Playlists

Curated by Claude from what Hacker News recommends, each in a deliberate order.

Start here

Broad, essential lists for your first visit.

10 videos · 6 hr 32 min

The HN canon

The ten videos Hacker News has pointed people to most often, thread after thread and year after year. Math, money, programming, chips, biology and how to live, all in one place.

13 videos · 11 hr 8 min

Talks every programmer should watch

The programming talks Hacker News tells every developer to watch, whatever language they write. Simplicity, design, craft and how to think about software.

13 videos · 10 hr 41 min

Computers from the transistor up

How a computer works, one layer at a time: transistors and logic gates, how chips get made, CPUs and memory, the operating system, and finally compilers and languages.

11 videos · 11 hr 18 min

Learn deep learning from zero

A learning path from 'what is a neuron' to building GPT in code, using the explainers HN recommends most at each step.

12 videos · 12 hr 24 min

Programming history in 12 talks

The story of programming in the talks and films Hacker News recommends, from wartime codebreaking machines through Unix, PARC, the home computer boom, free software and the web.

9 videos · 9 hr 7 min

Lectures worth a weekend

The recorded lectures Hacker News keeps telling people to watch: Feynman, SICP, Strang, Sapolsky, Sandel and other great teachers, one opening lecture from each.

10 videos · 14 hr 9 min

Documentaries HN loves

Long-form documentaries Hacker News recommends for a slow evening: AlphaGo, Connections, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis and more, across tech, science, history and people.

11 videos · 5 hr 55 min

How things are made

Factory tours and manufacturing explainers that give you the "how is this even made" feeling, from a soda can to EUV chip machines and rocket plants.

13 videos · 10 hr 42 min

Security war stories

Real hacks, cons and breaches, told by the people who pulled them off or tracked them down. From a KGB spy hunt in 1986 to the xz backdoor that nearly reached every Linux server.

12 videos · 11 hr 32 min

Systems and databases

The deep technical talks HN recommends for learning how real systems work: databases, consensus, testing distributed code, performance and keeping production running.

13 videos · 8 hr 22 min

Hidden gems

Videos Hacker News loves that YouTube has barely noticed, most with well under 50,000 views. Physics, music, spacecraft, genetics, energy and software history.

14 videos · 2 hr 6 min

A comedy break for programmers

The sketches, parodies and absurd talks that Hacker News threads link for a laugh, from meetings with impossible requirements to a Turing machine built in PowerPoint.

Deep dives

One obsession each, for when you want to go down a rabbit hole.

11 videos · 6 hr 43 min

Indistinguishable From Magic

From one transistor on a kitchen table to the tin-droplet lasers inside ASML's machines, then out to the people and countries fighting over the result.

11 videos · 8 hr 23 min

Mechanical Sympathy

Why your fast computer runs slow code, and what the people who write fast code know about caches, data layout and measurement.

12 videos · 2 hr 35 min

Things You Never Look At

Doors, plugs, cans, toasters and turn signals, explained by people who obviously love them. Short design essays about everyday objects.

12 videos · 8 hr 7 min

Debugging at a Distance

From the Apollo Guidance Computer's 1202 alarms to patching Voyager 1's memory from 15 billion miles away: the hardest remote debugging jobs ever done, told by the people who did them or who rebuilt the hardware.

13 videos · 3 hr 53 min

Brass Brains: Computing With Gears

Before transistors, people did calculus with gears, cams and water. This walks from one differential gear to the machines that aimed battleships, predicted tides and ran a model economy.

11 videos · 10 hr 50 min

Objects on Trial

The OOP argument HN has been having for fifteen years, staged as a trial: the defense, the prosecution, the founder's testimony, and a two-hour closing statement.

11 videos · 6 hr 19 min

Before It Worked

AI history told through talks recorded before the field took off, from the 1973 debate that helped start an AI winter to the 2017 speech that called the boom alchemy.

12 videos · 2 hr 17 min

How to Count a Vote

Voting is an algorithm, and HN argues about it like one. From why first-past-the-post breeds two parties, through Arrow's theorem and score voting, to gerrymandering and why paper ballots still beat computers.

12 videos · 9 hr 40 min

Speedrunners Are Reverse Engineers

From one Mario Kart shortcut to running Flappy Bird inside Super Mario World with only a controller: how players took their games apart.

12 videos · 6 hr 14 min

Cheating the Hardware

How game developers got around tiny RAM, few colors and slow disks, from Asteroids to Crash Bandicoot, in roughly chronological order.

10 videos · 2 hr 50 min

Everything Is Circles

One idea, the Fourier transform, followed from Homer Simpson drawn in epicycles to JPEG, digital audio, radio, lenses and the uncertainty principle.

12 videos · 5 hr 39 min

Biology for Programmers

Cells as nanoscale machine shops, bioelectric networks that store body plans, genetic diseases treated as exploits, and a Lisp compiler for designing molecules. Biology seen the way HN sees it: as the strangest codebase there is.

11 videos · 9 hr 33 min

Who Watches the Silicon?

Your threat model probably stops at the OS. These talks go below it: undocumented CPU instructions, hidden coprocessors, malicious USB firmware, and implants on motherboards.

12 videos · 7 hr 16 min

How Things Fall Over

Deleted databases, a nuclear accident, a datacenter rebooted by one typo, and the ideas from safety science that explain why all of it was normal.

12 videos · 9 hr 19 min

Small, Profitable, Nobody's Unicorn

The talks HN sends to anyone who wants a business rather than a rocket ship: DHH's 2008 heresy, Jason Cohen's bootstrapping playbook, Maciej on barely succeeding, and a game studio that has stayed alive since 1994.