THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
tef ebooks · 3 HN recommenders
Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.
Chrome for Developers · 4 HN recommenders
Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.
The Documentary Network · 13 HN recommenders
Code Rush is a one-hour documentary following Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley through the company's last year as an independent firm. It covers the Mozilla open-source announcement, the frantic push to ready the source for release by March 31, 1998, and the toll on engineers' lives before the AOL acquisition.
Google · 2 HN recommenders
Google's short promo for Project Starline, a booth that shows a life-size, three-dimensional view of the person you are talking to. It presents the technology as a magic window for friends, families and co-workers who are far apart.
Extra Credits · 7 HN recommenders
An Extra Credits episode on China's Sesame Credit, which gamifies obedient citizenship through a social score. It covers how the system rewards conformity and pressures people through their friends' behavior.
minutephysics · 2 HN recommenders
minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.
AI Council · 2 HN recommenders
Paul Phillips, a major Scala compiler contributor, gives a long talk on Scala collections and views, using it to critique Scala's design and direction.
Santiago Ginnobili · 3 HN recommenders
A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.
PSBHQVEVO · 2 HN recommenders
Music video for Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" from the album The Race For Space, built from NASA audio and archival material of Apollo-era voices.
The Thought Emporium · 3 HN recommenders
The Thought Emporium shows how to receive clear images directly from GOES-15, 16 and 17 and Himawari 8 geostationary weather satellites with software-defined radio. It covers the extra effort needed to receive GOES data.
X, The Moonshot Factory · 6 HN recommenders
A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.
GOTO Conferences · 5 HN recommenders
Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.
GDC Festival of Gaming · 3 HN recommenders
At GDC 2019, Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage ask why game developers rarely sign their work. They argue that indie developers could benefit from putting their names on their games.
Insights into Mathematics · 6 HN recommenders
The first lecture of N J Wildberger's History of Mathematics course, starting with Pythagoras' theorem and following Stillwell's text. It emphasizes the flow of ideas over proofs.
Improbable Matter · 2 HN recommenders
A roughly three-hour technical livestream Q&A on Helion Energy's fusion approach and the National Ignition Facility. It covers neutron production, shielding, energy recovery, diagnostics and why tokamaks might fare better.
QuakeCon Official · 3 HN recommenders
John Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2011, an hour and a half of wide-ranging talk about id Software, Rage, engine open-sourcing, patents and programming practices.
QuakeCon Official · 6 HN recommenders
John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.
malekanoms · 2 HN recommenders
An animated xtranormal explainer on quantitative easing, what the Federal Reserve was doing and how things got there. It was made by Omid Malekan.
vpro documentary · 2 HN recommenders
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.
WIRED · 2 HN recommenders
IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.
Microsoft Research · 12 HN recommenders
An 88-minute Microsoft Research talk that explains how quantum computers beat classical ones using basic linear algebra, qubits, superposition and gates. It works through the Deutsch oracle problem and ends with entanglement, teleportation and a live demo.
Veritasium · 9 HN recommenders
Veritasium explains quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance, walking through Bell's inequality and the experiments that rule out hidden variables, in under ten minutes.
PBS Space Time · 3 HN recommenders
PBS Space Time explains the Bohr-Einstein debate over quantum mechanics and how quantum entanglement settled it. It covers the weirdness of measurement and nonlocal correlations.
Qiskit · 2 HN recommenders
Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.
ScienceClic English · 2 HN recommenders
ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.
The Royal Institution · 5 HN recommenders
David Tong, a Cambridge theoretical physicist, explains at the Royal Institution that the fundamental building blocks of nature are quantum fields rather than particles. He covers what we know about these fields and how they fit into the Standard Model.
Micah Lee · 2 HN recommenders
Micah Lee's Circle of HOPE 2018 talk on Qubes OS, which isolates activities in separate virtual machines so one compromise, such as a bad PDF or USB stick, does not expose everything. He gives an overview timed around the Qubes 4.0 release.
Cathode Ray Dude - CRD · 2 HN recommenders
Cathode Ray Dude covers two bizarre HP 'Quick Start' features: QuickLook, an offline email client built on EFI firmware, and Daystarter, which hijacks the Windows boot process. It includes an explanation of EFI applications and why HP built these things.
AlgoRythmics · 2 HN recommenders
Hungarian folk dancers from Sapientia University act out the quicksort algorithm step by step, with music. It is part of the AlgoRythmics series of sorting algorithms performed as dance.
x1x2x3ct · 2 HN recommenders
A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing it. He uses the example of knowing a bird's name in every language and still knowing nothing about the bird.
The Research and Applied AI Summit - RAAIS · 3 HN recommenders
Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, talks about "intelligence processors", chips designed specifically for machine learning. The talk was given at the RAAIS 2017 summit and covers Graphcore's architecture.
Retro Game Mechanics Explained · 2 HN recommenders
Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.
Racket · 3 HN recommenders
Dan Liebgold of Naughty Dog gives a RacketCon 2013 keynote on using Racket in PlayStation 3 game development. He explains the Racket-based DSLs used for game data and scripting, which replaced the studio's earlier GOAL-based toolchain.
Diego Ongaro · 4 HN recommenders
John Ousterhout lectures on the Raft consensus algorithm, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It covers leader election and log repair.
CYBERGEM · 2 HN recommenders
A fan-made Metal Gear Solid 2 codec call using AI voice synthesis, in which the Colonel warns Raiden about using AI to censor the internet and enforce digital ID. It riffs on the game's 'Selection for Societal Sanity' conversation.
Confreaks · 8 HN recommenders
Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.
Confreaks · 5 HN recommenders
Sandi Metz's RailsConf 2013 talk offers practical guidelines for deciding what to test and how, so tests stay cheap and stable. She argues for testing the public interface rather than implementation and using mocks appropriately.
Ruby on Rails · 6 HN recommenders
DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.
O'Reilly · 5 HN recommenders
Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.
Confreaks · 15 HN recommenders
Sandi Metz takes an ugly section of conditional code and refactors it into a few simple objects, bridging object-oriented theory and practice. The talk includes her take on the Gilded Rose refactoring kata and the idea that duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.
Confreaks · 3 HN recommenders
David Heinemeier Hansson's RailsConf 2014 keynote argues that programming is closer to writing than to science, with clear code produced by iterating through drafts. It prioritizes clarity and craft over technical superiority.
Confreaks · 3 HN recommenders
Sandi Metz argues that hidden assumptions in code are missing concepts, and shows how to name and expose them so code is easier to understand and change. It covers null objects and messages in Ruby.
Confreaks · 6 HN recommenders
Sam Stephenson's RailsConf 2016 talk on Turbolinks 5, showing how small teams can ship fast Rails apps in the browser and hybrid iOS and Android apps sharing one set of web views.
Confreaks · 4 HN recommenders
Brian Cardarella's RailsConf 2016 talk on why and how teams can move from Rails to Elixir and Phoenix. It covers performance gains without losing productivity and how to introduce Phoenix in an organization.
Confreaks · 3 HN recommenders
David Heinemeier Hansson's opening keynote at RailsConf 2019 argues against the expectation of payment for open source work, drawing on his experience releasing Rails. It also includes lighter asides about the industry.
TED · 2 HN recommenders
In an 11-minute TED talk, Ralph Langner explains how his team reverse-engineered the Stuxnet worm and worked out that it targeted industrial control systems, with a covert state origin. It is a compact look at cyber-forensics.
Mathologer · 3 HN recommenders
Mathologer examines how identities like 1+2+3+... = -1/12 arise in Ramanujan's work, starting from his 1913 letter to Hardy. The video explains the rules for summing infinite series and why such results are meaningful but not naive sums.
Numberphile · 4 HN recommenders
Numberphile with Simon Pampena on how humans misunderstand randomness, including coin-flip sequences, run lengths and the gambler's fallacy.
Carnegie Mellon University · 4 HN recommenders
Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch gives a lecture on time management at the University of Virginia in 2007. He covers practical habits such as tackling important tasks first and distinguishing important from urgent work.
Carnegie Mellon University · 12 HN recommenders
Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He reflects on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles and helping others reach theirs.
Jonathan Blow · 3 HN recommenders
Jonathan Blow's hour-long livestreamed response to a RustConf 2018 closing keynote about entity systems in Rust. He argues that index-based entity systems amount to manual memory management that sidesteps the borrow checker, and he talks about friction for game developers.
Vox · 3 HN recommenders
Vox breaks down how great rappers build rhymes, from Kurtis Blow's simple bars to Biggie's smooth flow and Kendrick Lamar's dense, fast delivery. It uses on-screen visualizations of rhyme structure.
Jon Bois · 3 HN recommenders
Jon Bois tells the story of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon, a chaotic race involving fraud, rat poison, brandy, feral dogs and near-deaths. It is an episode of his show Pretty Good.
Sidewinder77 · 2 HN recommenders
Seventeen-year-old Ray Kurzweil appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret in 1965, playing a piece of music composed by a computer program he built.
PyCon 2018 · 2 HN recommenders
Raymond Hettinger explains Python's dataclasses module, showing the problem it solves and its key design decisions. He places it in a progression from tuples and dicts through named tuples and attrs.
SF Python · 4 HN recommenders
Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2017 keynote on concurrency in Python. It covers threads, processes, asyncio, locks and the GIL, with live shell-based examples.
Dubmood · 3 HN recommenders
Razor 1911's eponymous demo celebrating 40 years of the group, which won first place at the Revision 2026 demo competition and the public's choice award. It is a retrospective of keygen and warez scene culture with chiptune music.
re:publica · 2 HN recommenders
Eben Moglen's re:publica 2012 talk argues that media which spy on and data-mine the public threaten freedom of thought, and that free technology and free culture are needed to protect it.
re:publica · 5 HN recommenders
Aral Balkan's re:publica 2015 talk argues that people are the product of surveillance-based business models. It makes an ethical case against data monopolies and for privacy as a human right.
Fraktio · 2 HN recommenders
React Helsinki meetup recording featuring a talk on lessons with Apollo GraphQL and Linear co-founder Tuomas Artman on real-time sync for web apps. The sync talk explains Linear's local-first architecture.