HN commenters love Cliff Stoll's earnest, playful personality and point to this as a delightful look at his unusual warehouse.
Topics › Arts, Comedy, Music & Film
The best magic, puzzles & curiosities videos, according to Hacker News
34 videos about magic, puzzles & curiosities that Hacker News commenters keep pointing each other to, ranked by how many separate months they were recommended. Part of Arts, Comedy, Music & Film.
HN commenters repeatedly call it among the best magic performances ever, valuing it as acting and craft that stays impressive even once you know the method.
HN points to it as an example of ambitious, practical-effects creativity in music videos, made without CGI.
Recommended as an entertaining example of rediscovered lost skills, though some commenters note it is contested.
HN points to it in lock-security threads as a good example of engineering meeting real-world exploitation, where flaws unrelated to the headline mechanism get found.
It is the classic demo HN people point to for showing positional 3D audio working on ordinary headphones.
HN cites it as the classic demonstration of survivorship and confirmation bias in betting, trading and prediction claims.
HN recommends it as an entertaining way to learn math through juggling.
HN recommends it as a trick admired for both its method and its effect.
HN uses it constantly as the classic demonstration that attention is selective, in threads on driving, motorcycles, AI and perception.
HN people share it as a classic example of sleight-of-hand mastery whose ending is mind-blowing.
HN recommends it as the canonical talking-piano example, uncanny and impressive once you read the captions.
Offered as a satisfying example of fighting back against scam call centers.
HN commenters recommend it as one of the best short clips on YouTube for illustrating Balkan versus Central European identity.
HN recommends it as a memorable and fun way to visualize how sorting algorithms work.
Shared whenever gear reductions, exponential scaling or playful kinetic art come up.
HN uses it as the standard demonstration that the brain reinterprets perception, in threads on speech, AI audio and illusions.
HN treats it as the canonical example of a Rube Goldberg style musical instrument and a work of love, and references it in threads on unconventional instruments and machines.
Recommended as an example of inventive, physical-effects music video making, with the car as an instrument.
Cited for its well-known attempt to convey the size of 52 factorial.
HN mentions it as an example of Lenny, the telemarketer time-waster, and of how a canned script can fool callers for a long time.
Recommended as a quick demo of vision overriding hearing, and cited as an example of perception producing confident wrong answers.
HN cites it as a hands-on demonstration that one person with simple tools can move huge stones, undercutting arguments that ancient construction needed lost technology.
HN links it in Strandbeest threads as a showcase of the eerily smooth, wind-driven walking creatures.
Cited as an ad worth enjoying and as an example of practical effects so good they were mistaken for CGI.
HN cites it as a neat, simple trick of relaying moves between opponents, often in discussions of chess, AI or ludic fallacies.
Used as an example of how easy homing and guidance have become, resembling precision-guided munitions.
HN uses it as the reference example of the illusion and as a metaphor for endless escalation.
Cited as an example of how padding can allow survival of very high-speed impacts.
HN uses it as the go-to example of an astonishingly perfect hand-drawn circle.
It is passed around as a favorite bit of computing folklore, and resurfaces in threads about Penzias, Ritchie and Pike.
Cited as a favorite flying oddity and as a joke about projects that get airborne through sheer thrust.
Used as a reference when discussing inverted-steering analogies and how hard it is to rewire a learned skill.
Shared as a darkly funny moment of televised schadenfreude in threads about early audio formats and cylinder archives.
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