Vsauce: the videos Hacker News recommends
Not the channel's most viewed videos: the ones HN commenters kept linking with real commentary. The top pick, "The Banach–Tarski Paradox", recommended as an accurate, entertaining on-ramp to set theory and infinity, worth pausing and rewatching.
- 6 HN recommenders 7 months 2015–2024explainerRecommended as an accurate, entertaining on-ramp to set theory and infinity, worth pausing and rewatching.
- 6 HN recommenders 6 months 2021–2025explainerHN recommends it as an entertaining tour of how we define and categorize things, and it is cited when concept boundaries come up.
- 6 HN recommenders 5 months 2016–2022explainerHN recommends it as the most accessible introduction to what lies beyond infinity.
- 4 HN recommenders 4 months 2018–2024explainerLinked as an entertaining introduction to Zipf's law and power-law distributions.
- 3 HN recommenders 3 months 2021–2026documentaryRecommended as a worthwhile real-world experiment whenever trolley problems or moral dilemmas come up.
- 3 HN recommenders 3 months 2021–2024explainerPointed to as a fun, light introduction to topology and to answer the human-holes question.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2016–2024explainerCited for its well-known attempt to convey the size of 52 factorial.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2024explainerHN commenters cite it for the social theory that reasoning evolved as a collaborative activity, and one lists it as a favorite video.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2018–2024explainerHN points people to it as an accessible explanation of what qualia are.
- cited 3× 0 months 2015–2020explainerHN uses it as the reference for counting how many songs or melodies are possible from a finite set of notes.
- cited 3× 0 months 2016–2023explainerHN uses it to put worries about phones, music and technology and kids into historical perspective.
- cited 3× 0 months 2022–2024explainerHN commenters cite it to explain why people in old photos seem older than they were.
Questions
Which Vsauce video does Hacker News recommend most?
The Banach–Tarski Paradox: recommended in 7 different months by 6 HN users between 2015 and 2024.
Is this every Vsauce video?
No. Only videos that at least three different HN users linked, in at least three different months, with at least a sentence of their own commentary. That filter is what makes the list useful.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.