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    10 videos · 14 hr 10 min
    Playlists

    Documentaries HN loves

    Curated by HackerTube · 10 videos · 14 hr 10 min

    Feature-length and long-form documentaries that HN commenters recommend to each other, most of them an hour or more. It opens with the most welcoming of the lot, then moves through the history of computing and the hacker world, on to stories of science and the people behind it, and ends with films about how ideas spread and how societies fall. Pick one, settle in.

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    1. 1
      1:30:28

      AlphaGo - The Movie | Full award-winning documentary

      Google DeepMind · 39M views · 6 years ago

      The story of DeepMind's 2016 match against Lee Sedol works for technical and non-technical viewers alike, and one commenter calls it a timeless classic.

    2. 2
      49:22

      James Burke Connections, Ep. 1 "The Trigger Effect"

      DRS_Education · 765K views · 7 years ago

      James Burke's 1978 opener starts with the 1965 New York blackout to show how fragile our interlocking technology is, and HN brings it up in every blackout thread.

    3. 3
      1:45:00

      The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz | full movie (2014)

      moviemaniacsDE · 2.5M views · 12 years ago

      The life of Aaron Swartz and the prosecution that ended it, which commenters call a must-watch for anyone who belongs to hacker culture.

    4. 4
      1:07:51

      Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary) | Future Cities | WIRED

      WIRED Investigations · 16M views · 10 years ago

      WIRED's tour of Shenzhen's prototyping markets and copycat factories, the film HN links whenever hardware startups and fast manufacturing come up.

    5. 5
      33:45

      Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

      Veritasium · 57M views · 2 years ago

      Veritasium's account of Shuji Nakamura's stubborn pursuit of the blue LED, which HN enjoys as a story of persistence against the consensus.

    6. 6
      42:30

      The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize

      BobbyBroccoli · 4.2M views · 6 years ago

      The first part of BobbyBroccoli's series on Jan Hendrik Schon's Bell Labs fraud, the film HN cites whenever research misconduct comes up.

    7. 7
      1:25:52

      TempleOS | Down the Rabbit Hole

      Fredrik Knudsen · 7.8M views · 7 years ago

      Fredrik Knudsen's heartbreaking portrait of Terry Davis, his operating system and his illness, regarded on HN as the definitive account.

    8. 8
      3:54:44

      The Century of the Self (Full Adam Curtis Documentary)

      David Lessig · 3.8M views · 11 years ago

      Adam Curtis traces how Freud's ideas and Edward Bernays's public relations shaped consumer culture, which one commenter says finally explained the why of American society.

    9. 9
      1:16:17

      In Search Of A Flat Earth

      Folding Ideas · 4.9M views · 6 years ago

      Dan Olson's compassionate essay on how people fall into flat earth and wider conspiracy thinking, called by HN commenters the best documentary on the subject.

    10. 10
      1:03:45

      2. The Bronze Age Collapse - Mediterranean Apocalypse

      Fall of Civilizations · 8.2M views · 6 years ago

      Fall of Civilizations on how a connected Mediterranean world came apart around 1100 BC, a long view to end on after Burke's fragile networks at the start.