Ask HN: Which programming podcasts do you listen to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which programming podcasts do you listen to?

28 pointslionkor37 comments

Hi HN,

I love listening to programming or programming-adjacent/technology podcasts while I do chores, I would like to find more!

Please share your favorite ones!

Here are mine, in no particular order:

- CoRecursive

- ADSP (Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs)

- Two's Complement

- Darknet Diaries

- Lex Fridman (some episodes with programmers and programming language creators)

Im having a hard time finding ones not just hypong the next framework, but any of your favorites I'd love to hear about!

Edit: CppCast was my favorite, but its no longer as fun without the original two ;)

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None. Most are filled with too many pointless comments, side commentary, tangents, and can't show detail over audio.

I can't listen to them anywhere I want. I have to pause and rewind constantly to catch detail. I can't underline something significant or save it for later.

I’m slowly reaching the same conclusion only with a more cynical bent.

Most programming podcasts are just paid interviews it seems. It’s always the same guest on the same podcasts making the same comments.

Very few hosts ask relevant questions or try to have a dialogue. It always comes across as extremely disingenuous when you can tell they are just sucking up to the person they are interviewing.

The only podcast I consistently listen to is Oxide and Friends, it comes across is genuine even if it’s basically an advertisement for Oxide Computers. Probably more to do with who the hosts are as people.

Thank you for listening -- and for the kind words! (And on ads: hey, at least we don't carry even more ads on top of the podcast!) For whatever it's worth, we did an episode on (other!) podcasts that had some good recommendations in it -- plenty of which are technical.[0]

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/podcasts-fo...

Yeah I've got enormous sweetspot for oxide. They sometimes take you back to the 90s at sun. While I was to young to do actual coding in the 90s, somehow it triggers instant nostalgia.

Also oxide is doing god's work for servers. I've had the misfortune to automate thousands of servers through their BMCs, and boy did I curse a lot.

The Future of Coding (https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/)

It's become far too long and not focused enough for me to enjoy lately, but it's a nice change of pace to hear about new or lost ideas, rather than hearing about mundane tech I see and hear about every day anyway. Less Rust, Javascript and k8s, and more revisiting papers and moonshot ideas from the 80s for me, please!

A great introduction to this podcast is the Devine Lu Linvega (of 100 Rabbits fame) double episode about writing his own tools, and orca, his music live coding platform.

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045

I've stopped listening for probably a year now. But other than some already mentioned here I'd go with:

- Soft Skills Engineering: very humorous and light take on the people side of SWE

- StaffEng: interviews with engineers with staff+ roles

- Lenny's: if you are into product, growth and startups in general

It was already mentioned by a sibling comment, but podcasts from the Changelog are also very good.

I enjoy dipping into the Changelog family of podcasts, particularly their more casual ones.

Recently I started listening to Acquired, starting with their episodes on Nintendo and Sega, then Microsoft. Not all of their episodes are tech companies, but plenty are if that’s what you want.

Software Unscripted sometimes, and Rustacian Station occasionally. CoRecursive as you already mentioned.

- Software Architektur im Stream (mostly German, but sometimes English)

- 2.5 Admins (sysadmins Talking)

- A Bootiful Podcast (Java / Spring)

- Risky Biz (IT Security News)

- Software Engineering Radio

- The Engineering Room with Dave Farley

- Ship It (What happens after git push)

- ThoughtWorks Technology Podcast

- Big Ideas in App Architecture (Cockroach DB Makers)

- OpenSource Security Podcast (Two guys talking about OS)

- InfoQ Podcast

- Engineering Enablement

It’s more CS education and learning focused, but my friend Oz and I have been doing the CS Primer Show for the last year. Had a brief hiatus for more family time, but we’ll be back in August with more chats and whatnot about Bell Labs and other computer science fun.

https://show.csprimer.com

Also YouTube version: https://youtube.com/@cs_primer

Hey, thanks for sharing this, I'm really enjoying it.

Especially the one about packet loss, it was really interesting to hear the way a software engineer explains network protocols.

I hope you continue.

This is a great question and an awesome list.

I started an open source scrollset compiling the list here: https://pldb.io/lists/podcasts.html (source: https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/main/lists/podcasts.scro...)

The Array Cast https://www.arraycast.com/. This is a podcast on array languages (which more or less means APL-like, for the purposes of the podcast). Even if you don't particularly care about these languages they discuss algorithms and things from an abstract enough perspective that is helpful and illuminating.

i became aware of this recently and your comment reminded me to listen. this is great! thanks!

I really like Software Unscripted by Richard Feldman.

Aside: Richard seems impossibly nice— like, if Mr Rogers was a programmer, he’d be the creator of Roc.

[1] Click Here - https://therecord.media/podcast

[2] Reply All (which apparently ended in 2022 as I just learned) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_All_(podcast)

Programming:

- The Data Engineering Show

- Signals & Threads by Jane Street occasionally releases programming-focused episodes, although they haven't updated for a while.

Tech:

- Hard fork by NYT

I co-host a podcast called Book Overflow (https://bookoverflow.io) where each week we read and discuss a new software engineering book. We keep the conversations fairly dense. We've even interviewed a few of the authors, like Brian Kernighan!

Does A Frog Have Scorpion Nature? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/does-a-frog-have-scorp...

I really enjoy https://www.latent.space/podcast nowadays - it really gets into the technical details and concepts around various modern AI and LLM related topics.

Shout out to Stefan Mischook on YouTube https://youtube.com/@stefanmischook?si=Mo9ccAHmU2diCwZ9

He has great advice to new learners starting their career.

The Changelog is decent and has a few spinoff shows. Also Oxide and Friends.

I used to listen to the StackOverflow one but now it's just white-washing AI, and justifying them selling out their data to OpenAI.

go time but really anything from changelog

Software Unscripted is worth a shout-out

https://changelog.com

Radio Free XP is pretty Pivotal Labs focused, but I think it's really cool.

Thinking Elixir podcast is great if you work in the Elixir ecosystem.

Software Unscripted, by Richard Feldman

Just Go Time from time to time.

syntax or something like that.

Syntax is occasionally nice for that “Everyman programmer” quality it has. There’s a lot of humility in the way they approach topics.

Backend Banter

Practical AI

> Lex Fridman

I created a YT Playlist of 50+ Lex Fridman programming, robotics, AI, tech, etc videos. Feel free to reply (with URLs) if I missed any.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ4_Rj_Aw2Yl2GR6_JgIq...

Andrej Karpathy: Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, and AGI #333

Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet #434

Bjarne Stroustrup: C++ #48

Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave #160

Brian Kernighan: UNIX, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Programming #109

Charles Hoskinson: Cardano #192

Chris Lattner: Compilers, LLVM, Swift, TPU, and ML Accelerators #21

Chris Lattner: Future of Programming and AI #381

Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages #131

Donald Knuth: Algorithms, Complexity, and The Art of Computer Programming #62

Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life #219

Elon Musk: Neuralink, AI, Autopilot, and the Pale Blue Dot #49

Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI #252

Elon Musk: Tesla Autopilot #18

Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity #400

George Hotz: Comma.ai, OpenPilot, and Autonomous Vehicles #31

George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets #132

George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God #387

Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming #341

Guido van Rossum: Python #6

Ilya Sutskever: Deep Learning #94

Jack Dorsey: Square, Cryptocurrency, and Artificial Intelligence #91

James Gosling: Java, JVM, Emacs, and the Early Days of Computing #126

Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI #218

Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror #7

Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin #405

Jim Keller: Moore's Law, Microprocessors, and First Principles #70

Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness #162

Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia #385

John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets #309

Kate Darling: Social Robotics #98

Kate Darling: Social Robots, Ethics, Privacy and the Future of MIT #329

Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family #417

Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI #386

Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse #398

Mark Zuckerberg: Future of AI at Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp #383

Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse #267

Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development #371

Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication #380

Noam Chomsky: Language, Cognition, and Deep Learning #53

Peter Norvig: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach #42

Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality #250

Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality #321

Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO on GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI #367

Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI #419

Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness #130

Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics #89

Stephen Wolfram: ChatGPT and the Nature of Truth, Reality & Computation #376

Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality #234

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe #124

Travis Oliphant: NumPy, SciPy, Anaconda, Python & Scientific Programming #224

Yann LeCun: Dark Matter of Intelligence and Self-Supervised Learning #258

Yann LeCun: Deep Learning, ConvNets, and Self-Supervised Learning #36

Yann LeCun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI #416

The Jeff Bezos interview is really good. Esp. the 10,000 year clock.

i read that title as „which podcasts are you procrastinating to?“

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