13 videos · 8 hr 22 minHidden gems
Every video here has a loyal following on Hacker News and a small audience everywhere else. The subjects range widely on purpose, so expect to find at least one you would never have searched for. It starts with a one-minute demo and short talks, and ends with longer evening-length pieces.
Play all on YouTube- 11:02
Single particle creates interference after double slit - Wave particle duality at the workshop
heligone · Picked by 3 · 2015–2021A one-minute opener: a bouncing oil droplet makes an interference pattern, and HN shares it to help people build intuition about wave-particle duality.
- 213:29
!!Con 2016 - How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! By Sina Bahram
Confreaks · Picked by 2 · 2019–2022A short talk from a blind developer that lets you hear a screen reader at full speed, and at one point it shows how inaccessible Hacker News itself is.
- 317:33
Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival
TheTedNelson · Picked by 7 · 2016–2025Alan Kay honors Ted Nelson on a revived 1970s Smalltalk system, and HN keeps returning to it to show how programmable software from that era was.
- 419:10
Velocity NY 2013: Richard Cook, "Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems"
O'Reilly · Picked by 4 · 2017–2021Nineteen minutes on why complex systems run close to failure, which one HN commenter calls one of the most important talks they have seen.
- 5
39:21Functional Composition - Chris Ford
ClojureTV · Picked by 6 · 2013–2023Chris Ford builds from a single sine wave up to a Bach canon in code, and several HN readers say it was the talk that made music theory click.
- 6
49:55How Python was Shaped by leaky Internals, Armin Ronacher, Flask framework
Видео с мероприятий {speach! · Picked by 15 · 2017–2025The most-recommended video under 50k views: Flask's creator explains why Python is so hard to speed up, and people who build JITs keep recommending it on HN.
- 7
35:25Saving Voyager 1! - Bruce Waggoner at !!Con 2024
!!Con · Picked by 4 · 2024–2026A Voyager team engineer tells how they diagnosed and patched a 1970s spacecraft from 15 billion miles away, which HN calls a great blind-debugging story.
- 8
40:51Geoffrey West on COMPLEXITY
FQxI · Picked by 3 · 2014–2018Physicist Geoffrey West on the scaling laws that govern organisms, cities and companies, recommended on HN as an accessible doorway to the subject.
- 9
49:47DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome
DEFCONConference · Picked by 11 · 2017–2023A physician treats genetic diseases as exploits in the human genome, a DEF CON talk that some HN readers say convinced them to keep their DNA out of databases.
- 10
59:2328c3: The Science of Insecurity
28c3 · Picked by 9 · 2012–2024Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus explain why messy input formats keep software insecure, which HN regards as the standard introduction to LANGSEC.
- 11
52:11Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019
Nysnø Klimainvesteringer · Picked by 3 · 2019–2024Vaclav Smil uses data on how slowly past energy transitions happened, and HN often links it as a sober counterpoint to techno-optimism.
- 12
1:11:48Math Encounters -- Five Balls, Two Hands: The Patterns of Juggling -- Colin Wright (Presentation)
National Museum of Mathematics · Picked by 3 · 2017–2026A mathematician juggles while explaining the notation that led to new juggling patterns, an entertaining math lecture HN readers remember fondly.
- 13
52:472 1 1 Jason Scott Rescuing The Prince of Persia from the sands of time
Adrian Crenshaw · Picked by 3 · 2014–2026Jason Scott recounts recovering the Prince of Persia source code from decaying floppies with its author, and HN treats it as a favorite example of digital archaeology.