THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
TED · 5 HN recommenders
Johann Hari's TED talk arguing that addiction is driven largely by disconnection and environment rather than chemical hooks alone. He draws on his personal experience with addicted relatives and on research and policy examples from around the world.
checkoutmytrip · 3 HN recommenders
A clip of Louis C.K.'s bit "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy," about how quickly people take modern technology for granted and complain about it. It is a comedic riff on impatience with air travel and gadgets.
thoughtbot · 6 HN recommenders
Aaron Bieber, a longtime Vim user, describes his experience trying Emacs with evil mode. He covers what he found, what he missed from Vim, and what Vim could borrow from Emacs.
acapellascience · 6 HN recommenders
A Capella Science parody of Despacito that sings through evolutionary developmental biology, explaining how a single cell becomes a body, including body-axis genes and dormant snake leg DNA. It runs about four minutes.
Josh Darnit · 2 HN recommenders
A family video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a parent follows them exactly as written, with comic results. It demonstrates how precise instructions must be.
Tom.K · 2 HN recommenders
A short screen recording of the flight simulator Easter egg hidden in Excel 97, with the steps to trigger it. The uploader notes the mouse controls are hard to handle.
Digital Foundry · 3 HN recommenders
Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.
David Kuckhermann · 4 HN recommenders
A short video of stretching and hand exercises for preventing and easing tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome, from a percussion teacher. The exercises were shown to him by a doctor.
BBC Earth · 2 HN recommenders
A BBC Earth clip from Super Powered Owls in which the team uses sensitive sound equipment to compare owl flight with other birds. It shows why owls fly almost silently.
Louis Rossmann · 2 HN recommenders
Louis Rossmann explains why NYC commercial landlords keep storefronts vacant rather than lowering rents. He points to commercial mortgage-backed security loan terms and inflated property valuations.
jasonofthel33t · 3 HN recommenders
A Channel 9 Going Deep interview in which Brian Beckman talks with Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, about the language's design. It covers Clojure's persistent data structures, reference types and its approach to concurrency on the JVM.
Mick West · 6 HN recommenders
Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.
Mick West · 5 HN recommenders
Mick West explains the three Navy UFO videos (FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST) released in 2020, giving mundane explanations such as a distant plane and camera artifacts. He notes the videos were not new and had been circulating since 2017.
GDC Festival of Gaming · 7 HN recommenders
In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.
3Blue1Brown · 10 HN recommenders
A short 3Blue1Brown primer on exponential and logistic growth, using early COVID-19 case data to show how epidemics grow and eventually level off. It explains why small changes in growth rate make enormous differences in outcomes.
Hiroob · 5 HN recommenders
A recording of physicist Albert Bartlett's well-known lecture on the arithmetic of exponential growth, applied to population and energy use. He argues that steady percentage growth in a finite world cannot continue and sneaks up suddenly.
Coffeezilla · 7 HN recommenders
Coffeezilla gives a comprehensive history of Tether, the stablecoin issued by a company controlled by the owners of Bitfinex. He lays out accusations that it is not fully backed.
Business Insider · 2 HN recommenders
A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.
MegaLag · 2 HN recommenders
MegaLag investigates PayPal's Honey browser extension, showing how it swaps affiliate attribution and was promoted by large YouTube influencers. It includes technical demonstrations of the affiliate tag replacement in browser dev tools.
Kirsten Dirksen · 2 HN recommenders
Kirsten Dirksen visits architect Gary Chang's 32 square meter Hong Kong apartment, which he has redesigned over decades. Sliding walls and transformable furniture turn it into 24 different room configurations.
Giroux Studios · 2 HN recommenders
The first video in a series on extremely large numbers, introducing the topic with examples. Later parts go deep into the fast-growing hierarchy.
F2C2012 · 2 HN recommenders
Aaron Swartz's keynote at Freedom to Connect 2012 describing how ordinary people helped defeat the SOPA censorship bill. He recounts how the Senate unexpectedly united behind the bill and how grassroots action stopped it.
Veritasium · 7 HN recommenders
Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.
Google TechTalks · 5 HN recommenders
A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.
BAMM.TV · 3 HN recommenders
Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.
GDC Festival of Gaming · 11 HN recommenders
Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software gives a GDC 2018 retrospective on surviving as an indie game maker since 1994, from shareware days through Steam. It covers business realities, costs and sustaining a comfortable living without chasing riches.
SpaceX · 2 HN recommenders
SpaceX's recap of the Falcon Heavy debut launch, with side booster landings and a Tesla Roadster with Starman sent into orbit.
SpaceX · 4 HN recommenders
SpaceX's livestream of the Falcon Heavy test flight, including the launch, side booster landings and Tesla Roadster payload. It was the first launch of the most powerful operational rocket at the time.
Tech Ingredients · 2 HN recommenders
Tech Ingredients shows how to build cheap, high-performance flat-panel speakers using audio exciters on sheet materials such as foam-core board. It explains how distributed-mode speakers work and walks through experiments to find good designs.
Numberphile · 3 HN recommenders
Numberphile's James Grime introduces quaternions, a type of number beyond the complex numbers, building up from real and complex numbers and explaining why they are useful.
Leonard Ritter · 3 HN recommenders
Masagin is a realtime demoscene production by Farbrausch and Neuro with music by paniq, using animated recursive SVG graphics made in Inkscape. It is a psychedelic, nested-dials audiovisual piece.
kb · 4 HN recommenders
Debris by Farbrausch, the winner of the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition. All of its 3D visuals, textures and music come from a single 177 KB executable.
Drinks and Dice · 6 HN recommenders
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.
Nemean · 3 HN recommenders
A walkthrough of the Quake III fast inverse square root, explaining where the constant 0x5f3759df comes from. It covers IEEE 754 floats, the bit hack that approximates a logarithm, and a Newton's method refinement.
The Galen Foundation · 6 HN recommenders
Cardiologist Dr. Pradip Jamnadas lectures on the rationale for dietary restriction and fasting, covering insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and low-carb eating over about 81 minutes.
Joseph Everett - WIL · 5 HN recommenders
A short explainer on the physiological differences between fasting and simply eating less. It covers ketosis, ghrelin and hunger waves, and the hormonal effects of fasting.
University of California Television (UCTV) · 5 HN recommenders
Robert Lustig of UCSF updates his sugar talk, arguing that fructose and processed foods drive obesity and metabolic syndrome through their endocrine effects. It is a roughly 90-minute university lecture.
Top 2000 a gogo · 2 HN recommenders
A Dutch Top 2000 a gogo segment in which Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) explains how The Rockafeller Skank is built, in his studio. The studio shows a long-running Atari ST setup.
Radical Discourse · 10 HN recommenders
A rap battle in which John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek debate the causes of boom and bust, stimulus, and bailouts. It was produced by Econstories to teach the two schools of thought.
Mark Rober · 3 HN recommenders
Mark Rober makes a plant-based burger for Bill Gates and explains why meat production strains the environment. Gates also appears and discusses his worry about steel and cement.
LastWeekTonight · 2 HN recommenders
A Last Week Tonight segment on the Ferguson shooting, racial inequality in policing, and the militarization of local police forces in the US.
Isaac Arthur · 2 HN recommenders
Isaac Arthur examines the Dyson Dilemma, the puzzle of why we see no Dyson spheres or megastructures if growth-oriented civilizations should build them. He covers detectability and whether such structures could hide.
Festo · 4 HN recommenders
Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.
seabala · 6 HN recommenders
A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining the scientific method: guess, compute consequences, compare to experiment, and why vague theories like astrology cannot be proven wrong.
TehPhysicalist · 2 HN recommenders
A clip of Richard Feynman contrasting the Greek and Babylonian traditions of mathematical reasoning. It compares the axiomatic approach of mathematicians with how physicists use mathematics.
Christopher Sykes · 5 HN recommenders
An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.
Christopher Sykes · 3 HN recommenders
A clip from the BBC Fun to Imagine series in which Richard Feynman is asked how magnets work and explains why 'why' questions depend on a shared framework of understanding and cannot always be answered in layman's terms.
Christopher Sykes · 5 HN recommenders
A 1983 BBC interview in which Richard Feynman is asked how magnets work and explains why 'why' questions are hard to answer in everyday terms. He reflects on what counts as an explanation and the limits of analogy.
TehPhysicalist · 2 HN recommenders
A ten-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing how mathematicians and physicists differ in their interests and customs. He argues physics rests on visualizing and applying math rather than pure abstraction.
Christopher Sykes · 3 HN recommenders
Richard Feynman, in a clip from the BBC series Fun to Imagine, takes on the puzzle of why mirrors seem to swap left and right but not top and bottom.
Aaron Scher · 2 HN recommenders
Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.
Christopher Sykes · 4 HN recommenders
A clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains heat as the jiggling of atoms and how we perceive it as hot and cold.
Radical Discourse · 5 HN recommenders
A hip-hop music video from EconStories in which Keynes and Hayek rap-battle over how to handle recessions and government spending. It is the second round after the first rap battle.
TEDx Talks · 3 HN recommenders
Esther Gokhale's short TEDx talk argues that the natural human spine is curved rather than straight and teaches a 'primal posture' for sitting without back pain.
Kaze Emanuar · 2 HN recommenders
Kaze Emanuar searches for the best sine approximation for the Nintendo 64, comparing the lookup tables in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time with polynomial alternatives. It walks through numerics and 3rd, 4th and 5th order approximations.
The Qualcomm Institute · 12 HN recommenders
R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.
LightningOnDemand · 2 HN recommenders
LightningOnDemand revives a pulsed Lorentz plasma cannon, using modern capacitors to extend its range and increase the delivered energy. It is a high-voltage, high-current hobby demonstration.
Derek Sivers · 3 HN recommenders
Derek Sivers annotates a short clip of a lone dancer at a festival, showing how a first follower turns a ridiculous act into a movement. He draws out lessons about leadership and making it easy to follow.
SpaceX · 2 HN recommenders
Sped-up onboard camera footage of the Falcon 9 first stage landing on a drone ship during the THAICOM 8 mission on May 27, 2016. It shows the descent from grid fin deployment to touchdown.
Linus Tech Tips · 2 HN recommenders
Linus Tech Tips opens up an M1 MacBook Air to test whether better thermal pads could improve performance in the fanless design. It looks at what Apple left on the table.