HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

karpathy.bearblog.dev

803 points by karpathy 7 hours ago


YouTube-style UI over 6,454 videos sourced from 39,834 HN comments since 2007.

https://hackertube.org/

murm - 5 hours ago

It's so refreshing browsing this compared to YouTube, it feels like I don't have to constantly be on high alert at being baited into some trap. Makes you wonder what kind of internet could be possible if all these tech giants weren't just optimizing for engagement and addiction.

zmmmmm - 4 hours ago

I've been a bit fascinated by my lack of interest in the feeds that are curated for me. They are all things I'm supposedly interested in but I just am not when I see them in that format.

I realised after a while that one of the main reasons I go online is to expand my horizons. I'm actively looking for something new or interesting or surprising that I might not have encountered or thought about before. I am also looking for perspective - give me a broad picture of how the world is so I can calibrate and introspect where my own perspective differs and could be updated. I want to see the things that don't fully align with my ideas.

So it turns out personalised feeds are actively curating against what I'm looking for. I'm curious if others are like me or is this just something weird about me. I think it is very much why I like Hacker News format. It's in the broad areas of my interests but it is anything but curated just for me.

minimaxa - 5 hours ago

You know what I like about this? It's 100% pure nerd content, no sneaky influencer videos or clickbaity news.

It does need a new-to-old sort though, which is easy to add in.

If you watched all of these videos, you would be the smartest, most annoying person ever. Lol

reorder9695 - 6 hours ago

I find it amazing how close the front page of this is to what I actually watch/want to watch on YouTube. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it feels like an unpersonalised feed (besides being based on Hacker News) shouldn't have a significantly better hitrate for me than YouTube's "personalised" feed.

genxy - 3 hours ago

Wonderful!

> Fork it

> Everything behind this site is yours to reuse. The easiest way: give the zip to your AI agent (Claude Code or similar) and tell it what you want, such as a different interface, a weekly email of talks on your topics, a terminal browser, or an analysis. The zip includes a DATA.md written for agents: how the files fit together, the gotchas, example records, and how to walk you through getting YouTube metadata if you want it.

https://hackertube.org/about

rigrassm - 5 hours ago

You have no idea how big of a smile it put on my face when I saw the "Longs" option in the sidebar.

Seriously, thank you for prompting this into existence!

twalichiewicz - 6 hours ago

Interesting project, but have you considered publishing the curated videos as automatically maintained playlists (organized by topic, popularity, or recency) on a YouTube channel?

To me the most valuable part of this is the curation pipeline. I'd love to have access to those recommendations without needing to adopt an entirely separate viewing experience.

mixtureoftakes - 6 hours ago

I wish there was a way to sort by recency, if i'm mainly interested in finding obscure gems from like last 6 to 12 months of ai and tech updates

mraza007 - 16 minutes ago

It's so cool to browse youtube like this again, So many cool recommendations, a much needed project

thuruv - an hour ago

Its so refreshing to see the GUI. especially, since most of these videos are handpicked(?!) by users as suggestions and not originally intended to swim on the ratrace! AdBlockers helps you w/ UI distractions but the continious sloppy videos equipped q/ faulty thumbnails was/is my biggest distraction so far and thats what picked my attention on this fresh take.

I believe YT clients is inevitable (not just UI but something similar to this) similar to RES[1] happened for reddit!

[1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

thefourthchime - 7 minutes ago

Karpathy is such a legend.

sarmadgulzar - 6 hours ago

Wow, this is genuinely so good. I just browsed it for a few minutes and the difference between this and the YouTube homepage is astounding.

numbasys - 4 hours ago

> push to a VPS, secure, harden, optimize

In my opinion this is the part that's holding back _a lot_ more people from publishing. It's a barrier that's surely about to fall. Still interested what steps you took (and manually, or Claude did it all?)

privacyishuman - 7 hours ago

I like this a lot. I was just thinking about a site where you could share your YouTube cookies and then use anybody's curated algorithm because you can curate it quite fast in signed out mode.

Could you block all the trackers from loading from https://www.youtube-nocookie.com on your side?

zabouti - 12 minutes ago

I'm sad that there seems to be no RSS feed. It looks very nice indeed if I can remember to look.

jumploops - 7 hours ago

I’m always surprised how bad YouTube’s recommendation algorithm seems to be.

Maybe it’s because I don’t watch enough videos, but it’s sort of like Amazon, in that it will suggest the exact same content/topic.

I rarely use TikTok, only to view links people send me (similar to YouTube), but the recommended content is miles ahead, making it much more difficult to close compared to YT.

meken - 5 hours ago

I attempted something similar a few months ago, but specifically for documentaries after I found two amazing documentaries in the comments sections (the Disney living characters one [1] and the Mars rover engineer one [2]).

I mostly used some basic string matching to pull out documentaries and put them in a spreadsheet [3]. I sorted them by random and was going through one a day, but the results weren’t great so I stopped.

I should give it another go with a more hands-off fully vibe-coded approach.

- [1] https://youtu.be/NyIgV84fudM?is=PTwtQ9v0sxQ1eCYl

- [2] https://youtu.be/QKSPk_0N4Jc?is=YGgIRFCpFpMbddu7

- [3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uoZiAe5qHGIyUTsqFPLG...

Flere-Imsaho - 6 hours ago

What a smart idea!

Just randomly found this video from CGP Grey:

"What Happened to Horses Is Happening to Us"

https://hackertube.org/watch/7Pq-S557XQU

From...2014 It's surprisingly accurate. I wonder why he stopped making youtube videos.

uvu - 2 hours ago

I created a new YouTube account that turn of history and that's my default. If I want to watch something I have to type and search, there is no recommendation and it's been great so far. Sharing this as I think someone might not know about this and they might find it interesting.

zeroq - 3 hours ago

Everyone has praised it already, so I won't be original, but I have to say that I've been looking for something like this for quite a while now. I consume a lot of long form videos on yt, similar to what you can find in your feed, but somehow yt keeps boxing me into very narrow space after a while with same videos over and over again. I've been trying to escape this trap by creating new accounts but eventually I keep finding myself in the same box.

Definitely something worth exploring.

silveryfu - 3 hours ago

Kudos to Andrej for another demonstration of frontier vibe engineering (since MenuGen). Looking forward to the new recommendation model.

codingisfreedom - 6 hours ago

Out of curiosity - was this created using claude code? Cli or gui? I am not even remotely getting that kind of thoroughness from claude with opus 5.5 or anything really. It seems to want to stop as soon as it thinks it figured things out and then the rest of the conversation is just itself saying that its previous claims were wrong.

Really having a bad time with LLMs lately.

generuso - 4 hours ago

I was thinking earlier how the comments or annotations could be implemented in the right way, to fix the problems with the Youtube's comments system. It is certainly not trivial, and one can argue whether this is even desirable. But it would be cool to be able to reference parts of different videos and other resources more fluently.

For example, Kurzgesagt channel prepares their mini-lecture videos very carefully, and they often have a document on their site, referenced in the description under the video, and which annotates the video, and justifies the choices they made in how to present things. The document gives quotes and references to academic sources. If one could navigate and update narratives like that, sort of like a wiki, with one-click references to the relevant snippets of the video, maybe that would work. But even for their videos, the comments section in Youtube is largely useless.

World wide web was unleashed by putting together in a seamless way a few things which were already common before it. One click hypertext navigation was already a standard thing for the technical manuals locally on PC. But making it work on-line, instead of typing several strings in command line made all the difference. Maybe today we could tweak the commenting system to make the comments much more convenient to navigate than they are today. Keep similar comments from multiplying unnecessarily. Allow finding and linking relevant information. I do not have a thought out solution, but there is definitely some room for innovation here, if one approached it imaginatively.

zahirbmirza - 6 hours ago

Gosh, the videos HN have recommended are amazing. What a community this is.

num42 - 2 hours ago

Great work!

I’d like to add one more thing, 3Blue1Brown has created a well-organized archive of YouTube channels launched during all the 3Blue1Brown Math Exposition Contests from 2021 to 2026. There are a lot of great YouTube channels worth checking out!

https://some.3b1b.co/archive

tdhz77 - 2 hours ago

What makes this so good is not the curation it’s the age in which confirms our current views after years of bad information. The truth is setting us free and this confirms much

GodelNumbering - 6 hours ago

This is such a good use of tech! Although I have heard in the past that youtube is quick to ban any use of its content on a third party site. I hope I am wrong and this stays.

sakesun - an hour ago

AI companies sell tokens to produce slops. Then they sell more tokens to shield people from those slops.

doginasuit - 6 hours ago

You may want to change the logo, it is a different color but close enough to cause confusion. Not sure what a trademark court would say but it would definitely be enough to draw intimidation from Google if they wanted to.

aizk - 6 hours ago

Nitpick, maybe adding the youtube dislike counter estimation for videos might be a nice touch (yes it's an estimate but it's pretty decent). Though on second thought, perhaps these videos don't need them.

Doohickey-d - 6 hours ago

Someone did something similar for the current front page: https://hn.video

There was also another one with a more youtube-like UI, which I can't find anymore.

cliche - 5 hours ago

This is very cool. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about owning your algorithms and what rss could have been.

Is there a file / feed of the data driving this?

jimothyhalpert7 - 4 hours ago

This prompted me to finish HackerNewsTV – YouTube playlist of latest HN videos, updated daily:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321248

quix0te - 4 hours ago

Is it right that there haven't been any interesting or good videos for the past 5 months? I filtered by “upload date,” and the most recent videos are from 5 months ago. Still, I like it. Is it open source? I'd like to know what kind of tech stack was used here.

- an hour ago
[deleted]
AzzyHN - 3 hours ago

Hehe, longs. I'd love to see this iterated on to keep adding new content that's in line with this kind of thing!

ethanhood_okroh - 2 hours ago

One thing worth exploring would be how the recommendations compare to YouTube's algorithm. Hacker News upvotes and discussion history provide a different signal for what people find interesting, but I wonder how well that translates into video recommendations.

sc970 - 7 hours ago

How many tokens (or $) does something like this take to make?

freddref - 4 hours ago

Very nice, I've had great experience using hn to recommend, more like a feed though: https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html

cromka - 6 hours ago

I pay for YT premium but noticed the quality of recommendations is subpar yet I still end up wasting time watching it. So I decided I need to limit my feed to my subscribed videos only, which YT app makes annoyingly difficult.

How does HN handle this? I suppose downloading videos for consuming outside YT own app works, but what's the best solution for this, especially with Apple TV as a player?

jonbaer - 5 hours ago

Not sure how but adding a live up to date version of https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com would be nice to see in channel form, I don't think this matches recently recommended (unless based on # of upvotes) - still thank you for putting this curation together.

beaconflint - 6 hours ago

Recency sort needs a pick between comment date and upload date, since a 2012 talk linked last month is exactly the gem you'd want.

gosen - 6 hours ago

Nice idea, thanks Andrej! When will you add HackerTube Shorts? (kidding :D)

firefoxd - 4 hours ago

With the new wave of ads on mobile, the ones with the "next" button, I gave up. Instead I use the app to find videos and copy them to pipepipe.

Maybe the curated list can be exported to load on other apps.

SamDc73 - 5 hours ago

that's really cool, I don't know if it's possible to add `Return YouTube Dislike` integration to shows the dislike counts. API (OSS): https://returnyoutubedislike.com/docs

and this one might be tricky but SponsorBlock integration also? to auto-skips sponsor segments and introsusing crowdsourced timestamps. API: https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/API_Docs

m1keil - 4 hours ago

I actually do like it a lot.

Small bug report: on mobile layout, the like/dislike button is getting a bit clipped and the watch later button seems a bit off too.

ninjahawk1 - 6 hours ago

Really cool idea, you might consider bundling taps when you click a video so it auto-plays instead of opening up the native web browser for youtube. That would make it feel more like the official client. Could easily hide it behind a “buffering” screen.

zahirbmirza - 6 hours ago

Very interesting. I find that my youtube feed is nicely curated to my interests. Adapting my interests with the algo well. Discovery is mostly en pointe. It is only when I use an unlogged-in browser that I see the world outside the Matrix. That is a slopfest indeed.

What I would really like, now that you have opened up this amazing concept, is an ability to feed my own algo this entire collection. Inject all those videos into my own saved playlist. That would be anotherr cool use of this collection. Is there a way of doing that? Like some sort of algo plant food.

liquicity - 7 hours ago

Nice idea will watch though some - I made something similar but for food vids (filters over YouTube chefs - such as only vids with ingredients)

https://mealplannr.io/discover

mikert89 - 5 hours ago

Wait a second, forget the content, is the html/tech behind this actually more pleasant to use than googles hyperoptimized youtube website?

jahala - 6 hours ago

This is great, would love filters for duration and sort by upload date

farrelle25 - 7 hours ago

What a great idea. Does anyone know of a way of 'getting' / downloading all those URLs (maybe with the video title)..? I'm afraid of the site disappearing.

zahrevsky - 6 hours ago

Do you plan to update the site with new videos and comments?

- 2 hours ago
[deleted]
krmmalik - 5 hours ago

Oh how I wish there was an Apple TV app for this. I do all my YouTube browsing on an Apple TV.

simultsop - 5 hours ago

At this point everything looks boring and possible (technically). I wonder what would change this.

davidzweig - an hour ago

Kind of related, I extracted opinions on products and other things for large part of Reddit and HN:

https://www.trustmebro.reviews/r/hackernews

"47,699 products, places and tools ranked from 13,576,547 opinions."

Opinions extracted using local models running on 3090s in my basement. If someone wants to take it over, you can mail me.

The travel opinions on a map are pretty neat: https://www.trustmebro.reviews/c/travel?view=map

- 2 hours ago
[deleted]
breakyerself - 2 hours ago

YouTube itself needs a competitor. There's too much ads.

Balgair - 5 hours ago

Oh, oh no.

I already have about 35 tabs open of YT to watch.

This is going to kill my productivity.

Still, great stuff thank you!

- 6 hours ago
[deleted]
mancerayder - 4 hours ago

Amazing! If only it would appear on my AppleTV...

iugtmkbdfil834 - 6 hours ago

I currently use downloaded and curated youtube videos on my local server ( mostly for my kid so that I don't have to deal with youtube autoplay or her clicking something kid would ), but this is just a reminder of much google has changed for the worse.

mirekrusin - 6 hours ago

No login/account? What a blasphemy. Feel in love from the first site.

wildmXranat - 3 hours ago

Nice. This is excessively large so it probably took a while to curate. Well done

- 6 hours ago
[deleted]
pkal - 6 hours ago

It might be neat to integrate DeArrow to fetch thumbnails instead of just arbitrarily picking picking a 50% screenshot. It could also be used to replace the titles on the server side.

mongol - 3 hours ago

It would be great if this could be keyboard navigable, using arrow keys and enter to play.

beaker52 - 5 hours ago

Funny, this user made exactly this a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43672050

Only 12 upvotes - I guess his name wasn’t Karpathy.

Coill - 5 hours ago

I like this. All the "influencers" gone.

gpugreg - 6 hours ago

How do the categories work? I'd download the video transcripts and embed the text (maybe summarized first). This way you could support custom categories via embedding similarity.

skyberrys - 6 hours ago

What is a 50% thumbnail?

fhub - 4 hours ago

Feedback: On mobile, swipe back from video jumps back to top of feed with different video order.

imjonse - 6 hours ago

It would be nice to have some context for each video, a summary of the comments that recommended it in the thumbnail tooltip?

bch - 5 hours ago

Would love to see the list of submissions and comments that positively contributed to this.

morphle - 6 hours ago

Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube

kiuiras - 6 hours ago

It would be great to have an option to sort videos by upload date, so it's easier to discover recent content.

- 6 hours ago
[deleted]
blltprfmnk - 4 hours ago

I guess I learn something new about the HN crowd every day. When I loaded the page, half of the first screen were videos by IDW folks.

Pro tip for YouTube proper - turn off history and only view the “subscribed” page, and search for content that you really want to see. Oh and of course turn off autoplay and limit shorts to 0 views per day.

mhrmsn - 6 hours ago

Interesting idea! Also funny that the fourth recommendation for me was a video with Andrej himself :D

sigma5 - 3 hours ago

cool! It would be nice to have a "watch a random video" button

chrisczura - 3 hours ago

Hey Andrej, thanks for the effort. It's highly appreciated!

In your video regarding your own use of LLMs[1] you mention https://arena.ai/leaderboard and https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard to keep track of the status quo. That video is from February 2025 and https://artificialanalysis.ai has gained quite a lot of popularity but also earned criticism repeatedly due to updating the benchmarks right before a new model release. Would you still recommend the arena and scale leaderboards? And if you don't mind, what's your opinion wrt artificialanalysis?

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

ciefa - 6 hours ago

Seeing Prejudice by Tim Minchin on the front page makes me very, very happy.

Love Tim Minchin <3

annjose - 2 hours ago

Whoa, what a breath of fresh air! Just watching videos without worrying about clickbait.

And those filters and sorting options - imagine what the internet could have been without enshittification.

Pushy - 5 hours ago

Can i plz has rss

saussianglat - 2 hours ago

a lot of this is still too maintstream

low_tech_punk - 4 hours ago

How come there are no ads?

forevernoob - 4 hours ago

Sounds good, but could you please make it so that it can also be viewed without Javascript being enabled?

victor9000 - 6 hours ago

Could this not just be a playlist?

whattheheckheck - 6 hours ago

Build something to fix the wicked problems of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Or https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/databases/25202804

The rules are the ai can't say the only winning move is to not play and it can't choose to kill everyone.

youoy - 5 hours ago

I went into the blog, and saw only two entries in 2026. I dont know how to feel.

I dont know if its because the new state of things is that all knowledge is now secret and cant be shared.

Or if its because Opus 5.5 has turned even Karpathy into a product owner/manager so now the only interesting things are products (hackertube in this case).

Either of them makes me sad. Although its probably both.

Wake me up when true science is back.

In any case, im a big fan of Karpathy.

gambiting - 6 hours ago

>>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews

I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl

mwambua - 6 hours ago

> I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me

I see this sentiment expressed a lot regarding a variety of ways the internet has been enshittified. Are we really sure the median person would prefer this to better content if they were presented with an alternative?

And even if they would - what are the ethics of knowingly feeding slop to the masses?

ChiliPie - 2 hours ago

Ur filter missed Patrick Boyle, not only that dudes content is slop but his voice too xD

mentalgear - 7 hours ago

Appreciate the effort, yet I think there is a place this is needed even more:

> It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop.

Please do the same thing on Social Media: Facebook, 'X', reddit, instagram, etc . Maybe find a 'hacker signal' that identifies quality content across those platforms and have them aggregated for the public so we don't have to spend time in the fascist network prisons.

The greatest trick - if it even can be pulled - would be setting it up in a way that it can't be sued out of existence by the angry platform overlords - if you can do this, then you are truly a genius, sir.

Free the people.

chalmovsky - 6 hours ago

I found this gem there: Rails Conf 2012 Keynote: Simplicity Matters by Rich Hickey (https://hackertube.org/watch/rI8tNMsozo0)

And lol ... Can you imagine how savage this is, with Rich's disgust with ORM and entangled concepts and like the audience sits there with their ActiveRecord and 10 levels deep inheritance and rails 'easy way' of doing stuff. Probably was a bigger shocker than dHH's keynote this year. lol

b0ner_t0ner - 4 hours ago

Now redo it with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, see how it compares.

mbed92 - 6 hours ago

Really cool idea. I also realized recently that whenever I enter YT, I enter "nshittified wall of slop"...

thr0waway001 - 4 hours ago

"I have doors that open like this. Not like this."

_s_a_m_ - 4 hours ago

i wished yt would be so fast. yt itself is the most bloated heavy app

ajs1998 - 3 hours ago

Unfortunately HN is just another algorithm. It roughly aligns with what I already see on my youtube but includes some terribly old videos and a mix of videos from creators I'm currently subscribed to and channels I know I never want to watch again like Joe Rogan, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lex Fridman etc. This is indeed a HN video site and I hate it lol.

The youtube video recommendation algorithm isn't that bad if you're careful which videos you watch. Sometimes you'll take a risk on a video and it'll punish you with a week of similar videos though.

sejje - 6 hours ago

> Media, journalism & propaganda

Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.

vfclists - 7 hours ago

Where is the source, so I can roll my own specialized video site?

9dev - 4 hours ago

[flagged]

tonymet - 3 hours ago

john oliver. Simon Sinek. c'mon guys

karpathy - 5 hours ago

Changelog push from HN comments on this thread:

- Filters on search and topic pages: upload date, duration, type (talk, lecture, documentary, ...), and sort by upload date, view count, etc. (ty jahala, kiuiras, mixtureoftakes)

- Filters are now on the home page too, no need to search first. Picking one shows all matching videos, e.g. every lecture over an hour. (ty kkotak, macote, Aboutplants)

- Sort by "Recently recommended": orders by the latest HN recommendation instead of upload date, so a 2012 talk that someone linked last month floats to the top. Also a chip on the home page. (ty beaconflint, mixtureoftakes)

- Sort by like ratio as a quality signal: likes/views, damped so small videos can't win on a handful of likes. (ty gpugreg)

- "Play all on YouTube": turns the videos on a page (up to 50) into a temporary YouTube playlist, so it works in the YouTube app on phones and TVs. A start toward real HackerTube playlists. (ty twalichiewicz, waschl, victor9000)

- Removed the YouTube-looking logo. (ty doginasuit)

- HackerTube Longs: every video over an hour, right where YouTube puts Shorts. (ty gosen)

- Bonus: "Hidden gems" filter (loved on HN, under 100k views on YouTube), and "Evergreen only" to hide news-of-the-week videos.

toppa33 - 43 minutes ago

[dead]

seymores - 37 minutes ago

[dead]

smjy_studio - an hour ago

[flagged]

- 6 hours ago
[deleted]
- 6 hours ago
[deleted]
thingfyi - 3 hours ago

[flagged]

- 7 hours ago
[deleted]
saikiran91 - 6 hours ago

I can't find it on GitHub. Is it open source?

thingfyi - 4 hours ago

[dead]

tester457 - 5 hours ago

Can you add videos sourced from lobste.rs?

tdhz77 - 3 hours ago

A majority of right wing extremism starts via YouTube.

Yash16 - 6 hours ago

[dead]

mi_lk - 6 hours ago

One of the better ones but in all honesty a random ass vibed site that's on front page because Karpathy

- 7 hours ago
[deleted]