trading pit

The climactic orange juice futures trading scene from the film Trading Places, in which the heroes corner the market on the trading floor.

A 13-minute clip from This Week in Startups in which Chamath Palihapitiya describes venture capital as a Ponzi-like scheme driven by fees and inflated valuations among VCs.

Chamath Palihapitiya talks with Jason Calacanis about how he bought into the mythology of Silicon Valley, which he calls a Ponzi scheme, and about rebuilding Social Capital. He urges founders to grow slowly and build what matters.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

Rick Beato argues that adults cannot develop true perfect pitch, which he ties to critical-period brain plasticity and language acquisition. He says it can only be developed in young children, and discusses the research behind this.

Rick Beato discusses a theory of why some children develop perfect pitch, based on early exposure to music. He draws on his experience with his own children.

A short MIT Aerospace Controls Lab demo from 2011 of a variable pitch quadrotor flying.

A Telegraph news clip showing newly revealed footage from the January 6 Capitol attack, with rioters overwhelming police. It accompanies coverage of the congressional committee's televised hearing.

Rick Beato tests his 8-year-old son Dylan's perfect pitch on single notes, note pairs and complex polychords.

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.

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.

Optiver's Carl Cook explains how to build high-frequency trading systems in C++, where the critical path runs rarely but must be extremely fast. He covers techniques for low and predictable latency, including avoiding main memory and cache misses.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

An RSA Animate video that illustrates a talk by geographer David Harvey on the crises of capitalism. It covers creative destruction, wage stagnation masked by credit, and the search for a more just economic order.

A BBC Question Time clip in which Ian Hislop argues against capital punishment, rebutting the deterrence argument. He points out the problem of executing innocent people.

A VPRO documentary on quantitative analysts who designed the mathematical models and high-speed trading systems behind modern finance. It features figures such as Paul Wilmott and asks what risks come from treating markets as a machine.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment examines prediction markets such as Polymarket: the legal and moral questions, weak regulation, and insider trading and manipulation concerns.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

Economist Richard Wolff's Talks at Google lecture on his book Democracy at Work. He critiques capitalism and argues for worker-run cooperatives as a path to a more democratic economy.

The Kodak Carousel pitch scene from the Mad Men season finale, in which Don Draper sells nostalgia through a slide projector. It runs about three minutes.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

A TED talk by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer arguing that decades of 'greed is good' economic theory drove inequality and instability. He proposes an economics built on reciprocity and cooperation.

12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards. It is a short music history explainer.

An Adam Ruins Everything comedy segment on why US hospitals are so expensive, covering opaque price lists, surprise bills and penalties for the uninsured.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on money as an instrument of change. HN mostly knows it for his remarks on social media's dopamine-driven feedback loops and regrets about Facebook.

A Vox reporter tries to learn what his son's birth would cost before it happens and fails, showing how opaque US hospital pricing is even for the most common procedure.

Yaron Minsky explains how Jane Street moved from mainstream languages to developing almost entirely in OCaml. He covers trading systems, research infrastructure, tooling and hiring.

A short clip of Milton Friedman on the Donahue show answering whether greed is a vice specific to capitalism, arguing it exists in every system.

A VPRO documentary in which Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff explains her book on surveillance capitalism. It covers how Google and Facebook turn personal data into raw material for prediction and behavioral influence.

Ali G pitches his ice cream glove idea to marketing professionals and even talks to Donald Trump. It is a comedy sketch of a clueless entrepreneur seeking investment.

Kevin Rose interviews Chris Sacca, founder of Lowercase Capital, for his Foundation series. The conversation covers Sacca's path in venture capital and angel investing, including his early financial ups and downs.

Tom Scott visits IEX, a stock exchange that slows down trading with a long coil of fiber. The coil removes the speed advantage of high-frequency traders.

Paul Graham gives a keynote in his hometown of Pittsburgh, reflecting on the old and new city and arguing that it could become a startup hub.

Megan McArdle's AEI Vision Talk 'Capital and Poverty' argues that social and financial capital work differently in low-income communities, and that this explains barriers to reaching the middle class.

A roughly 2.5-hour Toronto debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek on happiness under Marxism versus capitalism. This is the official upload from April 2019.

Neil and Laura Westwood pitch their Magic Whiteboard, reusable static-cling whiteboard sheets, to the investors on the BBC's Dragons' Den and win 100,000 pounds of investment.

Bill Gurley's talk at the All-In Summit 2023, titled 2,851 Miles after the distance between Washington and San Francisco. He describes how incumbents use lobbying and regulation to entrench themselves, followed by a conversation with the hosts.

A Startup School SV 2014 conversation between Sequoia's Jim Goetz and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum. They discuss how Sequoia pursued WhatsApp, its tiny engineering team, and how it handled growth and support.

Guy Kawasaki's UC Berkeley Haas talk on the top ten mistakes entrepreneurs make, covering a startup from inception to exit.

Michael Reeves rigs up a camera and software that tracks a goldfish's movements to choose stock trades, tied to wallstreetbets sentiment. It is a comedic programming and electronics stunt.