Hidden gems
Curated by Claude · 13 videos · 8 hr 22 min
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
17K views • 13 years agoheligoneA short demo of a walking droplet on a vibrating silicone oil bath passing through a double slit and producing interference, a macro-scale analogue of pilot-wave behavior.A 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
11K views • 10 years agoConfreaksA short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.A 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
41K views • 12 years agoTheTedNelsonAlan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.Alan 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"
47K views • 13 years agoO'ReillyRichard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.Nineteen minutes on why complex systems run close to failure, which one HN commenter calls one of the most important talks they have seen.
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39:21Functional Composition - Chris Ford
31K views • 13 years agoClojureTVChris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.Chris 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.
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49:55How Python was Shaped by leaky Internals, Armin Ronacher, Flask framework
20K views • 10 years agoВидео с мероприятий {speach!Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, explains how CPython's internals and C API leak into the language's semantics. Using examples like the complexity of the add operation, he shows why Python is hard to optimize or reimplement.The 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.
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35:25Saving Voyager 1! - Bruce Waggoner at !!Con 2024
8K views • 2 years ago!!ConBruce Waggoner of the Voyager team describes how engineers diagnosed Voyager 1's 2023 loss of telemetry and patched its flight software from 15 billion miles away. The talk covers the spacecraft's architecture and the scarcity of old documentation.A 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.
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40:51Geoffrey West on COMPLEXITY
23K views • 15 years agoFQxIPhysicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.Physicist Geoffrey West on the scaling laws that govern organisms, cities and companies, recommended on HN as an accessible doorway to the subject.
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49:47DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome
14K views • 9 years agoDEFCONConferenceJohn Sotos, a physician and former Intel chief medical officer, argues at DEF CON 25 that genetic diseases are exploitable vulnerabilities in the genome. He warns that CRISPR and related tools will make malicious genome hacks and targeted bioweapons feasible.A 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.
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59:2328c3: The Science of Insecurity
42K views • 14 years ago28c3Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus argue that networked software stays insecure because protocols and inputs are too complex to recognize safely. They propose using formal language theory and grammars to build secure, verifiable input handling.Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus explain why messy input formats keep software insecure, which HN regards as the standard introduction to LANGSEC.
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52:11Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019
38K views • 7 years agoNysnø KlimainvesteringerVaclav Smil's talk on historic energy transitions and what they imply for climate investment. He argues that transitions are slow, technology improves gradually, and only absolute cuts in energy use would truly work.Vaclav Smil uses data on how slowly past energy transitions happened, and HN often links it as a sober counterpoint to techno-optimism.
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1:11:48Math Encounters -- Five Balls, Two Hands: The Patterns of Juggling -- Colin Wright (Presentation)
33K views • 14 years agoNational Museum of MathematicsMathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns. It is a public presentation at the Museum of Mathematics aimed at a general audience.A mathematician juggles while explaining the notation that led to new juggling patterns, an entertaining math lecture HN readers remember fondly.
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52:472 1 1 Jason Scott Rescuing The Prince of Persia from the sands of time
25K views • 14 years agoAdrian CrenshawJason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.Jason 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.