The YouTube videos Hacker News keeps recommending

6,386 talks, lectures and documentaries that HN commenters have pointed each other to for 19 years. Every one shows the real comments that recommended it.

Built on the open dataset behind Karpathy's HackerTube. No account needed to browse.

HN classics

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Seattle is Dying | A KOMO News Documentary

KOMO News

20.1M views · 2019 · 10 HN recs

HN commenters cite it in homelessness threads about San Francisco and Seattle as an eye-opening, widely viewed argument for treatment-first policy, though some see it as pro-law-enforcement framing.

Richard Feynman Fire

nebulajr

757K views · 2009 · 8 HN recs

HN repeatedly cites it as an elegant, eye-opening explanation of fire and photosynthesis and as an example of Feynman's infectious love of knowledge.

28c3: The Science of Insecurity

28c3

42K views · 2011 · 9 HN recs

HN commenters call it one of the best security talks and the standard introduction to LANGSEC, which they use to argue for simpler, well-specified input formats.

Hidden gems

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HN loves them. Fewer than 60,000 people have watched them.

Literate Programming in the Large

Next Day Video

17K views · 2013 · 3 HN recs

HN recommends it in literate programming threads as a rare look at applying the idea to a huge, complex codebase, though some find it meandering.

28c3: The Science of Insecurity

28c3

42K views · 2011 · 9 HN recs

HN commenters call it one of the best security talks and the standard introduction to LANGSEC, which they use to argue for simpler, well-specified input formats.

Seymour Papert

Seth Morabito

43K views · 2009 · 3 HN recs

Recommended as a glimpse of Papert's vision of computers as tools for learning, shared especially after his death.

Recent HN favourites

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The Loving Trap

Ben Woodhams

417K views · 2011 · 15 HN recs

Recommended as the standard companion to any Adam Curtis film, since it lampoons the style and gives reasons to take his claims with skepticism.

[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models

Andrej Karpathy

4.3M views · 2023 · 9 HN recs

HN recommends it as the dense, approachable starting point for understanding LLMs and often cites it for specific claims about scaling and training.

"Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011)

Strange Loop Conference

219K views · 2021 · 14 HN recs

HN treats it as the canonical talk on software complexity, shared constantly and recommended to every programmer regardless of language.

Everything is a Remix (Original Series)

Kirby Ferguson

925K views · 2016 · 7 HN recs

HN invokes it constantly in debates over originality, copyright and AI training, and calls it the best explanation of creativity as remixing.

Longs

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Over an hour each. Worth it.

The Art of Code - Dylan Beattie

NDC Conferences

4.9M views · 2020 · 6 HN recs

HN regularly names it among the best programming talks ever, praising the storytelling, the demos and the ending.

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