About Talks to Watch

For almost twenty years, Hacker News commenters have been linking each other to YouTube talks, lectures and documentaries: “you have to watch this”. Talks to Watch collects 6,454 of those videos, recommended across 39,834 comments, so you can browse them in one place.

How videos are ranked

A video only appears if at least three different people mentioned it in at least three different months. It is ranked by the number of distinct months in which someone recommended it, with enthusiastic recommendations counting extra. Each comment was labeled by a language model as a recommendation, a neutral reference, a joke or a criticism, and each video got a short summary from the comments that mention it. Expect a few percent of labels to be off.

Credits

The video list, labels, summaries and topics come from the HackerTube dataset, built from the open-index/hacker-news archive. Both are released under the Open Data Commons Attribution License 1.0. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator, and comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles and channel names belong to their creators.

Talks to Watch is not affiliated with YouTube, Google, Hacker News, Y Combinator or HackerTube.

Contact: [email protected]