How the ranking works
The catalog starts from conferences, so a talk can rank without ever being mentioned online. It covers 156,196 talks from 143 YouTube channels, longer than 10 minutes, with duplicate uploads merged. The site shows the 3,450 strongest across topics, stacks and recent years.
score = 40% recommendations + 25% reach + 20% curated lists + 15% staying power
- Recommendations: different Hacker News commenters who recommended the talk, 2007 to August 2026. One person counts once. Neutral mentions add a little, and critics lower the score once they pass a quarter of the opinions.
- Reach: views compared with all talks and with the same channel. When likes are under 0.4% of views, views are capped, which cuts the effect of paid promotion.
- Curated lists: 16 independent lists and "best talks" posts.
- Staying power: how many different years people brought the talk up.
What to keep in mind
- Hacker News leans toward languages, systems and Clojure, and it says little about .NET or leadership. Use the Topic and Stack filters for those.
- An AI model (Claude Sonnet) read the 8,839 comments about the talks on this site and labeled each one. In a manual check of 30 comments, 26 labels were right.
- The comments shown under talks are picked automatically. Some praise a related idea more than the talk itself, so open the thread for context.
- Security and game development are left out of "All topics". Pick them under Topic to see them.
- View counts are from YouTube on November 8, 2026. Newer talks have had less time to collect recommendations, so check Rising for them.