Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

Building a prototype with Dan Gelbart [0]. An engineer and inventor, he has an 18 episode playlist of every aspect of using a machine shop to build prototypes. It teaches machining. Shop use, thinking though physical creation where order of operations is paramount. Really just a great learning experience even if you never plan on doing machining.

[0]https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_tws4AXg7asrBv1MMAq4AO68...

I came to post this. It is also likely one of the best-known lecture series, and for good reason.

I still occasionally think about the series on Rome, and also the Rise of the Khans series. (Also, apparently, it's pronounced Jenghis - who knew?!). The series on World War I is also phenomenally interesting and really paints the picture of just how brutal and senseless that war was. The section on Verdun is particularly harrowing.

Another one that I think everyone should hear is "Logical Insanity", where Dan talks through the civilian bombing campaigns of WWII. He makes a case that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into this wider pattern of bombings in a really interesting way - those two events obviously loom large in our thinking about history, but in the context of WWII they were almost... mundane. Just two more bombings of civilians in a war that was full of the same. (Dan makes the case in a much more fleshed out way, so please don't take my half-assed description as an indicator of the quality of the episode).

These have all fallen behind the paywall at this point but they are well worth the money and time.

I enjoyed Yuval Harari's course A Brief History of Humankind when it was available on Coursera (it can still be found on youtube, although at low video quality — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGhTQ4iruLc&list=PLE-kxvSEhk...). This was before Harari released his book, Sapiens, largely based on this course; and before he started fantasizing about the future.

Understanding the Universe, an Introduction to Astronomy[0] -- a video lecture series by Alex Filippenko

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLez3PPtnpncSF2QwpCB9C...