black start

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Startup School 2008 on building a profitable startup. He argues for bootstrapping and small, well-run companies instead of chasing investment and exits.

Paul Graham speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to create a successful startup. His talk emphasizes being good, not just avoiding being evil, as a strategic advantage.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to get press coverage for a startup and how to respond to it.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining how space and time swap roles inside a black hole's event horizon. It is part of the channel's black hole series.

An Isaac Arthur episode on civilizations in the dark, post-stellar universe, including black hole farming, accretion disks and the Penrose process as energy sources.

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

A Royal Institution event with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette on what happens if you fall into a black hole, covering the firewall paradox, the information problem and the holographic principle.

The opening lecture of the How to Start a Startup course at Stanford, with Sam Altman covering ideas and products and Dustin Moskovitz discussing why to start a startup.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what black holes really are and whether events can happen inside them. It covers event horizons, time dilation and common misconceptions about black holes.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind gives the first of two mini-lectures on "ER = EPR", the idea that quantum entanglement and wormholes are related. It covers what lies behind black hole horizons.

A 16-minute Y Combinator Startup School talk in which Sam Altman lays out what makes a startup succeed. It covers building a product people tell friends about, exponential markets, real versus fake trends, and having an ambitious vision.

PBS Space Time episode on the black hole information paradox, covering how black holes seem to destroy information, the no-hair conjecture and the proposed role of the event horizon. It is part of a series on black holes.

Kurzgesagt explains black hole stars, a hypothesized kind of giant star with a black hole at its core that could be a route to early supermassive black holes.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

Minutephysics compares how efficiently different processes convert mass to energy per E=mc^2, from fire and fission to fusion, antimatter and black holes, which can convert a large fraction of mass to energy.

Kurzgesagt explains the black hole bomb and how far-future civilizations might extract energy from spinning black holes, including Dyson-sphere-style ideas.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that black holes could create universes and that we might live inside one. It builds up the physics of how density falls as black holes get larger.

Paul Graham's lecture in the 'How to Start a Startup' course, covering counterintuitive parts of startups and how to have ideas. It is the video form of his essay 'Before the Startup'.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether our universe could sit inside a black hole. It covers what physicists think happens inside black holes and the arguments for and against this idea.

A CollegeHumor sketch from the Hardly Working series in which a pair of startup founders pitch a website using incomprehensible buzzwords and branding nonsense. It parodies Silicon Valley startup culture.

Bill Gross, who has founded and incubated many start-ups, ranked hundreds of companies on five factors. He presents the one factor that stood out as the biggest predictor of success.

PBS Space Time asks whether dark matter could be made of primordial black holes. It walks through the observational constraints that limit this idea.

Peter Thiel's lecture from the How to Start a Startup course on business strategy and monopoly theory, arguing that competition destroys profits and that startups should aim to build monopolies. It covers the ideas of Zero to One.

Chase Adam, founder of the nonprofit Watsi, speaks at Startup School 2013 about building a nonprofit startup.

Retired Major Brian Shul tells the story of a ground speed check with LA Center while flying the SR-71 Blackbird. He recounts it live at the Hiller Aviation Museum.

A Startup School 2013 session where Paul Graham and Sam Altman hold live office hours with startups including CodeCombat, Flexport and others. The founders pitch and get on-the-spot feedback.

Robert Scoble interviews Paul Graham at Y Combinator's Mountain View headquarters as 36 new startups debut. They discuss what YC is, and Graham's no-assholes rule.

A Startup School SV 2014 conversation between Sequoia's Jim Goetz and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum. They discuss how Sequoia pursued WhatsApp, its tiny engineering team, and how it handled growth and support.

A time-lapse from ESO's Very Large Telescope showing stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center over nearly 20 years.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

A This Week in Startups episode in which Jason Calacanis interviews David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals. They discuss bootstrapping, company philosophy and views on the tech industry.

Journalist Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on the CIA's operational security failures in the 2003 Milan kidnapping. Phone and location metadata exposed the team and led to arrest warrants.

A fireside chat at LAUNCH Festival 2014 where Paul Graham tells Jason Calacanis why he is handing Y Combinator's presidency to Sam Altman. He also shares startup advice drawn from nine years and 500+ startups.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Brian Krebs and Lance James present research on DDoS booter services at Black Hat 2013, including the SWATting Krebs suffered. HN knows it mainly for a later exchange between Krebs and Cloudflare's Matthew Prince.

A PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs, the string-theory proposal for black holes that replaces the singularity with a tangle of strings. It explains why black holes seem to both have to exist and break known physics.

The official 1994 music video for Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun.

An episode of This Week in Startups in which Jason Calacanis interviews Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. They discuss startups, bootstrapping and 37signals' approach to business.