Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2024? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2024?

It's that time of the year again. The Economist has released their best podcasts of 2024 list - https://archive.ph/Bh2Y0#selection-977.4-977.25

Personal favorites:

Conversations with Tyler - Tobi Lütke on Creating Shopify for Americans as a German in Canada (Ep. 221). I found Tobi's viewpoint as a European who has set up a business in North America to be particularly interesting and unique.

The Rest is Politics - Trump Returns: What Now? I was not pleased by the result but this podcast helped me process it and understand some of the reasoning behind it.

The Social Radars - Dan Siroker. First time coming across the Optimizely story and found it a fascinating one.

What's on your list?

View on HN

The best podcast of 2024 ran from 2007 to 2012

https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/200...

I listened to all 179 episodes of the History of Rome podcast.

From a simpler time before advertising.

179- The End The history of The History of Rome...Why the Western Empire Fell when it did...Some thoughts on the future...Thank you, goodnight.

178- Not With A Bang But A Whimper In the last few years of the Western Empire a series of Emperors came and went. The cycle finally ended in 476 with the exile of Romulus Augustulus.

177- The Burning Ships In 468 the two halves of the Empire combined forces to dislodge the Vandals from North Africa.They failed spectacularly.

Since I got some updoots here is some trivia:

The opening guitar that will get burned into brain is of unknown provenance. It's just called 'guitar solo #3' and came with the free sound editing software when he bought the audio card.

The USA is not falling like Rome. Rome lasted 800 years and the fall was imperceptable to them. Everything used as a marker for the fall happened more than once. The capital was moved away from Rome but came back several times. There were two Ceasars many times but they went back to one many times. Rome was sacked but recovered more than once. The eastern roman empire lasted arguably another thousand years.

The Romans had a rule that every man was instantly out of the army when coming back from war when they crossed a small stream near rome called the rubicon. To prevent what J. Ceaser did, keeping his army together and taking over.

Rome had about 400 really good years, 200 as a republic, J. Ceasar, then 200 years of the empire. Things didnt change all that much with the end of 'democracy' for a while.

J Christ was alive during emperor Tiberius, and is not mentioned in their records at all. No reason for it, he was unknown during his life and lived in an insignificant province at the very edge of the empire.

all from memory of course, YMMV.

> Rome was sacked but recovered more than once

That's somewhat arguable. As far as we can tell the 410 AD sack was relatively organized and the violence was somewhat limited (by ancient standards at least..).

By 455 AD the population was almost 50% lower than it was before the first sack and the Vandal sack possibly also wasn't that brutal (no wholesale slaughter or destruction of buildings).

However the end of the 400s while the city still had a massive population by premodern standards (>100k) it was barely 10-20% of the population it had in ~100 AD and then it was almost entirely depopulated during the Gothic Wars and the plague. After that it didn't really recover until the modern era.

> what J. Ceaser did,

He wasn't exactly the first to do it and the precedent of leading an army into the city to overthrow the current government was well established by Caesar's day. Even Pompey himself basically used the threat marching his army into the city to force the senate to concede to his political goals.

Also it's not certain that the Rubicon thing was contemporary (of course legions couldn't technically cross the pomerium/sacred boundary of the city itself without disbanding and Caesar had no legal authority/imperium outside of his province to begin with).

> From a simpler time before advertising

first episode starts with an ad

From 2007?

Yeah, I checked again and I am getting ads. The link for the first episode is this: http://traffic.libsyn.com/historyofrome/01-_In_the_Beginning...

It looks like it then routes the user to another link. Sometimes you get this one which has ads https://teletraan.libsyn.com

and sometimes you get this one that doesn't have ads: https://content.libsyn.com

Fall of Civilization is my favorite each year. They only released one (very long) episode in 2024. Each episode is pretty dense, and I end up listening to each one a few times. Can't recommend it enough.

I have really enjoyed a new one that has popped up.

Unbiased by jordanismylawyer

She gives a rundown of a days events, gives context, and legal analysis

We have ways of making you talk - ww2 podcast also have some great walking thr field youtube videos

I have no idea when these podcasts began, but currently listening to:

Hard Fork by the NYT

Robert Wright's NonZero

The Lovecraft Investigations

Within the Wires

Ctrl Alt Azure

Animal Spirits

Effectively Wild

The Changelog

Tides of History is probably the best history podcast I've ever listened to. Instead of a sequential retelling of events it focuses much more on cause and effects and presents a holistic analysis of archaeological findings, anthropology, genetics etc. merged with historical sources/texts.

I really loved the episodes on Ancient Rome and Italy that came out earlier this year. A completely opposite approach of History of Rome (which is also great but the early episodes on the "prehistorical" period were pretty meh.. of course it massively improved by the time it reached the mid/late Republic and especially during the Imperial period).

In no particular order:

Unhedged

The Rest is Politics

Witness History (BBC)

The Rachman Review

Late Night Linux

The Foreign Desk (Monocle)

Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell

[edit : reformat]

i found Soft Skills Engineering Podcast this year and i'm enjoying it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com