THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
Tom Scott · 2 HN recommenders
Tom Scott features Kurtis Baute inside a sealed homemade biodome as carbon dioxide builds up, showing how stale air with elevated CO2 affects cognitive function. Sources include studies on CO2 and cognitive scores.
Matt Risinger · 2 HN recommenders
Builders Matt Risinger and Jordan Smith visit a Swiss cross-laminated timber factory that makes thick all-wood walls with no traditional insulation and wooden nails instead of glue or chemicals. The video is sponsored by Siga.
Tom Scott · 2 HN recommenders
Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.
Tom Scott · 9 HN recommenders
Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.
TED · 2 HN recommenders
Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.
gordonmcdowell · 4 HN recommenders
A 2011 remix of over six hours of talks by Kirk Sorensen and other thorium advocates, explaining thorium as a nuclear fuel and the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). It argues LFTRs could produce energy without long-lived transuranic waste.
NativLang · 3 HN recommenders
NativLang's 47-minute animated documentary traces the birth and evolution of writing, from early cave marks to modern scripts. It presents the history of the world's writing systems as a story.
HD Retro Trailers · 5 HN recommenders
The original trailer for Threads, the 1984 British TV film depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Sheffield. The trailer hints at the film's bleak tone.
Google TechTalks · 2 HN recommenders
Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.
fin_topsu · 14 HN recommenders
A 2018 lecture, with subtitles available, by former Finnish intelligence colonel Martti J. Kari on Russian strategic culture. He walks through the historical layers of Russia and explains why the country behaves as it does.
TigerBeetle · 2 HN recommenders
Joran Dirk Greef's Systems Distributed '23 talk on TigerStyle, the engineering methodology behind TigerBeetle. It covers designing safer systems in less time through up-front design, assertions, and deterministic simulation.
60 Minutes · 2 HN recommenders
A 60 Minutes segment in which Tristan Harris contrasts TikTok with its Chinese counterpart Douyin. He argues that Chinese children get wholesome, time-limited content while the rest of the world gets the addictive version.
ClojureTV · 9 HN recommenders
Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.
stormmovie · 3 HN recommenders
Animated adaptation of Tim Minchin's beat poem 'Storm', in which he argues with a hippie at a London dinner party. It satirizes alternative medicine and defends science and reason.
melodysheep · 13 HN recommenders
A 29-minute cinematic timelapse by melodysheep that journeys trillions of years into the future, covering the death of the sun, the end of stars, proton decay, black hole evaporation and the fate of the cosmos.
Mathologer · 4 HN recommenders
Mathologer shows how times table diagrams on a circle produce cardioids and other curves connected to the Mandelbrot set. He explains the patterns and links to a tool for making your own diagrams.
LastWeekTonight · 3 HN recommenders
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on timeshares covers how people get sold into them, why they are so hard to leave, and the exit-company scams that target owners trying to get out.
Timothy Snyder · 2 HN recommenders
Historian Timothy Snyder explains the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, two ways of thinking about time that frame his books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.
YaleCourses · 6 HN recommenders
The first class of Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine. It introduces the course and asks what it means for a nation to exist in light of the Russian invasion.
Alexander Grace · 2 HN recommenders
A social experiment in which an 18-year-old woman runs a Tinder profile as a man and sees how differently the dating experience plays out for men.
Verge Science · 3 HN recommenders
Verge Science's pilot of its Trial & Error series follows amateur scientist Jon Larsen on a hunt for micrometeorites. It shows how tiny space rocks can be found on rooftops and confirmed under a microscope.
Oerg866 · 2 HN recommenders
Overdrive 2 by TiTAN, a Sega Mega Drive demo that won first place in the Oldskool competition at Revision 2017. It shows effects and 3D graphics on the stock console.
Arend Schwab · 2 HN recommenders
Arend Schwab demonstrates a research bicycle, the two-mass-skate design, that balances itself without gyroscopic effects or trail. It challenges the common explanations for why a moving bicycle stays upright.
LastWeekTonight · 6 HN recommenders
A Last Week Tonight segment on how tobacco companies sustain profits by pushing sales overseas. It covers suits against countries like Australia over plain packaging through trade-deal arbitration.
Foresight Institute · 2 HN recommenders
Tom Chi gives the opening talk of a Foresight Institute competition on clean energy and clean air, framing excess CO2 as a carbon debt to repay and discussing large-scale tree planting, including by drone.
Jared Khan · 4 HN recommenders
An amateur animation of Tom Lehrer's satirical song New Math, which pokes fun at 1960s math teaching and subtraction in base 8. The animation illustrates the old and new subtraction methods.
The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel · 2 HN recommenders
A 1967 live film of Tom Lehrer performing his patter song "The Elements" in Copenhagen, reciting the chemical elements to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. It is a short, polished example of his satirical piano-and-voice style.
The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel · 3 HN recommenders
Tom Lehrer's satirical song about Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who went from the Nazi missile program to the US space program. It includes the famous line about not caring where the rockets come down.
The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel · 2 HN recommenders
Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction. It is a two-minute musical clip.
Tom Lehrer · 2 HN recommenders
A full-length recording of Tom Lehrer's 1967 concert in Copenhagen, mixing his satirical songs with spoken comedy between numbers. It runs about 51 minutes with good audio for its age.
The British Museum · 6 HN recommenders
Tom Scott plays the Royal Game of Ur against British Museum curator Irving Finkel, who deciphered its rules from a cuneiform tablet. Finkel teaches the game and explains its history as the oldest playable board game.
Modern Vintage Gamer · 2 HN recommenders
Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.
retrogameinternals · 5 HN recommenders
Allan Blomquist demonstrates the internal programming and debugging tools Tomorrow Corporation uses to make games, including live modification of a running game and time-travel debugging.
DisneyResearchHub · 2 HN recommenders
Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.
TEDx Talks · 3 HN recommenders
Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.
markdcatlin · 2 HN recommenders
A 1966 NASA safety film teaching workers how to handle toxic rocket propellants such as hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. It explains the hazards of these corrosive, flammable and toxic chemicals and what to do after contamination.
The Linux Foundation · 5 HN recommenders
Rob Landley compares Toybox and BusyBox and surveys options for embedded system command-line tools, including GNU. He also tells the story of leaving BusyBox, Toybox becoming Android's command line, and licensing.
Ahoy · 7 HN recommenders
Ahoy's documentary traces tracker music from early Amiga software like SoundMonitor and Soundtracker through the demoscene, Protracker, and PC trackers such as Screamtracker and FastTracker. It covers the sound, culture and history of 16-bit module music.
Motherboard · 3 HN recommenders
A Motherboard documentary episode from Nebraska about farmers and mechanics fighting manufacturers like John Deere over access to the diagnostic software needed to repair modern tractors. It shows how software locks have taken away farmers' traditional self-reliance.
Y Combinator · 2 HN recommenders
Tracy Young, a former construction engineer and cofounder of PlanGrid, speaks at the 2015 Y Combinator Female Founders Conference. She talks about building software for construction superintendents and about customer success.
Not Just Bikes · 4 HN recommenders
Not Just Bikes shows how traffic calming is built into streets across the Netherlands, from city centres to villages. Street design naturally slows cars and makes roads safer.
CGP Grey · 6 HN recommenders
CGP Grey explains how traffic jams come from human driving behavior such as tailgating and reaction delays, and how leaving gaps and smoothing speed would reduce congestion. It also touches on self-driving cars.
wbeaty · 5 HN recommenders
A short video from the trafficwaves.org site showing how traffic jams and standing waves form, including the fight between cheaters and blockers at an exit-lane backup. It also touches on how individual driving behavior affects the flow.
Robert Miles AI Safety · 3 HN recommenders
Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.
3Blue1Brown · 13 HN recommenders
3Blue1Brown's visual explanation of how transformers and GPT-style language models work, tracing data through tokens, embeddings and attention.
Next Day Video · 9 HN recommenders
Raymond Hettinger's PyCon 2013 talk on transforming code into idiomatic Python through a series of before-and-after refactorings. It shows how to use iterators, dictionaries, named tuples and other language features well.
Arif Nur Rahman · 3 HN recommenders
A complete remastered soundtrack for the Transport Tycoon 2014 mobile game, re-recorded with real instruments rather than the original MIDI. The music was composed by John Broomhall for the classic Transport Tycoon.
Lex Fridman · 2 HN recommenders
Lex Fridman interviews Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy, SciPy and Anaconda, about scientific Python and its history. It runs about three hours.
Living Web Farms · 12 HN recommenders
A long talk by rancher Gabe Brown on turning his North Dakota farm into a regenerative ecosystem using no-till, cover crops and integrated livestock. It covers the five principles of soil health and how they pay off financially.
GitHub · 2 HN recommenders
Max Brunsfeld of GitHub presents Tree-sitter, a parsing system for programming tools that supports incremental, error-tolerant parsing. He demos its integration into GitHub.com and Atom for syntax highlighting and code navigation.
Paul G. Allen School · 3 HN recommenders
Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a University of Washington lecture on trends in deep learning hardware. It covers numeric formats, specialized instructions, energy per operation and co-design of hardware and software.
3Blue1Brown · 5 HN recommenders
3Blue1Brown presents the Triangle of Power, an alternate notation that unifies powers, logarithms and roots in a single triangular symbol. The video shows how the inverse operations relate and how the notation could help.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · 3 HN recommenders
Kurzgesagt explains why, even with science-fiction technology, most of the universe is permanently out of reach because of cosmic expansion and finite resources.
Kraut · 2 HN recommenders
A long video essay by Kraut arguing that Trump's biggest failure was his handling of China. It spends much of its length on Chinese history, culture, the trade war, and the rise of a communist superpower.
BBC · 2 HN recommenders
A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see. It shows that people integrate visual speech information into what they hear.
CGP Grey · 15 HN recommenders
CGP Grey's animated adaptation of The Dictator's Handbook, explaining how rulers stay in power by keeping a small group of key supporters happy rather than ruling fairly. It lays out selectorate theory and how resources shape regimes.
The Signal Path · 2 HN recommenders
Shahriar of The Signal Path tears down and experiments with Keysight's UXR real-time oscilloscope, which offers 110GHz bandwidth and 256GS/s sampling, and compares architectures from Keysight, LeCroy and Tektronix.
RISC-V International · 2 HN recommenders
Chris Celio of UC Berkeley compares the RISC-V, ARM and x86 instruction sets, with quantitative data on instruction counts and code density. It examines how the compressed extension fares against Thumb and x86.
MrBtongue · 2 HN recommenders
MrBtongue argues that modern theme-park MMOs lost what made earlier sandbox online games compelling, and that MMOs could be saved by returning to sandbox design.
Computerphile · 2 HN recommenders
A Computerphile video in which Mark Jago of the University of Nottingham explains Turing's halting problem and how it led to the blueprint for the modern computer.