THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
Andy80o · 2 HN recommenders
Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.
Chomsky's Philosophy · 3 HN recommenders
A nine-minute excerpt from the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent in which Noam Chomsky summarizes how corporate media shapes public discourse.
k1mk1mk1m · 3 HN recommenders
A 1996 BBC interview in which Noam Chomsky explains his propaganda model of the media to Andrew Marr, including how filters shape what journalists report and the role of self-censorship.
Santarchy · 2 HN recommenders
A 1997 Noam Chomsky talk at Northeastern University about the gap between free-market rhetoric and practice. He argues that business relies heavily on state intervention, and he discusses trade, NAFTA and labour versus capital mobility.
Al Jazeera English · 2 HN recommenders
A short Al Jazeera animation narrated by Amy Goodman presenting Noam Chomsky's five filters of the mass media: ownership, advertising, media elite sourcing, flak and a common enemy. It is part of the MediaTheorised series.
gar1t · 2 HN recommenders
A short satirical sketch in which a Q&A about web servers turns into a profane rant about threads, blocking and non-blocking I/O. It lampoons the hype around Node.js and async programming.
PBS Space Time · 5 HN recommenders
PBS Space Time explains Noether's theorem: conservation laws such as energy and momentum are consequences of deeper symmetries. It also covers why those laws hold only under certain conditions.
Alexander Budde · 3 HN recommenders
A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.
Anders Puck Nielsen · 2 HN recommenders
Anders Puck Nielsen analyzes the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage using Kilcullen's theory of liminal warfare and prospect theory. He argues from the operational design that Russia is the most likely culprit, then discusses how hybrid warfare might be used against Europe.
Nordic.js · 3 HN recommenders
Douglas Crockford's Nordic.js 2014 talk on 'the better parts' of JavaScript and programming in general. He argues against `this`, `new` and ES6 classes, and for classless, composition-based object patterns, with some broader remarks on building better structures for the future.
Ray “PODAN” Dorschner · 2 HN recommenders
Norm Macdonald's 2015 appearance on Letterman's final Late Show, delivering a deadpan bit about Germany and its military history. Jerry Seinfeld reportedly called it Norm's best joke.
Tantacrul · 6 HN recommenders
Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.
Nick Black · 4 HN recommenders
A seven-minute demo from the author of Notcurses, a C library for text user interfaces. It shows the 2.3.0 release, which adds Sixel and Kitty bitmap graphics integrated into its multiplane character-graphics model.
cnxlinux · 2 HN recommenders
Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.
HUP · 9 HN recommenders
Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.
Belfer Center · 4 HN recommenders
Harvard Belfer Center lecture by Matthew Bunn explaining how nuclear bombs work, including fission and fusion weapons and which parts of bomb-making are hard. It is part 1 of 2 in the Nuclear 101 series.
US National Archives · 2 HN recommenders
A 1968 NASA film from the US National Archives explaining why the US needed a nuclear rocket and how the engine works. It also shows combined nuclear and chemical stages for a manned Mars mission.
LastWeekTonight · 4 HN recommenders
A Last Week Tonight segment on the US nuclear arsenal and how poorly it is maintained and secured. It covers weapons accidents, outdated launch protocols and security problems.
Mathologer · 4 HN recommenders
Mathologer examines the infamous Numberphile claim that 1+2+3+... equals -1/12, explaining what is wrong with the calculation and how it connects to real math like the zeta function and analytic continuation.
Centrum Nadania · 6 HN recommenders
A roughly three-hour San Francisco workshop by Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication, with full English subtitles added by a fan. He teaches the model with his jackal and giraffe language examples.
NVScene · 3 HN recommenders
Johann Korndorfer's NVScene 2015 talk on building content with signed distance functions. It focuses on patterns that make SDF modelling more structured, arguing that SDFs capture a shape's essence like vector graphics do compared with polygons or voxels.
OktaDev · 7 HN recommenders
Okta developer advocate Nate Barbettini explains OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in a roughly hour-long talk. It starts from the problems the protocols solve and walks through the flows. The description notes the implicit flow material is now out of date.
Brian Will · 13 HN recommenders
Brian Will makes the case for procedural programming over object-oriented programming, arguing that OOP's promised encapsulation and decoupling are largely illusory. He analyzes real code examples and the problems of tying data to behavior in classes.
Brian Will · 6 HN recommenders
Brian Will follows up his earlier anti-OOP video by walking through four short code examples, including Java code in the style of Uncle Bob, to show how object-oriented design complicates simple programs. It argues that OOP hides and scatters state and adds needless indirection.
Brian Will · 2 HN recommenders
Brian Will critiques object-oriented programming and rewrites a roughly 3800-line OO program in a procedural style, cutting code and complexity. It is part of a series of OOP critiques.
Linking Your Thinking with Nick Milo · 3 HN recommenders
A 12-minute beginner lesson from Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking series introducing the Obsidian note-taking app and the first steps to start using it.
OCamlWorkshops · 2 HN recommenders
A one-hour OCaml Workshop 2020 talk on the state of the OCaml Platform, covering IDE support, next steps for the tooling and plans for 2020-2021.
Games Done Quick · 2 HN recommenders
A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.
Meta VR · 3 HN recommenders
John Carmack live-codes a simple VR application at Oculus Connect 2 using a Racket-based environment for rapid development and deployment on Gear VR.
Meta VR · 2 HN recommenders
John Carmack's keynote at Oculus Connect 2014 about the Gear VR and development stories from building it. He discusses mobile GPU optimization, latency, and display ideas like programmable interlacing.
Y Combinator · 2 HN recommenders
A Startup School 2013 session where Paul Graham and Sam Altman hold live office hours with startups including CodeCombat, Flexport and others. The founders pitch and get on-the-spot feedback.
OK Go · 2 HN recommenders
OK Go's music video for Needing/Getting, shot in the desert with a Chevy Sonic fitted with pneumatic arms that play over a thousand instruments across two miles.
OK Go · 5 HN recommenders
OK Go's music video for This Too Shall Pass, featuring a huge Rube Goldberg machine built in a warehouse in Los Angeles with Syyn Labs. The band interacts with the contraption in one continuous take.
OKGoVEVO · 3 HN recommenders
OK Go's music video for Upside Down & Inside Out, filmed during parabolic flights so the band and performers are weightless in the plane.
Technology Connections · 4 HN recommenders
Technology Connections explains why American cars all had the same standardized sealed-beam headlights until 1957. It covers the regulations behind the design and the effect on night visibility.
Arrested DevOps · 3 HN recommenders
A podcast episode of Arrested DevOps with Andrew Clay Shafer and Bryan Cantrill, featuring Cantrill's rant on integrity in companies and technology.
GOTO Conferences · 4 HN recommenders
Kevlin Henney's GOTO 2018 talk argues that much of what looks new in software is a recycling of concepts with long histories. It draws on history to show the slow, steady current beneath constant churn in frameworks and trends.
Technology Connections · 6 HN recommenders
Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.
Technology Connections · 6 HN recommenders
Technology Connections explains how old-fashioned non-electronic rice cookers work, using a magnet and spring switch tripped by the Curie point. It shows the thermodynamics and magnetism behind a simple appliance.
Kirsten Dirksen · 2 HN recommenders
Kirsten Dirksen visits the Providence Arcade, the oldest US indoor mall, which was converted into 225-square-foot micro-lofts classified as a rooming house.
The Toaster Challenge · 3 HN recommenders
Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.
ClojureTV · 3 HN recommenders
David Nolen presents Om Next, the redesign of the ClojureScript Om library, drawing on Relay, Netflix's JSONGraph and Datomic. He covers the tradeoffs in handling the client-server boundary over immutable data.
PapersWeLove · 5 HN recommenders
Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.
Tom Wildenhain · 8 HN recommenders
A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.
Veritasium · 10 HN recommenders
Veritasium explores the Prisoner's Dilemma and Axelrod's tournaments, showing why tit-for-tat and forgiving strategies win in repeated games. It extends the ideas to cooperation in evolution and conflict.
CGP Grey · 2 HN recommenders
CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.
RetroDemoScene · 2 HN recommenders
Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.
52 Living Ideas · 3 HN recommenders
Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.
Computer History Museum · 6 HN recommenders
Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.
OpenAI · 2 HN recommenders
OpenAI's 2021 live demo of Codex translating natural language into code, from Hello World to building a game and a Microsoft Word plugin.
Two Minute Papers · 2 HN recommenders
Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.
Cognitive Revolution "How AI Changes Everything" · 3 HN recommenders
A podcast episode in which GPT-4 red teamer Nathan Labenz describes using the model before release, finding it human-level but not human-like, and discussing its weaknesses and worrying capabilities. It closes with speculation about GPT-5.
New York Times Opinion · 3 HN recommenders
A New York Times Opinion documentary tracing Soviet and KGB disinformation, from the 1980s AIDS origin hoax to modern campaigns like Pizzagate. It features former KGB officers and the people who tried to counter the lies.
LastWeekTonight · 3 HN recommenders
John Oliver's second Last Week Tonight segment on the opioid epidemic, covering the role of large companies in driving it. It touches on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family.
LastWeekTonight · 3 HN recommenders
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the Sackler family and how they have handled opioid lawsuits. It covers how hard they fought to defend their name and is the third of three segments on the opioid crisis.
LastWeekTonight · 5 HN recommenders
A Last Week Tonight segment on the US opioid epidemic, tracing how prescription painkillers fed addiction and heroin use. It is the first of three episodes the show devoted to the crisis.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · 5 HN recommenders
Kurzgesagt's short animated take on optimistic nihilism. It argues the universe has no inherent meaning, so we are free to create our own and enjoy life.
Andrew Huberman · 2 HN recommenders
A Huberman Lab episode on setting up a workspace for productivity, focus and creativity, covering light, posture, movement and sound. It touches on ideas like ceiling height and the effect of screens on the brain.
Computer History Museum · 2 HN recommenders
A Computer History Museum oral history of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502 and the Commodore PET, covering his career from GE through Motorola and MOS Technology. It runs nearly four hours.
Computer History Museum · 2 HN recommenders
A Computer History Museum oral history interview with Dave Cutler, covering his youth, early work on operating systems at DuPont and Digital Equipment, and his path toward VMS and Windows NT. This is part one of a long-form interview.