Karpathy builds HackerTube, a YouTube clone curated from HN comments
Frustrated with YouTube's recommendation algorithm, Andrej Karpathy used Claude Opus to mine 15+ years of Hacker News comments into a video site.
What to know
- Karpathy built hackertube.org in roughly a day using Claude Opus 5.5, prompted by dissatisfaction with YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
- The site curates 6,454 videos drawn from about 40,000 Hacker News comments spanning 2007 to 2026, filtered with an AI pipeline (Opus plus Sonnet) to remove spam and low-quality picks.
- The launch post reached 191 points and 88 comments on Hacker News and was cross-posted via RSS and Mastodon.
Andrej Karpathy Creator of HackerTube
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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1
Launch post climbs Hacker News front page
Karpathy's write-up of HackerTube was posted to Hacker News and reached a score of 191 with 88 comments, while an automated HN Frontpage RSS repost and Mastodon shares (via hkrn@mstdn.social and newsycombinator@framapiaf.org) circulated the link further.
“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.”
— Andrej Karpathy, Creator of HackerTube · source -
first by HN Frontpage, 9d ago · also HN Best
2 more headlines
- Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-inspired version of Hacker News HN Best · 9d ago
- Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-Inspired Version Hacker News HN Frontpage · 9d ago
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B
*Karpathy just reverse-engineered YouTube, over the weekend, to produce a hacker-friendly dis-enshittified version: https:// hackertube.org
2 more of the top 3 · 309 posts in this stretch
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> I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me.Why does…
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What you have done was and is a revolution, Karpathy.I have been shouting that YT, the "video museum" is unmissable for cultivation in the current days ever since this obvious fact met the will of pitiful entities to bar it to minors (unbelievable) and impede it to adults (through privacy or practically dubious constraints). Karpathy has just…
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background
Pipeline filters 40K HN comments down to 6,454 videos — Opus downloaded all HN comments, ran Sonnet over them in a workflow to strip spam and low-grade content, and narrowed roughly 40,000 comments recommending YouTube videos into a curated set of 6,454 videos spanning 150 topics from 2007-2026.
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background
Karpathy has Claude Opus 5.5 build HackerTube over a weekend — After finding YouTube's recommendations an "enshittified wall of slop" on Friday night, Karpathy tasked Opus 5.5 on Saturday morning with building a YouTube clone sourced from videos recommended on Hacker News, resulting in hackertube.org.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by HN Best, 10d ago · also HN Frontpage
2 more headlines
- Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books recommended on HN HN Frontpage · 10d ago
- Show HN: Wikihack – HackerTube, but for Wikipedia articles mentioned on HN HN Best · 10d ago
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first by HN Best, 11d ago · also HN Frontpage
1 more headline
and 1 smaller piece
What people are saying 21 voices from 1 site · best of 309 · verbatim
- Nov 3
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Love it ! Thank you for creating this. I am in the process of minimizing my digital consumption and was looking for something like this to live like if it's the 70s. Shameless plug: i have two chrome plugins to reduce digital distractions if anyone is interested. Sanctum : https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sanctum-its-time-to...FlowTube :
- Nov 2
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I remember finding YouTube videos to watch on the something awful forums in like 2007. Was the only real way I knew of at the time but the variety puts my current recommendation feed to shame.I miss the sheer random absurdity of what I'd find there. Don't remember too much of what I found any more, other than "man from lox" which I still find…
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I remember there was a similar project like this posted a while ago. Turns out there are multiple. Here are just a few (that are still online):A couple of months ago (so probably vibe-coded too):https://thefrontpage.dev/https://times.hntrends.net/https://hackernewstimes.com/This one even from 6 years…
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To throw a few videos more videos into the mix that I've really been enjoying is Quinn's intros into metal machining.Absolute beginner intro https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY67-4BrEae-qwNQ3II1G1ZdU...Lathe Intro https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY67-4BrEae9Ad91LPRIhcLJM...Milling intro…
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Whenever this topic comes up I always wonder if people mean reading as all long-form reading (including pop fiction) or if they mean “serious” reading. To me it’s actually quite strange but I feel like I have “lessened” as a reader over the past decades.I used to be able to read some of the more classic novels a bit easier and now I just find…
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I second this.For quite a long period in my 20s I would buy very worthy intellectual non-fiction books (based on reviews or recommendations) and then struggle to make headway with them. In retrospect, I think I was just usually too tired from work and life to have the mental energy to focus.I then read an article by (IIRC) Irvine Welsh, the nub of…
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On the subject of reading (since the 'decline' in literacy is being raised in this thread) -- especially if you haven't read in a while and are thinking about reading but are maybe struggling to because you feel like it's "been too long" or that you'll struggle to concentrate on a book...Please give reading (especially fiction) another chance. I…
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We have a continuously updated, publicly accessible hackernews database in BigQuery, in case more of you folks are interested in building similar projects:https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...Clickhouse equivalent, updated in real-time: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIG1heCh0a...Relevant post…
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I have recently tried to check around goodreads alterantives and I came face to face with these ISBNs and ASINs and how these are a hot mess. There's really no truly open metadata source that is "enough". App developers often depend on proprietary sources and sadly those are the ones which are more complete and go their own way for every source…
- Nov 1
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"I think this gives us an opportunity to fully cut the cord from eyeball merchants who want us to maximally engage and therefore polarize their content."https://hackertube.org/download/hackertube-data.ziphttps://hackertube.org/data"YouTube's own metadata (descriptions, view counts, durations, publish dates) can't be redistributed under YouTube's…
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A couple of missing ones (that I expected to have been mentioned, aren't there as far as I can tell, and I found them on here with a quick google):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Morel mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779266 I'd have expected it to come up as one step removed from Borges, and it…
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I noticed almost all of the top recommended books are written by men. A quick skim of the first 100 books on the home page and I see ~4 by women. The Fiction category was largely the same. Nothing against these books, I have read many and enjoyed them, but that's a pretty crazy ratio.Just interesting. I will add some personal recommendations to…
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You know, one thing that I think is interesting in tech circles is how much interest we have in maths in general, except that there is almost nothing on the "top" list that I saw that was related to probability and statistics. It's like P&S, which is probably the most useful math for most people who need to make decisions in life, is just not that…
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I think there is a massive opportunity for this kind of feed disaggregation. Used to be the recommender and indexing of content was hard, now I believe we can likely build our own according to our own preferences.Haiku/Sonnet (or even Jev) can do a lot of the filtering work to rank and extend an RSS feed list.I think this gives us an opportunity…
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YouTube has two choices - it can maintain its' iron grip over the UI and the algorithm, and with that alienate content creators and viewers, who no longer are able to remain connected with each other effectively via YouTube.Or YouTube can completely open up and encourage this sort of custom UI design and allowing people to explore their own…
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While the project is very interesting in and of itself, the process section that has been edited a bit later to the post is even more revaling:> A little bit more on my process. I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac). I use Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I don't actually do anything resembling traditional engineering anymore (read/write…
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This is what my dad (87) needs, filtered YouTube. He sits a lot on YouTube and often he is recommended a lot of negative World War 2 content. He is often trapped in that and although he also sees positive videos about other interesting things, depressing content gets the most attention. He has been to a geriatric doctor who also said he needs to…
- Oct 31
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Shameless self-promotion: https://github.com/andunieee/cathode (gtk4 desktop app) can give you a non-bait interface to YouTube that works.Now this project gives me some ideas of things to implement:- pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video- allow curated subscriptions, i.e. I subscribe to some curated list made by someone (in this case it…
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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…
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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…
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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…