There's been quite a surge in curated lists in the last few weeks. How can I tell which ones are curated well?

Rich Hickey's all talks[0] are awesome! Definitely would be a welcome addition to this list! Few other good ones - https://github.com/PharkMillups/killer-talks

[0] - http://www.infoq.com/author/Rich-Hickey

"Cool Code" by Kevlin Henney is quite fantastic I think. He lists some examples of amazing programs (like a chess program in less than 1K, and the Ruby quine with the rotating ascii-art globe). Maybe not so useful, but still great! http://vimeo.com/28772428

Having the same issue (listing tech talks) and seeing that lots of tech slides were made with HTML and available on github we develop a search engine in a week-end to reference them. http://slidedeck.io/

Since it is not readme based, I suggest including Y-Not[1] - an excellent talk about functional programming and lambda calculus

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs

Shameless plug for yet another site with curated tech talks: http://www.aula.io

Also: https://github.com/hnrc/aula

If you all want to see some more archived tech talks, check out what we had built at TechTalks.tv.

Good list. Would you consider maintaining a JSON version?

You can contribute by forking here https://github.com/phatak-dev/techtalks.