are largely illusory. He analyzes real code examples and the problems of tying data to behavior in classes.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Thunderf00t, a physicist, critically assesses the Hyperloop concept, covering the vacuum, pressure, safety, and cost problems of high-speed tube travel. He argues the media accepted the claims uncritically.

Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python. He shows how this high-level design pattern fits Python's features and addresses maintainability problems in large applications.

Alan Kay speaks at the DEMO Founder School session on why real progress takes invention rather than incremental innovation. He argues for problem-oriented thinking and long-term research funding.

Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.

Larry Hastings explains what Python's GIL is, what problems it solves and how it works, and presents his Gilectomy project to remove it, including the performance and C-extension obstacles.

Facebook engineers explain why they abandoned the traditional MVC paradigm for a more functional architecture, introducing Flux and React. They use the unread-message-count bug as a case study of the problems of bidirectional data flow at scale.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 19 talk on the weaknesses of SSL and the certificate authority system. He explains how CA trust became a problem and proposes an alternative that removes the CA oligopoly without reducing security.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

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.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

Jafar Husain's ACM keynote presents Netflix's JSON Graph and Falcor, which let web developers treat all cloud data as one virtual JSON model. It combines reactive programming with REST principles.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

Segment co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt recounts how his company found product-market fit, including how a product grew out of a small feature of another. It is a lecture from Stanford's Startup School course.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel lectures at Startup School on building a product people want: identifying the problem, the customer, an MVP and which customers to pursue first.