stack machines

An episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines that explains how a washing machine works, using models, cut-aways and animations. It was first aired in 1988.

Part 1 of an episode of the British educational TV series The Secret Life of Machines, about how vacuum cleaners work and their history. It mixes humor with explanation of household technology.

Joel Spolsky's 2012 Google tech talk on the cultural anthropology of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. He explains how the software was designed to shape community norms and curation standards.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.

Andrej Karpathy's Databricks talk on Software 2.0, the shift from human-written code to code produced by neural network training. It covers how developer work moves toward curating datasets, the advantages and challenges, and opportunities for new tooling.

In this 2019 GDC talk, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott explain how they flooded the app stores with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games to find the lowest bar for success. They tour the dark side of the mobile app market.

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

Kalman Reti, one of the last Symbolics developers, gives a roughly hour-long talk on Symbolics Lisp machines. It covers the machines and their environment from an insider's perspective.

Veritasium short showing Drew Berry's scientifically accurate animations of the molecular machines that drive cell division. It walks through mitosis, chromosomes and motor proteins.

An excerpt of Richard Feynman's 1985 lecture Q&A about whether machines can think. He discusses the difficulty of defining what computers can never do and compares machine intelligence to machines that don't copy animals.

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.

The first part of Adam Curtis' documentary series on Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. It shows how Bernays used Freud's ideas to link mass-produced goods to unconscious desires and create modern consumer persuasion.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

Cliff Click, author of HotSpot's JIT compiler, shares hard-won advice for people writing virtual machines at the VMSS16 workshop. Topics include interpreters, JITs and performance lessons.

Veritasium explores compliant mechanisms, devices that move by flexing rather than using hinges and joints, with researchers at BYU. It covers advantages such as fewer parts and precision, including uses in nuclear weapon safety.

A Capella Science parody of Camila Cabello's Havana, retold as a song about molecular machines and nanotechnology. It features animations of rotaxanes, catenanes and molecular switches, and comes with footnotes.

Bryan Cantrill presents Manta, an object store with in-situ compute that lets tools like grep, awk, and sed run map-reduce style over huge data. He frames it as bringing the Unix philosophy to big data.

A short Harvard Online animation, narrated by Professor Rob Lue, showing how ATP synthase works inside mitochondria. It comes from the HarvardX Cell Biology: Mitochondria course.

A NeXT, Inc. promotional video showing its highly automated factory and the manufacturing of the NeXT Cube, including automated circuit board assembly.

Gabriel Lebec's Fullstack Academy talk introduces lambda calculus syntax, the history of mathematical logic, and the essence of functional programming using JavaScript. It also covers combinators, currying and Church encodings.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

A compilation of molecular animations of DNA replication and gene transcription by Drew Berry and Etsuko Uno at WEHI, made with no narration. It shows molecular machinery at work inside cells.

Drew Berry shows scientifically accurate animations of molecular processes inside cells, such as DNA replication, at TEDxSydney.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

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.

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.

A short video of a man moving a 20 ton stone block by himself using wood and levers. It is part of a pyramid-mysteries channel.

Aaron Patterson's RailsConf 2011 talk on Rails 3.1 performance, showing why deeper Rack middleware stacks slow Rails and how a shallower pipeline helps. It also touches on Rack API design.

Sony CSL's Daddy's Car is a pop song composed with AI in the style of the Beatles, with lead sheets generated by software from Beatles-style training material. Humans produced, arranged and performed it.

A Curry On talk by Lars Bak, known for V8 and Dart, on building a secure and robust IoT development platform. It discusses language and VM design choices for small devices.

Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman shows how to make an action game feel great by stacking small effects like screenshake, recoil and particles onto a basic shooter. It was presented at INDIGO Classes 2013.

Sam Stephenson's RailsConf 2016 talk on Turbolinks 5, showing how small teams can ship fast Rails apps in the browser and hybrid iOS and Android apps sharing one set of web views.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

A documentary on the last day the New York Times was printed with linotype machines in 1978, following the process from the newsroom to the press. It marks the move to computerized typesetting.

Techmoan's 45-minute retrospective on Sony's MiniDisc, covering the first and last machines, ATRAC, MD-LP, Net-MD and HiMD. It argues the format deserves more credit than its US failure narrative suggests.

A short Harvard Online animated lesson on how the mitochondrial electron transport chain works. It shows proton pumping and the machinery that drives ATP synthesis.

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.