THE ARCHIVE · EVERY DISCOVERY
3,553 videos with summaries and linked Hacker News recommendations, arranged by title.
AvE · 4 HN recommenders
AvE tears down a roughly $500 Dyson hair dryer, examining how its motor, airflow and electronics fit into a small body. He runs tests along the way and ultimately decides whether the engineering justifies the price.
AvE · 6 HN recommenders
AvE tears down the Juicero cold-press juicer, examining its heavily machined parts, electronics and the pricey juice packs. He pokes fun at the product and venture-funded culture along the way.
AvE · 2 HN recommenders
AvE tears down a high-end KitchenAid stand mixer, looking at its castings, large DC motor and gear train. He also picks apart some design trade-offs.
Max Joseph · 3 HN recommenders
A short film by Max Joseph about his anxiety in bookstores and how to read more books amid constant streaming, social media and news. He looks for ways to rebalance his content diet in favor of reading.
olinerd · 3 HN recommenders
Boston Dynamics' March 2008 video of BigDog, a four-legged robot, walking on ice and snow, climbing rubble and recovering from slips and kicks.
ClojureTV · 5 HN recommenders
Mark Bastian contrasts top-down object-oriented design with bottom-up, data-oriented design in Clojure. He models a board game as plain data plus small composable functions and compares it with a roughly 22-class OOP version.
Ze Frank · 2 HN recommenders
A short Ze Frank piece from his 2006 show about "brain crack", the rush of exciting new ideas that feel great but tend to fall apart once you start executing them.
Google TechTalks · 7 HN recommenders
Geoffrey Hinton's Google Tech Talk linking machine learning to biology, explaining dropout as a form of model averaging and why sexual reproduction and stochastic spiking neurons may prevent overfitting.
hgoetkehgoetke · 6 HN recommenders
An episode of the Norwegian documentary series Brainwash, in which a comedian interviews academics from different sides about gender differences and gender equality. It looks at why more equal societies can still show unequal career choices.
Intelligence Squared · 2 HN recommenders
An Intelligence Squared debate in which Will Self argues for Brave New World and Adam Gopnik for Nineteen Eighty-Four as the better dystopian warning. It includes acted excerpts and is chaired by Jonathan Freedland.
Adrian Crenshaw · 6 HN recommenders
Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.
Cool Worlds · 2 HN recommenders
Astronomer David Kipping of Cool Worlds talks with Mick West to break down the three declassified Pentagon UFO videos. They explain the footage through camera artifacts, glare, and perspective effects.
Benn Jordan · 6 HN recommenders
Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.
Black Hat · 9 HN recommenders
Christopher Domas presents at Black Hat 2017 how page fault analysis and processor fuzzing can exhaustively search the x86 instruction set. The talk uncovers undocumented instructions and hardware bugs and shows limits of disassemblers.
Citus Data · 4 HN recommenders
Dan Robinson, then CTO of Heap, explains how Heap runs its product analytics backend on PostgreSQL and CitusDB. It covers conversion funnels, retention and cohort queries across tens of billions of events and 50 TB of data, plus Postgres and Kafka together and the indexing strategy.
MIT Club of Northern California · 11 HN recommenders
MIT's Prof. Dennis Whyte explains the ARC/SPARC compact tokamak approach, in which new high-temperature superconducting magnets allow smaller and cheaper fusion reactors. He covers fusion physics, performance trends and the engineering path to net energy.
Talks at Google · 3 HN recommenders
Dr. Howard Schubiner presents his research that much chronic pain comes from learned neural pathways rather than structural damage, and outlines a treatment approach based on that view.
Lex Fridman · 5 HN recommenders
A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave. It covers JavaScript's rushed creation at Netscape, the browser wars, Firefox and Mozilla, and Brave's privacy approach.
Royal Society of Arts · 3 HN recommenders
A short animated RSA piece with Dr Brene Brown's voiceover on the difference between empathy and sympathy. She argues that real connection requires getting in touch with your own vulnerability, rather than trying to fix someone's pain.
Joey Reid · 12 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.
Colin McDonnell · 3 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.
Rui Oliveira · 12 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.
Colin McDonnell · 2 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.
Colin McDonnell · 4 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's 2013 MIT Media Lab talk argues that the media we think with determine which thoughts are possible. He demos new representations for scientific papers, circuits, filters and signal processing.
Colin McDonnell · 3 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.
Colin McDonnell · 4 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.
Luna Programming Language Tutorials · 3 HN recommenders
Bret Victor's talk "Inventing on Principle" argues that creators should find a guiding principle to fight for. He shows demos of immediate-feedback tools, such as live-updating code and animation editors.
Bret Weinstein · 7 HN recommenders
Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin discuss the evidence for the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, including the furin cleavage site and gain-of-function research. The conversation draws on Deigin's Medium article.
Eric Weinstein · 5 HN recommenders
A long Portal podcast episode in which Bret Weinstein tells Eric Weinstein the story of his lab mice telomere work, the prediction behind it, and what it means for science and aging.
jasonofthel33t · 9 HN recommenders
Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.
ClojureTV · 10 HN recommenders
Java Language Architect Brian Goetz talks at a Clojure conference about the challenges of evolving a mature language like Java while preserving compatibility with existing code and developer expectations. It also gives a look at where the platform is headed.
MasterpieceConCen7 · 2 HN recommenders
Brian Springer's documentary Spin, built entirely from unauthorized satellite feeds of politicians and newscasters before they went on air during the 1992 US presidential election. It exposes the behind-the-scenes construction of media reality.
PyCon 2016 · 3 HN recommenders
Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.
Ancient · 4 HN recommenders
A maker's time-lapse of building a working computer inside a LEGO-style brick, using a tiny 0.42-inch OLED screen, with a demo at the end.
New Relic · 2 HN recommenders
Bryan Cantrill presents Manta, an object store with in-situ compute that lets tools like grep, awk, and sed run map-reduce style over huge data. He frames it as bringing the Unix philosophy to big data.
fiddyschmitt · 4 HN recommenders
A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.
JDProductions INC. · 2 HN recommenders
An Engineering Giants documentary episode following a British Airways Boeing 747-400 through a D-check, the heaviest maintenance inspection, in Cardiff. The aircraft is stripped down and inspected nearly everywhere.
Tom Scott · 3 HN recommenders
Tom Scott explains the design of the British BS 1363 plug and socket, including fuses, shutters and safety features, and why he thinks it beats other plugs.
Technology Connections · 8 HN recommenders
Technology Connections explains why brown is not a spectral color but a context-dependent perception, essentially dark orange seen against brighter surroundings.
Andreas Kling · 2 HN recommenders
In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.
ClojureTV · 3 HN recommenders
Bruce Hauman presents Figwheel, a ClojureScript tool for live, interactive development with hot code reloading. He explains the main ideas, demonstrates how it works, and shares tricks for getting the most out of it.
AI Council · 4 HN recommenders
Bryan Cantrill of Joyent presents Manta, an internet-facing object store that lets you run compute directly on the data. The talk is peppered with ZFS history and Cantrill's trademark commentary on the industry.
PapersWeLove · 3 HN recommenders
Bryan Cantrill presents the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) paper by Megiddo and Modha at Papers We Love. He opens with a survey of caching strategies before digging into the self-tuning LRU/MFU design.
PapersWeLove · 6 HN recommenders
Bryan Cantrill's Papers We Love talk on FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, tracing how OS-level virtualization grew out of chroot and the limits of the traditional UNIX security model.
Oscars · 5 HN recommenders
A one-minute clip of Bryan Cranston at an Academy new-member reception, advising actors to approach auditions without desperation and focus on solving the problem rather than landing the job.
Lex Fridman · 2 HN recommenders
Lex Fridman interviews Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and previously Braintree, about brain-computer interfaces and Kernel's non-invasive brain monitoring hardware. It covers what the devices can do today and the company's plans.
Adrian Crenshaw · 3 HN recommenders
A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.
TNG Technology Consulting GmbH · 2 HN recommenders
Spencer Lisenby explains dynamic soaring, a technique that lets unpowered radio-controlled gliders reach speeds above 835 kph. He covers the physics and the design, build and flying challenges.
Michigan Medicine · 5 HN recommenders
A University of Michigan Medicine demonstration of building a cheap DIY air purifier from a box fan and a HEPA or high-MERV filter using hardware-store parts. It explains why this helps against dust, smoke and viruses and ties it to local air quality readings.
Chris McCord · 7 HN recommenders
Phoenix creator Chris McCord builds a real-time Twitter-style app live with Phoenix LiveView 1.5 in about 15 minutes. It shows interactive, real-time updates without writing JavaScript.
Applied Science · 2 HN recommenders
Applied Science builds a replica Apollo DSKY using an electroluminescent driver circuit and screen-printed conductive ink, with source and PCB files published.
David Beazley · 4 HN recommenders
David Beazley's workshop screencast builds asynchronous programming in Python from scratch, starting from callbacks and continuations and replacing threads to show how concurrency works underneath.
Robert Baruch · 3 HN recommenders
The first part of Robert Baruch's series on building a 6800 CPU on an FPGA with nMigen, a Python-based hardware description language. It introduces the HDL while implementing a simpler 6800 core.
Paul Irish · 4 HN recommenders
James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.
engineerguy · 5 HN recommenders
Bill Hammack of engineerguy explains how medieval engineers designed stone cathedrals using rules of thumb, with no science, mathematics or literacy. He uses it to define the engineering method.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · 4 HN recommenders
A Kurzgesagt animation walking through how a Mars base could be built and why it would be punishing, covering radiation, temperature extremes, toxic dust and the need for shielding.
DIY Perks · 9 HN recommenders
DIY Perks builds a realistic artificial sun for dark winters, using a powerful water-cooled LED, a satellite dish reflector for near-parallel rays, and a scattering layer to mimic the blue sky. The video explains the optics behind why most lamps do not look like sunlight and shows the build and its results.
AI Engineer · 3 HN recommenders
Mario Zechner explains why he built pi, a minimal coding agent, out of frustration with existing agent harnesses. He also discusses how AI agents are straining open source projects and argues for slowing down.
Dan Gelbart · 4 HN recommenders
First of an 18-part lecture series by engineer Dan Gelbart on building prototypes. The series covers practical mechanical design and fabrication of precision machines.
Dan Gelbart · 2 HN recommenders
Part 10 of Dan Gelbart's prototype-building lecture series, covering flexures: flexible joints that give precise, frictionless motion. It shows how a cheap piece of aluminum can become a nanometer-accurate mechanism.