single answer

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

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.

The full 1997 WWDC session in which Steve Jobs, newly back at Apple, takes developer questions for about an hour. He discusses OpenDoc, Microsoft, clones, Newton, advertising and Apple's strategy.

Rachel Potvin describes the scale of Google's codebase and its custom monolithic source repository. She explains the reasons for the monorepo model, the tooling that makes it workable, and its tradeoffs.

A full-day recording of the University of Utah computer science department's 50th anniversary event with panels, keynotes and talks by alumni and pioneers. It includes Ivan Sutherland's presentation on single flux quantum electronics.

Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, gives a TED talk on the blurry line between sane and crazy and on psychopathy as a spectrum, with stories of how the label gets applied.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

Bill Gross, who has founded and incubated many start-ups, ranked hundreds of companies on five factors. He presents the one factor that stood out as the biggest predictor of success.

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.

A short clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson answering a question about why there are not more women in science. He describes the resistance he faced as a Black kid pursuing science and the systemic barriers many people encounter.

An AWS re:Invent 2019 session for advanced DynamoDB users on design patterns used by large customers, including Amazon retail. It covers GSI sharding, index overloading, graph processing, composite keys and transactional workflows.

A fireside Q&A with the Go team (Pike, Thompson, Griesemer and others) at Google I/O 2012. They answer audience questions about Go's design, goals, garbage collection plans and future.

Steve Jobs presents Apple's proposal for a new campus to the Cupertino City Council in June 2011, answering council members' questions about the plan.

Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, explains how CPython's internals and C API leak into the language's semantics. Using examples like the complexity of the add operation, he shows why Python is hard to optimize or reimplement.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

Richard Feldman argues that functional programming is not the norm largely because of historical accidents, such as C++ popularity, platform exclusivity, marketing spend and network effects, rather than merit. He traces the history of how languages become mainstream.

Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

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.

Author JL Collins discusses his book The Simple Path to Wealth at Google, covering avoiding debt, simple index fund investing, and retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs. It is an hour-long interview in plain language.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

Freya Holmer's Dutch Game Day 2023 talk asking why vectors can't be multiplied, building from complex numbers to a single axiom and arriving at geometric algebra, quaternions and multivectors.

Ian Hubert's Blender Conference talk on world building in Blender, covering photogrammetry, camera projection and assembling complex environments from simple shapes at great speed.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Robert Miles gives a remastered introduction to AI safety, adapted from a talk in London. It lays out why advanced AI could go wrong and answers common objections.

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.

Law professor James Duane explains why you should not talk to the police even if you are innocent, drawing on case histories of wrongful convictions. It is a short version of the argument in his book on the right to remain silent.

X.Org developer Daniel Stone explains the history and technical limits of the X Window System and why Wayland was created, debunking myths from forum comments. He covers topics such as network transparency and blocking calls.

A clip from Steve Jobs's 1997 WWDC session, in which he answers a hostile question from an audience member about Apple killing OpenDoc. He says to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and that saying no is part of focus.

Andrew Tanenbaum's FOSDEM 2010 talk on MINIX 3, a microkernel OS built for high reliability and security. It shows how the system detects and recovers from device driver crashes, and addresses microkernel performance concerns.

The first three talks from React Conf 2018, by Sophie Alpert, Dan Abramov and Ryan Florence. They introduce React Hooks and explain the problems with classes that hooks solve.

David Nolen presents Om Next, the redesign of the ClojureScript Om library, drawing on Relay, Netflix's JSONGraph and Datomic. He covers the tradeoffs in handling the client-server boundary over immutable data.

A clean-audio clip from Apple's 1997 WWDC where Steve Jobs answers a hostile question from a developer about OpenDoc. He argues you must start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

A short TEDx talk by Joe Smith teaching how to dry your hands with a single paper towel. It shows a simple technique for cutting waste.

David Nolen explains how ClojureScript is used at Vouch.io to build mobile and web software with a single language and REPL-driven workflow. The talk includes a live coding demo of React Native development.

Rowan Atkinson's speech at the launch of the Reform Section 5 campaign in Parliament in 2012. He argues against criminalizing insulting words and for answering speech with more speech.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

A 16-minute Y Combinator Startup School talk in which Sam Altman lays out what makes a startup succeed. It covers building a product people tell friends about, exponential markets, real versus fake trends, and having an ambitious vision.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.