THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
SmarterEveryDay · 6 HN recommenders
Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.
Tom Scott · 4 HN recommenders
Tom Scott describes trying ChatGPT to fix his Gmail labels and being unsettled by how capable it was. He argues that we cannot know where we are on the technology curve, comparing it to Napster.
SmarterEveryDay · 9 HN recommenders
Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.
Miniminuteman · 4 HN recommenders
Miniminuteman begins a long, humorous point-by-point debunking of Graham Hancock's Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse and its claims of a lost ice-age civilization. It is part one of a multi-part critique.
Bisqwit · 2 HN recommenders
Bisqwit writes a raytracer from scratch in C++ for DOS, rendering in the 16-color VGA palette at 640x480. The video also covers color quantization and ordered dithering.
Wild West Hackin' Fest · 5 HN recommenders
Deviant Ollam, head of a physical penetration testing team, presents tactics for getting into buildings, from bypassing door levers with a wire to defeating bank doors. He argues that physical security is often surprisingly weak.
Larken Rose · 4 HN recommenders
A short anarchist-leaning video by Larken Rose arguing that the Constitution and similar documents cannot legitimately grant anyone the right to take other people's property. It uses a rhetorical 'paper that lets me rob you' setup to challenge belief in political authority.
I, Pencil · 3 HN recommenders
A short film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute adapting Leonard Read's 1958 essay I, Pencil, showing how no one person knows how to make a pencil and how many people cooperate without central planning.
Alex Booker · 4 HN recommenders
First of a three-part tutorial series on the i3 tiling window manager for Linux. It explains what i3 is, how to install it on Ubuntu, and how to use it.
jarkkkoo · 2 HN recommenders
A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.
engineerguy · 4 HN recommenders
Bill Hammack of engineerguy uses slow motion video to show how the IBM Selectric typewriter works. He focuses on its fully mechanical digital-to-analog converter, which turns key presses into rotation of the type ball.
Black Hat · 3 HN recommenders
Karla Burnett presents real phishing campaigns run against a Bay Area tech company, including conversion rates and how existing protections were bypassed. She argues for evidence-based techniques to prevent credential phishing, not just mitigate it.
Jonathan Blow · 7 HN recommenders
Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.
Dan Lewis · 3 HN recommenders
Dick Hardt's fast-paced OSCON keynote on Identity 2.0 and the move toward user-centric digital identity. It is also famous for its rapid-fire, many-slide presentation style.
Carefree Wandering · 2 HN recommenders
A philosophy lecture by Professor Moeller on the philosophy of identity. It builds on a discussion of Abigail Thorn's video and covers authenticity, sincerity and how online profiles reshape identity.
The Royal Institution · 3 HN recommenders
Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.
Medlife Crisis · 2 HN recommenders
A doctor from Medlife Crisis explains in under three minutes why even a rich patient should not simply order every medical test, touching on pre-test probability and Bayesian reasoning. False positives make blanket testing counterproductive.
Steven Brant · 2 HN recommenders
A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · 3 HN recommenders
A Kurzgesagt video on the conditions in which most farm animals are raised. It argues that cruelty is for cheaper rather than better meat, and that a small price increase per meal could avoid most of the suffering.
illumos · 2 HN recommenders
Bryan Cantrill's illumos Day 2014 talk on running Linux containers on an illumos kernel via LX-branded zones. He covers emulating Linux syscalls on SmartOS and compares Linux and Solaris-derived systems.
Bob Nystrom · 2 HN recommenders
Bob Nystrom shows his process for hand-drawing the diagrams in his book Crafting Interpreters, from pencil sketches to tracing and inking. It is a time-lapse of the whole illustration workflow.
Welch Labs · 7 HN recommenders
The first part of Welch Labs' series on imaginary numbers, presenting them as the natural extension of the number line into two dimensions. It covers the history and the math with strong visuals.
We Deserve Less · 2 HN recommenders
A five-minute video showing how to build a counter in the Imba web programming language in under a minute, then style it.
Casey Muratori · 5 HN recommenders
Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.
NumbersUSA · 7 HN recommenders
Roy Beck's short gumball presentation using World Bank and Census data to argue that letting people immigrate to the US cannot solve world poverty because the numbers are so large. It is made by NumbersUSA, an immigration-restriction advocacy group.
Jon Gjengset · 2 HN recommenders
Jon Gjengset's roughly four-hour live stream implementing part of a BitTorrent client in Rust, following CodeCrafters' test-guided challenge. He builds from scratch and shows idiomatic error handling along the way.
Peter Silk (KestrelPi) · 2 HN recommenders
A two-minute demonstration of LucasArts' iMUSE adaptive music system in Monkey Island 2. It shows music layers and transitions changing seamlessly as the player moves.
Defend Free Speech · 3 HN recommenders
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.
Tom Scott · 2 HN recommenders
Tom Scott explains how in Norway and other Nordic countries tax returns, and so individual incomes, are public. He looks at the effects of wage transparency and whether it is a good idea, with sources listed in the description.
Folding Ideas · 17 HN recommenders
Dan Olson's 76-minute essay on flat earth belief, built around a hike to a lake to test earth's curvature. It examines the community, how YouTube promoted it, and how it connects to wider conspiracy thinking and QAnon.
Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) · 9 HN recommenders
Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.
Jacob Collier · 2 HN recommenders
Jacob Collier layers ten vocal parts to arrange and perform Harold Darke's carol "In the Bleak Midwinter", with inventive harmony and tuning.
ContraPoints · 7 HN recommenders
ContraPoints' 35-minute video essay on incels, examining the community, its worldview and how people get radicalized. It is delivered with theatrical style and an empathetic tone.
Asianometry · 2 HN recommenders
Asianometry explains why India, a chip design powerhouse, cannot fabricate chips, tracing the 1980s government attempt to build a national semiconductor champion and how it collapsed. It includes the sabotage at the SCL fab.
Andrew Millison · 3 HN recommenders
Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the village of Garavadi in Maharashtra, India, which took part in the Paani Foundation's Water Cup competition. It shows the water harvesting structures the villagers built in 45 days and how they restored groundwater and the local economy.
Andor Gafotas · 19 HN recommenders
A HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.
Ray Delahanty | CityNerd · 3 HN recommenders
CityNerd Ray Delahanty explains induced demand and what happens when freeways are widened. He walks through the economics of supply and demand applied to traffic and asks how much new traffic appears and whether congestion returns.
Mathologer · 3 HN recommenders
Mathologer uses continued fractions to show why the golden ratio is the most irrational number, comparing it with root 2, e and pi and pointing to where this shows up in nature.
Robin Baumgarten · 3 HN recommenders
A bot built by Robin Baumgarten plays Infinite Mario using A* path-finding, shown as a red planned path that updates as new obstacles appear. It won the Mario AI competitions and uses only on-screen information.
Numberphile · 3 HN recommenders
Numberphile's James Grime explains Cantor's result that some infinities are bigger than others, including why the reals outnumber the integers. It is a short, accessible introduction to countable and uncountable infinity.
The Royal Institution · 3 HN recommenders
Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.
LastWeekTonight · 2 HN recommenders
A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on America's crumbling infrastructure and why maintenance is neglected and underfunded. It mixes comedy with real examples such as aging bridges and dams.
TheCoach · 2 HN recommenders
A 1970 demonstration of W. Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, teaching a complete beginner to play tennis in about ten minutes. He chats with her, feeds balls and gives positive feedback instead of instruction.
Strange Parts · 4 HN recommenders
Strange Parts tours JLCPCB's large PCB factory in Huizhou, China, walking through the printed circuit board manufacturing process step by step. It shows the machinery, quality checks and scale behind cheap prototype boards.
Andrew Millison · 3 HN recommenders
Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison travels with the UN World Food Programme to Niger to see land recovery within the Great Green Wall, where rainwater harvesting is boosting food security and restoring the ecosystem.
Aditya Shukla · 2 HN recommenders
The full 2010 documentary Inside Job, directed by Charles Ferguson, examines the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. It traces the story through interviews with key financial and political players across several countries.
TED · 5 HN recommenders
Tim Urban's TED talk on why people procrastinate, covering YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It ends with the life-calendar idea as a nudge to act before time runs out.
AdoredTV · 3 HN recommenders
AdoredTV's history of Intel's monopolistic behavior over three decades, covering its dealings with AMD and its anti-consumer practices.
Robert Miles AI Safety · 6 HN recommenders
Robert Miles explains the orthogonality thesis: how an agent can be highly intelligent while pursuing goals that seem stupid or alien to humans. He separates intelligence from goals and touches on the stamp-collector example.
The Julia Programming Language · 6 HN recommenders
Fons van der Plas introduces Pluto.jl, a reactive notebook for Julia that tracks references between cells and re-runs affected cells when code changes. The talk was given at JuliaCon 2020.
Bruce Hauman · 6 HN recommenders
Bruce Hauman live-codes Flappy Bird in ClojureScript in about six minutes, using figwheel to hot-reload changes into the running game. The demo shows game behavior being changed interactively without restarting.
MIT MechE Lectures & Colloquia · 2 HN recommenders
An MIT colloquium by Dennis Whyte on power exhaust and first-wall cooling in fusion reactors, including recent innovations and the SPARC and ARC designs.
Kirsten Dirksen · 2 HN recommenders
A short documentary about Eric Maundu's Arduino-controlled aquaponics setup in West Oakland, where contaminated soil rules out ordinary farming. Fish and circulating water grow plants without soil.
Kai Lentit · 2 HN recommenders
Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodying an interview with an agile coach, lampooning scrum, sprints and kanban jargon. It is a few minutes of programmer humor.
The Problem With Jon Stewart · 4 HN recommenders
A short excerpt of Jon Stewart interviewing former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers about the causes of inflation and whether workers or corporate profits are to blame. It comes from an episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart.
Dogwoof · 2 HN recommenders
Official trailer for the documentary Into Eternity, about Finland's Onkalo repository, built to store high-level nuclear waste safely for 100,000 years. It raises how to warn and communicate with far-future humans.
TiXL · 3 HN recommenders
Intrinsic Gravity is a real-time demoscene production by Still, made with the Tooll tool for Under Construction 2014. It is a black-and-white op-art animation with a soundtrack by hoffman.
Robert Miles AI Safety · 6 HN recommenders
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.
Molly Rocket · 4 HN recommenders
Day 1 of Handmade Hero's introduction to C on Windows, covering setting up Visual Studio, creating a Win32 project, the WinMain entry point and writing a first function. It is the starting point for Casey Muratori's from-scratch game series.
matrixsynth · 3 HN recommenders
Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.