Karpathy builds HackerTube: a YouTube clone powered by Hacker News recommendations
HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
After a Friday night encounter with what he calls an 'enshittified wall of slop' on YouTube, Andrej Karpathy spent two hours on Saturday using Opus 5.5 to build hackertube.org. The AI downloaded and filtered all Hacker News comments, ran Sonnet to remove spam, and surfaced 6,454 videos recommended by HN users from 2007 to 2026 across 150 topics. The site offers a clean YouTube-style UI, custom ForYou recommendations without accounts, keyboard shortcuts, and data export for agents.
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.
- murm
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
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.
- pknerd
I just noticed it is a vibe-coded project by Karpathy
It'd be awesome if he writes something about he he vibe-coded it
- minimaxa
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
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.
- allexsendev
Built (and still am) something like this, but hand-curated (watched end-to-end) rather than source-filtered. v0 test run: https://cabin.watch
no distribution means I'm having a bit of a hard time finding good videos fast enough (rejection rate through the roof rn), so send any if you know some.
- rigrassm
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
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.
- genxy
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.
- andai
Great idea. You know, it's weird, this looks very much like my feed in 2010, in terms of quality.
I recently logged into an account that hadn't been used since then, it was like a time capsule! But within a few days it figured out who I am and started showing me manmade horrors beyond comprehension.
So it sounds to me like there's a niche for a 2010tube as well.