THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
LastWeekTonight · 5 HN recommenders
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on municipal violations. It shows how small fines and fees escalate for people who cannot pay and how private probation and ticket revenue can ruin lives.
Policy-Relevant Science & Technology · 2 HN recommenders
A Munk Debate on the proposition that AI research and development poses an existential threat. Yoshua Bengio and Max Tegmark argue for it, and Melanie Mitchell and Yann LeCun argue against.
seandulac · 11 HN recommenders
A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.
TEDx Talks · 3 HN recommenders
Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.
Tantacrul · 2 HN recommenders
Tantacrul analyzes how stock music in reality TV uses blunt, repeated tropes to manipulate viewers, comparing it to nature documentaries. He ties it to ideas of reification and cultural homogenization.
Tantacrul · 8 HN recommenders
Tantacrul dissects the UX and UI of Avid's Sibelius music notation software, going through a long list of bad design choices. The review is both a comic rant and a practical lesson in interface design.
Tantacrul · 4 HN recommenders
Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.
Tantacrul · 2 HN recommenders
Tantacrul critiques the UX and UI of Steinberg's Dorico music notation software, comparing it with Sibelius and user testing it with real musicians alongside his own attempt to compose in it.
Adam Neely · 11 HN recommenders
Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.
TEDx Talks · 2 HN recommenders
Christian Picciolini tells how he became a white supremacist at 14 and led America's first neo-Nazi skinhead gang, then how he left. He shares a counterintuitive approach to countering hate and co-founded Life After Hate.
Sabine Hossenfelder · 2 HN recommenders
Sabine Hossenfelder explains why she left academia, criticizing its incentives, funding and career structure. She gives a personal account of the social problems in science.
Tony Heller · 3 HN recommenders
Tony Heller presents a short video arguing that climate science relies on data truncation, cherry-picking and selective presentation of statistics. It is a one-sided polemic against mainstream climate claims.
Maggie Mae Fish · 3 HN recommenders
Maggie Mae Fish analyzes the documentary My Octopus Teacher as an eco-horror film, critiquing it as a story of a man projecting his own needs onto a wild animal.
mikeselectricstuff · 3 HN recommenders
Mike of mikeselectricstuff shows his heavily modified old BBC Micro system in a 28-minute tour of 8-bit hardware archaeology.
linux conf au 2017 - Hobart, Australia · 2 HN recommenders
Hamish Coleman describes reverse engineering the keyboard controller in a Thinkpad and reflashing it with custom firmware. He covers how Lenovo secures its firmware, and his ongoing work on the protocol between the BIOS and the vendor flash tool.
TED · 2 HN recommenders
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.
Veritasium · 2 HN recommenders
Veritasium's Derek Muller explains his hypothesis that YouTube's algorithm, not viewer preference, drives views, and that click-through rate has become the key metric. He argues this pushes creators toward clickable titles and thumbnails and leads to burnout.
Power Pak · 4 HN recommenders
A long video essay on MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod uploaded by an anonymous user that hides unsettling secrets in its walls. It tells the story of the map, its mystery and its liminal horror.
AncestryFoundation · 2 HN recommenders
Todd Becker's Ancestral Health Symposium talk arguing that myopia is driven by near-work and can be reversed, covering the biology and epidemiology and experimental evidence for reversal by using weaker lenses.
SmarterEveryDay · 4 HN recommenders
Smarter Every Day films Prince Rupert's drops, tempered glass drops, in high-speed slow motion at 130,000 fps. It shows how the drop's heavy internal stress lets the head survive hits while the tail shatters the whole thing.
N N Taleb's Probability Questions · 2 HN recommenders
Nassim Taleb argues that evidence on terrorism risk presented in media is statistically naive, using extreme value theory without math to separate fat-tailed risks like Ebola and terrorism from thin-tailed ones.
suckerpinch · 7 HN recommenders
Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) presents a deliberately trollish computer architecture built on IEEE-754 floating point, using NaN and infinity to define logic gates. He builds working hardware around the idea.
acapellascience · 4 HN recommenders
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.
NardwuarServiette · 3 HN recommenders
Nardwuar interviews Pharrell and Shay of N.E.R.D. in Vancouver, using his trademark deep research and gifts. The extended version runs about ten minutes.
genuinelyfunnynazi · 2 HN recommenders
The first episode of Nathan Barley, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker's British sitcom satirizing hip media and startup scenesters in mid-2000s Shoreditch. Cynical writer Dan Ashcroft finds himself idolized by the moronic Nathan Barley.
PyCon 2018 · 2 HN recommenders
Nathaniel J. Smith's PyCon 2018 talk introducing Trio, a Python concurrency library designed around usability and structured concurrency. He live-codes a problem and analyzes pitfalls in other async libraries.
LastWeekTonight · 2 HN recommenders
A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on native advertising, showing how ads are disguised as editorial content in news media, including BuzzFeed and major newspapers.
60 Minutes · 2 HN recommenders
A 60 Minutes segment in which Navy pilots describe encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, ahead of a report due to Congress.
Douglas Lanman · 2 HN recommenders
A SIGGRAPH 2013 demo from Douglas Lanman and NVIDIA of near-eye light field displays, which allow much thinner head-mounted displays that still show accurate focus and depth cues.
Kirsten Dirksen · 4 HN recommenders
Kirsten Dirksen visits retired mailman Russ Finch in Alliance, Nebraska, who grows oranges, figs and pomegranates in a backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. The greenhouse uses the stable temperature of the earth, with underground earth tubes, to heat and cool itself.
Evan Schurr · 3 HN recommenders
A short, music-driven video built from Neil deGrasse Tyson's remarks on why advancing the space frontier matters, contrasting NASA's small budget with war spending and stressing inspiration.
D- Angel · 2 HN recommenders
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.
Patrick Boyle · 2 HN recommenders
Patrick Boyle's deadpan account of Saudi Arabia's Neom and The Line megaproject, a planned 170 km linear city that has been scaled back to a fraction of its size. He covers the feasibility problems and the financing.
Brad Fitzpatrick · 2 HN recommenders
Brad Fitzpatrick records himself struggling to silence a set of first-generation Nest Protect smoke alarms that keep beeping and triggering one another.
LastWeekTonight · 2 HN recommenders
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on net neutrality, explaining the stakes of the FCC's push to roll back the rules and urging viewers to file comments. It is a comedic but substantive explainer.
LastWeekTonight · 7 HN recommenders
John Oliver's 13-minute Last Week Tonight segment explains the 2014 net neutrality fight over cable companies creating unequal internet speeds. It uses comedy to make a dull regulatory topic engaging and tells viewers how to comment to the FCC.
media.ccc.de · 2 HN recommenders
Netanel Rubin's 31C3 talk chains Perl's syntax quirks into a powerful remote code execution attack, taking down popular Perl-based projects.
netdevconf · 2 HN recommenders
John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.
Matt Marenghi · 5 HN recommenders
A Netflix JavaScript talk on using Reactive Extensions (Rx) for asynchronous UI code. It covers Observables, composing events such as drag and drop, and sequencing Ajax requests.
znoopy2k · 5 HN recommenders
Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.
Welch Labs · 3 HN recommenders
The first of a short series by Welch Labs on building a complete neural network in Python. It introduces the data and the architecture of a simple network before later parts cover forward propagation, gradient descent, and backpropagation.
Michael McGrath · 3 HN recommenders
The BBC radio play adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, running about two hours. It features professional voice acting, sound effects and music.
Anders Kaestner · 3 HN recommenders
A short film made with cold neutron imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institut showing a moka pot brewing coffee, sped up four times. The neutron beam makes the water and steam inside the pot visible.
Matthias random stuff · 3 HN recommenders
Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.
Kirsten Dirksen · 3 HN recommenders
Kirsten Dirksen tours new Earthships, homes built from tires, bottles and cans that generate their own energy, collect water and grow food. The video covers the newer, cheaper Encounter model and its passive systems.
Ableton · 3 HN recommenders
Adam Neely's Ableton Loop 2017 talk links rhythm, pitch and synaesthesia. He shows that polyrhythms sped up become chords, so tempo and pitch are related by ratios.
NASA's Ames Research Center · 2 HN recommenders
A NASA and Durham University supercomputer simulation suggesting the Moon may have formed within hours of a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body. It is one of the highest-resolution giant-impact simulations run.
John Lin · 2 HN recommenders
John Lin reveals a rewritten voxel engine demonstrated in a Crystal Islands scene, with much finer voxel detail, fast collision, fracture and path-traced global illumination.
jarhead96 · 2 HN recommenders
A short NIST-based demonstration places a room furnished with old natural-material furniture beside one with modern synthetic furnishings and burns both. The modern room reaches full flashover in a few minutes while the legacy room is only starting to spread.
Computer History Museum · 2 HN recommenders
A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.
hoffman60613 · 3 HN recommenders
A 1991 NeXT promotional video that stages a head-to-head programming contest between a NeXT computer and a Sun workstation. It shows NeXT's interface builder and object-oriented tooling producing an application far faster than traditional UNIX development.
blatherskyte · 3 HN recommenders
Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.
unprompted · 9 HN recommenders
Nicholas Carlini of Anthropic talks at [un]prompted 2026 about how adversaries could misuse current LLMs for attacks. He shows recent models finding zero-day vulnerabilities in heavily tested software, including a SQL injection in Ghost.
YUI Library · 3 HN recommenders
Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.
Science, Technology & the Future · 2 HN recommenders
An interview with Nick Bostrom at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute presenting his simulation argument: at least one of three propositions about posthuman civilizations and ancestor simulations must be true.
DEFCONConference · 4 HN recommenders
At DEF CON 27, Nina Kollars tells how buying Nespresso capsules on eBay led her to investigate fraudsters reselling goods bought with stolen credit cards. She describes her non-technical tracking and reporting efforts.
Low Carb Down Under · 3 HN recommenders
Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise, speaks at Low Carb Gold Coast 2017 about the history and health implications of vegetable and seed oils. She covers the political and institutional forces behind dietary fat advice.
Game Maker's Toolkit · 3 HN recommenders
Game Maker's Toolkit examines Nintendo's design approach of starting from a core play mechanic, making it fun, and building around it. Examples include Mario's jump and Luigi's Mansion's vacuum.
superbikeschool · 2 HN recommenders
California Superbike School demonstrates its 'No B.S.' bike, which has fixed handlebars so riders can only steer with body lean. It illustrates how little control that gives compared with countersteering.
The Chieftain · 5 HN recommenders
Armor expert The Chieftain explains why tanks still have a place on the modern battlefield despite drones and guided weapons. He responds to the 'tank is dead' debate, noting that tanks have been declared dead repeatedly since 1919.