10 videos · 14 hr 9 minDocumentaries HN loves
Feature-length and long-form documentaries that HN commenters recommend to each other, most of them an hour or more. It opens with the most welcoming of the lot, then moves through the history of computing and the hacker world, on to stories of science and the people behind it, and ends with films about how ideas spread and how societies fall. Pick one, settle in.
Play all on YouTube- 11:30:28
AlphaGo - The Movie | Full award-winning documentary
Google DeepMind · Picked by 10 · 2020–2025The story of DeepMind's 2016 match against Lee Sedol works for technical and non-technical viewers alike, and one commenter calls it a timeless classic.
- 249:22
James Burke Connections, Ep. 1 "The Trigger Effect"
DRS_Education · Picked by 12 · 2019–2026James Burke's 1978 opener starts with the 1965 New York blackout to show how fragile our interlocking technology is, and HN brings it up in every blackout thread.
- 31:45:00
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz | full movie (2014)
moviemaniacsDE · Picked by 3 · 2015–2026The life of Aaron Swartz and the prosecution that ended it, which commenters call a must-watch for anyone who belongs to hacker culture.
- 41:07:51
Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary) | Future Cities | WIRED
WIRED Investigations · Picked by 8 · 2016–2022WIRED's tour of Shenzhen's prototyping markets and copycat factories, the film HN links whenever hardware startups and fast manufacturing come up.
- 5
33:45Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
Veritasium · Picked by 10 · 2024–2026Veritasium's account of Shuji Nakamura's stubborn pursuit of the blue LED, which HN enjoys as a story of persistence against the consensus.
- 6
42:30The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize
BobbyBroccoli · Picked by 6 · 2022–2023The first part of BobbyBroccoli's series on Jan Hendrik Schon's Bell Labs fraud, the film HN cites whenever research misconduct comes up.
- 7
1:25:52TempleOS | Down the Rabbit Hole
Fredrik Knudsen · Picked by 7 · 2019–2022Fredrik Knudsen's heartbreaking portrait of Terry Davis, his operating system and his illness, regarded on HN as the definitive account.
- 8
3:54:44The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary)
David Lessig · Picked by 13 · 2016–2026Adam Curtis traces how Freud's ideas and Edward Bernays's public relations shaped consumer culture, which one commenter says finally explained the why of American society.
- 9
1:16:17In Search Of A Flat Earth
Folding Ideas · Picked by 17 · 2020–2026Dan Olson's compassionate essay on how people fall into flat earth and wider conspiracy thinking, called by HN commenters the best documentary on the subject.
- 10
1:03:452. The Bronze Age Collapse - Mediterranean Apocalypse
Fall of Civilizations · Picked by 3 · 2021–2026Fall of Civilizations on how a connected Mediterranean world came apart around 1100 BC, a long view to end on after Burke's fragile networks at the start.