THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
Australian Phoenix CyberOps · 3 HN recommenders
A 57-minute account of Clifford Stoll's tracking of a KGB-linked hacker through Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers in 1986, the story of The Cuckoo's Egg. It covers the FBI and Chaos Computer Club involvement.
GBPPR2 · 2 HN recommenders
The 1990 NOVA documentary follows astronomer Clifford Stoll as he tracks a hacker through military and research computer networks, a story that involved the CIA and KGB. It is based on The Cuckoo's Egg.
DragonFartOutLoud · 3 HN recommenders
A WGBH/NOVA re-enactment of Clifford Stoll's hunt for KGB-linked hacker Markus Hess, based on his book The Cuckoo's Egg. It starts from a 75-cent accounting discrepancy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Ivica Stojkov · 3 HN recommenders
A full-length album by The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, a dark, cinematic electronic jazz group. It runs about 55 minutes across nine tracks.
American Museum of Natural History · 3 HN recommenders
The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.
bigclivedotcom · 5 HN recommenders
Big Clive tears down the Dubai lamp, a Philips LED bulb developed with Dubai's ruler for maximum efficiency and long life. He examines its construction and circuitry, including underrun LEDs and many filament strips.
ClojureTV · 10 HN recommenders
Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs. It ends with a call to action for building systems holistically.
Accursed Farms · 3 HN recommenders
Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.
Technology Connections · 7 HN recommenders
Technology Connections explains how LED traffic lights, which do not melt snow, drew complaints and were blamed for accidents. He uses it to illustrate the 'but sometimes' fallacy against new technology.
Technology Connections · 2 HN recommenders
A Technology Connections video weighing LED streetlights against high pressure sodium lamps, covering efficiency, color, cost and light pollution. It is a follow-up to his earlier explanation of why street lights are orange.
CosmoSpeedruns · 2 HN recommenders
Cosmo's 22:38 Ocarina of Time speedrun, performed live at AGDQ 2013. The runner uses a complex exploit to skip much of the game.
bilkable · 2 HN recommenders
First part of a six-part recording of the 1973 Lighthill debate on AI, where Sir James Lighthill's critical report on AI research was contested by figures including McCarthy and Michie.
Franklyn · 2 HN recommenders
An 8-minute explainer on the Lightning Network and how it relates to Segwit, Bitcoin and Litecoin. It covers how off-chain payment channels route payments to scale blockchain transactions.
School of Convergence Science · 3 HN recommenders
MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.
Not Just Bikes · 5 HN recommenders
Not Just Bikes explains how small pockets of shops and restaurants inside residential Dutch neighbourhoods create liveliness and help reduce traffic. It argues this kind of mixed-use design has been illegal in most of the US and Canada for a century because of zoning, and should be brought back.
AVweb · 3 HN recommenders
AVweb's Paul Bertorelli explains why general aviation has failed to replace leaded avgas, blaming industry inertia, bureaucratic delay and an exemption that removes the incentive. This is part one of two.
AVweb · 3 HN recommenders
AVweb's Paul Bertorelli explains in part two of a series why general aviation has not replaced leaded avgas. He covers industry inertia, bureaucratic delays and the exemption that lets the industry keep using lead.
Historia Civilis · 4 HN recommenders
Historia Civilis tells the story of 46 BCE, the 445-day year in which Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar. It covers the political context, including the civil war, Cato and Cicero.
LastWeekTonight · 6 HN recommenders
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on state lotteries. It argues that the claim that lotteries fund education is misleading, because the money is fungible and often diverted to general funds.
Matt Mayfield Music · 3 HN recommenders
A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.
Ben Woodhams · 15 HN recommenders
A three-minute parody of Adam Curtis's documentary style, assembled from archive footage with his typical narration and leaps of logic.
bitbutter · 4 HN recommenders
An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.
VblankEntertainment · 4 HN recommenders
Making-of video about ROM City Rampage, the NES version of Retro City Rampage, covering how the game's core was crunched to run on real 8-bit hardware and how NES games are made.
Yannic Kilcher · 3 HN recommenders
Yannic Kilcher interviews Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, about the company's funding, its mission, and the release of Stable Diffusion. Topics include access to compute, handling harmful outputs, and avoiding the corrupting influence of profit.
Veritasium · 6 HN recommenders
Veritasium tells the story of Thomas Midgley Jr., who introduced leaded gasoline and CFCs, and covers the science behind lead exposure and ozone damage. It also touches on isotope geochemistry used to uncover the history.
BobbyBroccoli · 6 HN recommenders
BobbyBroccoli's first of three parts on Jan Hendrik Schon, the Bell Labs postdoc whose fabricated organic semiconductor results nearly won a Nobel Prize. It covers his rise and the context around Bell Labs.
BobbyBroccoli · 2 HN recommenders
BobbyBroccoli's first of two long documentaries about Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist who faked human cloning results. It tells the story of the scandal that shook a country.
Veritasium · 2 HN recommenders
Veritasium tells the story of Kary Mullis, the surfer and LSD user who invented PCR and won a Nobel Prize. It explains how PCR works and how it was developed at Cetus.
Numberphile · 8 HN recommenders
Numberphile visits Cliff Stoll, the man behind ACME Klein Bottles, and sees how he stores a thousand glass Klein bottles in a crawlspace under his house. A remote-controlled forklift fetches them.
Real Stories · 2 HN recommenders
A documentary on Clive Wearing, a renowned musician whose brain was damaged by a virus in 1985, leaving him with a memory spanning only about seven seconds. It follows his life and condition.
Domain of Science · 4 HN recommenders
An animated 11-minute tour of the whole field of mathematics as a single map, showing how pure and applied math and their sub-fields relate to each other.
Blue Mars · 3 HN recommenders
A documentary following Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society as they push the Mars Direct plan for sending humans to Mars using current technology and local resources. It also covers the clash with NASA's more expensive approach.
Every Frame a Painting · 6 HN recommenders
An Every Frame a Painting video essay asking why Marvel films lack memorable musical themes. It blames temp tracks and directors scoring to filler music.
Real Engineering · 3 HN recommenders
Real Engineering explains the materials science behind metal 3D printing, including crystal structure, laser sintering, and why printed parts develop fatigue cracks. It shows how process imperfections limit the strength of printed metal.
PBS Infinite Series · 4 HN recommenders
A PBS Infinite Series episode explaining the mathematics of quantum computers, including how qubits store complex numbers and how quantum computation differs from classical computation. Hosted by Kelsey Houston-Edwards.
TEDx Talks · 6 HN recommenders
Ruben Meerman presents a TEDx talk on the stoichiometry of weight loss, showing with lab demonstrations where fat goes when it is lost. He argues that most of it is exhaled as carbon dioxide.
ScienceClic English · 3 HN recommenders
The first of an eight-part ScienceClic series building general relativity, covering worldlines, proper time and coordinate systems with animated visualizations.
Unreal Engine · 2 HN recommenders
Epic's Unreal Engine 5 tech demo set in the Matrix universe, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. It moves from a cinematic to a playable car chase through a large detailed city, with a behind-the-scenes look at the rendering at the end.
ClojureTV · 2 HN recommenders
A Clojure/conj 2019 talk by Wilker Silva on how namespace-qualified keywords and context-free federated names can be used pragmatically for data modeling, drawn from his experience at Nubank. It builds toward a graph-based view of connecting data from many sources.
3Blue1Brown · 4 HN recommenders
3Blue1Brown explains why positive results on accurate medical tests are often false positives, and reframes Bayes' rule using likelihood ratios (Bayes factors) to update odds. It uses visual examples to make the reasoning intuitive.
SF Python · 3 HN recommenders
Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.
Tech Ma · 2 HN recommenders
Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental strategies he uses when programming in Python, such as chunking, solving a simpler related problem, and repeating tasks manually until patterns emerge. This version is re-synced with the slides.
Healthcare Triage · 4 HN recommenders
A short Healthcare Triage episode by Aaron Carroll arguing that milk gets an undeserved pass in efforts to improve diets. It examines claims about calcium and bone strength and concludes you don't need to drink milk.
Dave's Garage · 4 HN recommenders
Dave Plummer interviews Dave Cutler, architect of VMS and Windows NT, in a roughly three-hour conversation about his career and the history of Windows.
SmarterEveryDay · 2 HN recommenders
Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.
Not Just Bikes · 2 HN recommenders
Not Just Bikes looks at the tiny microcars such as the Canta seen around Amsterdam. It discusses how they serve people with mobility issues, can use bike paths under certain rules, and where they fit in a 21st century city.
acapellascience · 2 HN recommenders
A Capella Science parody of Ed Sheeran's Shape of You, rewritten about molecular bonding and orbitals and sung a cappella.
minutephysics · 4 HN recommenders
A minutephysics explainer showing that the Moon's path around the Sun is not a spiral but closer to a 12-sided polygon with curved corners. It argues the Moon arguably orbits the Sun rather than the Earth.
3Blue1Brown · 7 HN recommenders
3Blue1Brown shows how the uncertainty principle arises from Fourier transforms. A wave packet cannot be narrow in both position and frequency, so the principle is a property of waves rather than of measurement.
Veritasium · 3 HN recommenders
A Veritasium video that runs the 2-4-8 rule-guessing puzzle on people to show how they test only examples that confirm their hypothesis. It uses this to illustrate confirmation bias and falsification.
WonderWhy · 2 HN recommenders
WonderWhy surveys complex international borders, including enclaves like Vatican City, San Marino and Lesotho, the enclave-within-enclave town of Baarle, and the India-Bangladesh Cooch Behar region.
bigclivedotcom · 2 HN recommenders
BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.
Vox · 5 HN recommenders
Vox Earworm explains why John Coltrane's Giant Steps is so hard to improvise over: it is fast and moves through three keys. Musicians Braxton Cook and Adam Neely walk the host through the underlying music theory.
TEDx Talks · 2 HN recommenders
Psychiatrist Daniel Amen discusses lessons from 83,000 brain scans, arguing that brain activity patterns relate to psychological symptoms and that you can improve your brain.
wonderingmind42 · 13 HN recommenders
Part 1 of a lecture by physicist Albert Bartlett on the exponential function and its consequences for population growth, resource use and energy. It argues that steady growth rates quickly lead to enormous quantities.
ANDREW HUANG · 3 HN recommenders
Andrew Huang explains the harmonic series, which he calls the foundation of almost all music. He builds the idea up step by step, with demonstrations of overtones and how harmonies derive from them.
Veritasium · 5 HN recommenders
Veritasium's explainer on entropy, presented as one of physics' most important and least understood concepts. It uses examples such as heat engines and the sun's energy flowing through the Earth.
Veritasium · 6 HN recommenders
Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.
Veritasium · 2 HN recommenders
Veritasium visits Chernobyl, Fukushima and other places to find who on Earth is exposed to the most ionizing radiation. The answer turns out to be surprising and puts radiation risk in context.
Veritasium · 5 HN recommenders
Veritasium tells the story of the Fast Fourier Transform, from its use in detecting nuclear tests to Cold War politics, and how it could have changed the arms race. It includes a short, intuitive explanation of what the Fourier transform does.