THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
Primer · 2 HN recommenders
Primer uses simulations to compare voting systems such as first-past-the-post, approval, ranked choice and others. It shows how each system behaves and can be manipulated, with links to further voting theory resources.
AngeTheGreat · 4 HN recommenders
AngeTheGreat describes building a physically realistic internal combustion engine simulator in C++, drawing on fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry. It generates procedural audio for engines such as a V8.
3Blue1Brown · 8 HN recommenders
3Blue1Brown builds toy SIR models to simulate how an epidemic spreads and tests scenarios like social distancing, travel restrictions, central gathering places and quarantine. It was made during the early COVID-19 outbreak.
Primer · 3 HN recommenders
Primer simulates green beard altruism, where individuals recognize and help others carrying a shared marker, and shows how imposters affect its evolution. It is an animated evolution simulation based on published papers.
LastWeekTonight · 10 HN recommenders
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of US local TV stations, and how it injects political content and scripted must-run segments into local news.
Deadspin · 3 HN recommenders
A Deadspin compilation of local news anchors at Sinclair-owned stations reading the same scripted message about irresponsible one-sided news. It was assembled by Timothy Burke.
heligone · 3 HN recommenders
A short demo of a walking droplet on a vibrating silicone oil bath passing through a double slit and producing interference, a macro-scale analogue of pilot-wave behavior.
Tom Scott · 2 HN recommenders
Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.
The Qualcomm Institute · 2 HN recommenders
A 2020 UC San Diego event with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff presenting their Orch OR theory that consciousness arises from quantum processes in brain microtubules, followed by a conversation with Roger Bingham.
Premier Unbelievable? · 2 HN recommenders
Physicist Roger Penrose and philosopher William Lane Craig discuss the origin of the universe on the Unbelievable? show. Topics include Penrose's three realms of reality, conformal cyclic cosmology and whether fine tuning points to a creator.
David Carroll · 3 HN recommenders
Earliest known footage of Ivan Sutherland's MIT PhD work, Sketchpad, the first computer graphics system, with commentary by Alan Kay. It shows light-pen drawing with constraints in a short clip.
LastWeekTonight · 2 HN recommenders
John Oliver explains SLAPP suits, lawsuits designed to silence critics through legal costs, after his show's legal fight with coal executive Bob Murray. It covers how such suits work and why state anti-SLAPP laws matter.
Stop Autonomous Weapons · 4 HN recommenders
Slaughterbots is a fictional short film, backed by Stuart Russell, depicting swarms of cheap autonomous drones that use facial recognition to assassinate targets. It was made to argue for banning autonomous weapons.
Future of Life Institute · 2 HN recommenders
An 8-minute fictional short film, made by campaigners for a ban on autonomous weapons, depicting swarms of cheap AI-guided micro-drones used to kill targeted people. It ends with a call to action against autonomous weapons.
Det Kgl. Bibliotek · 3 HN recommenders
Slavoj Zizek and Paul Holdengraber discuss surveillance and whistleblowers at the International Authors' Stage, ranging over Snowden, Assange, Pussy Riot and humor.
Christian G · 3 HN recommenders
A short excerpt from The Pervert's Guide to Ideology in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes John Carpenter's They Live. He uses the film's fight scene and sunglasses to explain how ideology works.
Numberphile · 2 HN recommenders
A Numberphile video with Dr James Grime on Sloane's Gap, the observation that integers in the OEIS are not evenly represented and some numbers are underrepresented. It explains the clusters of 'interesting' numbers.
SmarterEveryDay · 3 HN recommenders
Destin of Smarter Every Day films a cat falling in high-speed slow motion to show how cats right themselves in midair, and introduces the physics behind it.
pannenkoek2012 · 13 HN recommenders
Pannenkoek2012's commentated tool-assisted Super Mario 64 run collecting the Watch for Rolling Rocks star with half an A press, using parallel universes and QPU movement. The video is marked outdated in favor of a newer version.
Wendover Productions · 4 HN recommenders
A short Wendover Productions explainer on ETOPS, the rules that let twin-engine jets fly long routes over oceans. It covers the economics that favored twinjets like the 787 over four-engine aircraft like the A380 and 747.
Jeff Geerling · 2 HN recommenders
Jeff Geerling looks at a Sharp NEC commercial display with a slot for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module. It is a large screen without built-in smart TV features or tracking.
Christopher Roy · 4 HN recommenders
A 105-minute film of a West African smith family in Burkina Faso smelting iron from ore, from making charcoal and building the kiln to forging tools. It is a cultural recreation filmed for the camera, not current practice.
Noodle · 4 HN recommenders
Animator Noodle explains why frame interpolation does not make animation better, covering timing, easing, smear frames and using the wrong tool for the job. A pinned correction says the video is partly outdated given later AI developments.
Tim Hutton · 4 HN recommenders
Tim Hutton's demonstration of SmoothLifeL, a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life using floating point values. It shows gliders traveling in any direction, rotating pairs, and elastic cord-like structures, with config details to run it yourself.
GroundUP Music NYC · 3 HN recommenders
A live, overdub-free performance of 'Lingus' by Snarky Puppy, from the 'We Like It Here' DVD recorded in Utrecht. It features a Cory Henry keyboard solo.
SethBling · 9 HN recommenders
SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.
Technology Connextras · 3 HN recommenders
A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.
Hank Green · 2 HN recommenders
Hank Green, a TikTok creator with millions of followers, explains why he thinks TikTok underpays creators. He compares its fixed-pot creator fund with YouTube's revenue sharing.
Talks at Google · 3 HN recommenders
Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.
Zendesk · 3 HN recommenders
Glenn Vanderburg asks whether software development can be real engineering, surveying other engineering disciplines and decades of programming experience. He envisions what a software engineering worthy of the name might look like.
Greg Wilson · 2 HN recommenders
Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.
Tech Ingredients · 2 HN recommenders
Tech Ingredients builds a larger solar-powered desiccant air conditioner that uses a calcium chloride liquid desiccant with evaporative cooling to cool their lab. The video includes the engineering calculations.
Mosfilm · 2 HN recommenders
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.
EMPEX Conference · 3 HN recommenders
Sasa Juric's EMPEX talk demonstrates Elixir and Erlang's process model and what makes the BEAM runtime distinctive, such as fault-tolerant parallelism by design.
Clojure/north · 10 HN recommenders
Rafal Dittwald's Clojure/north talk shows how to move from writing Java-style code in Clojure to thinking in data-driven, functional terms. He walks through a JavaScript example, refactoring imperative code step by step into a functional core.
3Blue1Brown · 2 HN recommenders
3Blue1Brown uses Wordle as an excuse to teach information theory and entropy, building a solver that picks guesses by expected information and incorporating word frequencies.
3Blue1Brown · 2 HN recommenders
3Blue1Brown, in collaboration with minutephysics, introduces the math of superposition and quantum states using polarized light. It builds up the quantum behavior of photons as a simple counting and probability problem.
Tantacrul · 2 HN recommenders
Tantacrul examines sonification, the practice of turning data into sound or music, and critiques how scientists and musicians, including NASA and CERN projects, use it well and poorly.
Erlang Solutions · 2 HN recommenders
Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, discusses the future of microprocessors, including the economics of scaling below 28nm and why much of a chip must stay powered off.
CppCon · 7 HN recommenders
Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · 3 HN recommenders
A Kurzgesagt animation on South Korea's record-low fertility rate and rapidly aging population. It explains why a demographic collapse looks hard to reverse and projects the population shrinking sharply by 2060.
Rare Earth · 3 HN recommenders
Commander Chris Hadfield performs a revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded aboard the International Space Station. It was released as a music video in 2013.
SsethTzeentach · 3 HN recommenders
SsethTzeentach reviews Space Station 13, the chaotic multiplayer game, by recounting absurd stories of singularities, malfunctioning AIs and plasma fires.
Patrick Boyle · 2 HN recommenders
Patrick Boyle examines SpaceX's planned IPO at a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation. He covers the merging of other Musk companies, orbital data center claims and the fast-track index rules that may help the listing.
Spacevidcast · 2 HN recommenders
The full webcast of SpaceX's Falcon 1 Flight 4, the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit, on 28 September 2008. It includes the crew's cheering and Elon Musk's statement afterward.
Cliff O · 2 HN recommenders
Full recording of Elon Musk's January 2015 presentation and Q&A at the SpaceX Seattle office announcement. He lays out plans for a satellite constellation to provide low-latency global internet, tied to funding Mars ambitions. Pauses between questions have been edited out.
TED · 2 HN recommenders
A TED conversation with SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell about the company's race to put people in orbit and the BFR rocket. It also covers the idea of using the rocket for fast point-to-point travel on Earth.
Patrick Boyle · 3 HN recommenders
Patrick Boyle analyzes SpaceX's IPO prospectus, covering its financials, speculative products, AI business, related-party dealings, compensation, and a governance structure with minimal shareholder rights.
Sebastien Bubeck · 7 HN recommenders
Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.
TheMcphearson · 3 HN recommenders
A player piano is made to reproduce human speech, here reciting a European Environmental Criminal Court proclamation in German at the 2009 World Venice Forum. This upload adds subtitles so the words become understandable.
ClojureTV · 10 HN recommenders
Rich Hickey's keynote on software versioning, arguing that breaking changes are the real problem and that libraries should only grow by providing more and requiring less. It critiques semantic versioning and ties into Clojure spec.
MIT OpenCourseWare · 2 HN recommenders
A special lecture from MIT's Private Pilot Ground School in which Lt. Col. Randy Gordon, a fighter and test pilot, describes F-22 flight controls. Topics include thrust vectoring, the pilot command system and how software handles failures.
Michel van Biezen · 5 HN recommenders
The first video in a 55-part series by Michel van Biezen that introduces the Kalman filter and builds from the rationale through algebraic examples to the full matrix treatment. The videos are short, blackboard-style lectures.
Google TechTalks · 3 HN recommenders
A 2009 Google Tech Talk by Nicholas Zakas on the hidden performance pitfalls of JavaScript. It covers what is fast and slow in the language and how to avoid common bottlenecks.
AT&T Tech Channel · 2 HN recommenders
A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.
CodeParade · 3 HN recommenders
CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.
BBC Earth · 3 HN recommenders
A BBC Earth clip from The Hunt showing Portia jumping spiders, which leap many times their body length and ambush prey larger than themselves.
US Auto Industry · 5 HN recommenders
A 1936 Chevrolet-sponsored film that explains how a car transmission works by treating gears as spinning levers. It uses physical models to make the mechanism clear.
LastWeekTonight · 2 HN recommenders
A Last Week Tonight segment on sponsored content in local news. John Oliver explains why local news integrity matters and how paid content disguised as news erodes it.
The Verge · 3 HN recommenders
The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.