What is HackerTube?
A YouTube front end where the recommendation algorithm is two decades of Hacker News comments. Made by Andrej Karpathy and Claude in a morning; open data; no accounts.
The short version
HackerTube (hackertube.org) is a small website that looks like YouTube but only contains 6,454 videos: the ones that Hacker News commenters have been telling each other to watch since 2007. It was built on 31 October 2026 by Andrej Karpathy (former Tesla AI director, OpenAI co-founder, author of the "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" course) using Claude Opus 5.5 inside Claude Code. His blog post about it is five paragraphs long and the whole project took about two hours.
Why it exists
YouTube's home page optimizes for watch time. Karpathy's complaint was that at 11pm on a Friday it served him "insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics". Hacker News, meanwhile, has spent nearly twenty years doing the opposite in its comment threads: pointing people to the conference talk that changed how they write software, the lecture series that made a subject click, the documentary nobody else seems to know about. HackerTube is those recommendations collected, filtered and made browsable.
How the list was made
- Every HN comment from 2007 to 2026 (from the open-index/hacker-news archive) was scanned for YouTube links. A link only counts if the comment has at least 100 characters of its own text.
- A video stays if at least three different people linked it, in at least three different months. One-off links and drive-bys fall away.
- Claude read each remaining comment, with the title of the HN story it was under, and labeled what the commenter was doing: a strong recommendation, a recommendation, a neutral citation, a joke, or a criticism. It also picked a short quote and topics.
- Claude wrote a card for each video (summary, why HN likes it, format, level, whether it has aged well) and sorted it into 150 topics in 16 areas.
- Videos are ranked by lasting recommendations: the number of different months with a recommendation, not the number of comments.
The whole pipeline, including the labeling of 39,834 comments, ran in the same two-hour session. A few percent of labels are wrong, which the author says up front.
What it feels like to use
A home page of picks (HN classics, hidden gems, recent favorites, topics you have not explored), a search that understands topics rather than keywords, 150 categories, playlists, and a video page that shows what HN actually said, with links back to the threads. Likes, history and watch-later live in your browser only. Thumbnails are the frame from the middle of the video, not the uploader's custom one, which quietly removes most of the clickbait.
How this edition is different
The original is a single-page app: its 6,454 video pages do not exist for search engines, there is no sitemap, and the data is a snapshot from 31 October 2026. HackerTube Watch is built from the same data (published under ODC-By 1.0) and adds:
- A real, indexable page for every video, topic, area, channel and format, with the HN comments on the page.
- A visible recommendation record on every video: which years HN recommended it, how many people, how many months.
- Ranked lists the original does not have: the 100 most recommended, recommended for a decade or more, quiet favorites, and one page per channel.
- A plan to keep it current: new HN recommendations are collected after the export date. See how the list is made.
What it does not try to do: replace the original. If you want Karpathy's exact interface, playlists and semantic search, use hackertube.org.
Six videos that explain the whole idea
The top of the list, as it stands.
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3HN's go-to recommendation for learning linear algebra intuition, repeatedly credited with making concepts click and complementing textbooks. -
CHN recommends it repeatedly as one of the best and most entertaining programming talks, and as the talk that makes the Y combinator click, even for people who do not use Ruby. -
HN repeatedly calls it the best in-depth introduction to IC manufacturing, a sense-of-awe talk by an independent engineer, while wishing for an updated version. -
MHN treats it as the canonical, near-universally recommended lecture on giving talks and presentations. -
AHN treats it as the best starting point for really understanding backprop and neural nets, because Karpathy explains the why with intuition and builds everything in code. -
GHN repeatedly recommends it as a master class in limited-palette pixel art and palette cycling, from an artist behind Loom and Monkey Island.
Questions people ask
Who made HackerTube?
Andrej Karpathy prompted it into existence on Saturday, 31 October 2026, after a Friday-night YouTube session he described as an "enshittified wall of slop". Claude Opus 5.5, working in Claude Code, built the data pipeline, the search, the recommendations and the site in about two hours. Karpathy's own manual work was creating a YouTube API key, starting a VPS and buying the domain hackertube.org.
Where do the videos come from?
From the public Hacker News archive. Every comment from 2007 to 2026 was scanned for YouTube links; a video is kept if at least three different people linked it, in at least three different months, with at least 100 characters of their own commentary. That leaves 6,454 videos out of well over a hundred thousand that were ever linked.
Is HackerTube free? Do I need an account?
Yes, and no. There are no accounts; likes, watch-later and history are stored only in your browser. Videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed.
Is this site the official HackerTube?
No. The official site is hackertube.org. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition built from the data HackerTube publishes under the ODC-By 1.0 license. It adds indexable pages for every video, topic and channel, shows the HN comments inline, and is meant to be kept up to date.
What does the HackerTube score mean?
The number of distinct months in which someone on HN recommended the video, plus half a point for every month with a strong recommendation. A talk recommended in eighteen different months over eight years scores higher than a clip linked by many people in one week.
Can I get the data?
Yes. HackerTube publishes a 17.8 MB zip (videos, labeled comments, topics, related-video graph and search embeddings) under ODC-By 1.0. See the data page here for what is in it and how to build your own version.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.