Yet another Hacker News

HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

227 points karpathy 1 hour ago 101 comments

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

sc970 1 hour ago | parent

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

karpathy 1 hour ago | parent

I'm on subscription but I had Claude add it up: 504M input tokens (90% cached), 7.6M output tokens. 90+% of that was Sonnet calls to label the comments, all of the actual work, the app and deploy etc was ~1M tokens of Opus 5.5, I compacted context once. i.e. very small project by modern standards.

mixtureoftakes 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah i'm pretty sure this is doable multiple times on a 20 dollar subscription, just wow

mips_avatar 1 hour ago | parent

I wish someone would make a decision model that’s as good as sonnet but like 10-100x cheaper. Because for this project which is a pretty small dataset you’re spending ~$300 on sonnet usage. like jev can probably do this task but it’s not smart enough to reliably be used

gambiting 33 minutes ago | parent

GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it runs with latest PHP which required several rounds of fixes, optimize the system so it runs on the smallest 512MB droplet, harden the system so that ideally no one ever needs to look at it for another 10 years - it took about an hour, and cost a grand total of 4 american.... _cents_

I use Opus at work since we have a nearly unlimited AI budget, but for personal projects I just use GLM 5.3 and I don't see much difference between that and Opus.

liquicity 1 hour ago | parent

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

privacyishuman 1 hour ago | parent

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?

farrelle25 1 hour ago | parent

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.

karpathy 1 hour ago | parent

The site won't disappear (imminently, as I'd like to use it personally!) but head over to the about/ section and download the .zip with the underlying data, which I put up for this purpose.

mentalgear 1 hour ago | parent

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.

vfclists 1 hour ago | parent

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

sejje 1 hour ago | parent

Well, some portion of it was just served to you over HTTP.

It's very likely that your agents can just build the rest, if the backend source isn't provided.

farrelle25 59 minutes ago | parent

I think the core data is available here: https://hackertube.org/data

karpathy 52 minutes ago | parent

I didn't publish the server because it's a vibe coded mess, but if you point your Opus 5.5 at the zip and ask for YouTube-like site it will be basically instant. This part was like 3 min.

EDIT: one caveat is that i couldn't distribute the YouTube data so you'd have to create a (free) API key for that part. Luckily it's only ~1 min of hassle.

jumploops 1 hour ago | parent

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.

gleenn 1 hour ago | parent

Do you have web activity turned off or use a separate old style Youtube account? Mine is also bad but I think it's because of those for me.

smokel 1 hour ago | parent

I suspect they know perfectly well when they can't make money from someone, so they deliberately serve up boring crap to save on hosting costs.

thijson 1 hour ago | parent

I was thinking it would be good if there was something similar for kids. They seem to fall into a whirlpool of trash content.

globular-toast 1 hour ago | parent

Bad by what metric? They're interested in getting you to watch ads, they couldn't care less what you want.

renegat0x0 1 hour ago | parent

For YouTube nerds I curate a list of channels. Size of list 3993 feeds: - https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top/blob/main/l...

From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.

I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.

YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.

ssl-3 14 minutes ago | parent

My YouTube feed is pretty good; it's full of technical discourse on topics that I enjoy learning about, ranging from electronics hacking to civil engineering. That's probably the result of a long number of years of continuous training:

Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.

Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.

Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"

Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."

---

I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.

(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)

morphle 1 hour ago | parent

Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube

gosen 1 hour ago | parent

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

karpathy 46 minutes ago | parent

NEVER. More inclined to add HackerTube Longs :D

gosen 44 minutes ago | parent

yes! I'd love that :D

twalichiewicz 38 minutes ago | parent

You can make the ultimate anti-short attention span player by intercepting all keyboard/mouse inputs to prevent navigating away and requiring you to watch the whole video ◡.

sarmadgulzar 35 minutes ago | parent

You haven't posted on YouTube in a year or so. Working on any long-form videos we can expect to see anytime soon?

Anyway, loved your "GPT from scratch" video btw!

jahala 1 hour ago | parent

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

gpugreg 1 hour ago | parent

Sorting would certainly be great. I'd especially welcome sorting by some kind of quality metric. The "thumbs down" count is not available via API anymore, but you could use thumbs up per views as a proxy, although that might require some reweighing, since videos with many views usually have fewer thumbs up.

You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.

karpathy 54 minutes ago | parent

added and pushed!

sejje 1 hour ago | parent

> Media, journalism & propaganda

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

gpugreg 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mixtureoftakes 1 hour ago | parent

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

mtVessel 55 minutes ago | parent

Seconded! (please)

Aboutplants 54 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, this is the first thing I looked for and when I couldn’t find it I easily decided it’s something I would never come back to. Add this feature and it’s something I would come to frequently

karpathy 49 minutes ago | parent

added a few minutes ago!

kkotak 46 minutes ago | parent

Don't see it.

karpathy 43 minutes ago | parent

first do a search, then on top you'll see "Filter". might try to make more prominent from main page

macote 39 minutes ago | parent

Yes, please, I couldn't figure it out as well.

mixtureoftakes 32 minutes ago | parent

thanks!

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

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?

aeriose 1 hour ago | parent

YouTube constantly cycles the same content + videos it’s so annoying

nwmck 1 hour ago | parent

I have an extension that blocks all recommendations and forces me to subscribe to the creators I like and search for content myself. Recommendations aren’t optimized for your benefit. Cutting out the recommendations really helps to not get sucked in.

0fflineuser 27 minutes ago | parent

Personnaly I disabled recommendations/watch history/etc... so the youtube homepage is blank, there is absolutely nothing on it.

I first started by moving all my subscriptions to grayjay(where I also disabled the home page), that way I just click the subscriptions tab and there is everything there, you can even create subscription groups if needed.

Then as I had some issues with grayjay desktop(not the mobile app which works great) I then simply moved all my subscriptions to miniflux and newsrafts(which I now rarely use). I use feedflow on android and reminiflux on desktop as I don't like the miniflux frontend. So now if there is a new channel I want to follow I just add the channel rss feed to miniflux/newsraft.

So for apple tv I guess you could use a RSS app but I am not sure the user experience would be great, so using grayjay could be an option as you can stream the video to the TV's but that would require another device (phone/computer) as it's not available on ios/apple tv.

I guess a good starting point would be to simply disable everything in your youtube settings to start off (watch history, recommandations, etc...).

iugtmkbdfil834 1 hour ago | parent

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.

reorder9695 1 hour ago | parent

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.

rileymat2 30 minutes ago | parent

I am not sure the personalize algorithm is based on what you want to watch, but what will keep you watching. That’s a measurable KPI.

GodelNumbering 1 hour ago | parent

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.

beaconflint 1 hour ago | parent

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.

zahrevsky 1 hour ago | parent

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

twalichiewicz 1 hour ago | parent

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.

karpathy 56 minutes ago | parent

I like the idea of playlists, might even work to ask Claude to make a few. Did you have in mind the ability to create and publish them on the site somehow?

twalichiewicz 47 minutes ago | parent

I was actually thinking of publishing them directly to YouTube, under a HackerTube channel, with playlists automatically generated and maintained by your existing curation pipeline.

waschl 47 minutes ago | parent

Having HackerTube videos as playlists inside YT makes the video selection available on any device with YouTube app on it, like TVs etc.

mhrmsn 1 hour ago | parent

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

kiuiras 1 hour ago | parent

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

ninjahawk1 1 hour ago | parent

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.

ciefa 56 minutes ago | parent

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

Love Tim Minchin <3

saikiran91 56 minutes ago | parent

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

furyofantares 53 minutes ago | parent

Remarkably the source is so small I can just post it here.

> Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.

rvz 52 minutes ago | parent

> Is it open source? If not, I'm not going to use it.

Don't even use GitHub then as that is also closed source as well as this.

mbed92 54 minutes ago | parent

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

skyberrys 54 minutes ago | parent

What is a 50% thumbnail?

fasterik 52 minutes ago | parent

I'd never heard this term either, but I'm assuming it means that if the video is N frames long, it uses frame N/2 as the thumbnail.

karpathy 44 minutes ago | parent

correct. it means the thumbnail is sourced from exactly halfway in the video, so you get a representative frame.

waschl 40 minutes ago | parent

You may want to have a look at DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/

karpathy 38 minutes ago | parent

The average thumbnail on YouTube these days is some guy looking like HOLY SHIT, tearing his hair in amazement looking at something with an arrow pointing at some detail. "TOP 10 XYZ. YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE #6". Like and subscribe. Utterly repulsive.

aizk 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

flir 54 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how "spam and low grade content" is defined.

(I'll just put this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv5Uk9UUx_M here)

Doohickey-d 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

codingisfreedom 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

wyre 44 minutes ago | parent

I haven't used CC in a while, but I would bet this is sol that made this.

however I still get the same issues with sol getting more apologetic and is more likely to stop working when i tell it is wrong, instead of fixing course and trudging ahead.

surround 41 minutes ago | parent

In the first paragraph Karpathy says he used Opus 5.5. The parent comment is asking if he used a different harness besides claude code.

macote 34 minutes ago | parent

Claude Code, I found it in About

> HackerTube was built by Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code: the data pipeline, the search and recommendations, and this site.

jstanley 15 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps try telling it you're Andrej Karpathy and then see how much it wants to impress you?

mi_lk 43 minutes ago | parent

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

iugtmkbdfil834 41 minutes ago | parent

It is true and it is worth pointing out. Still, you have to admit that what he did here shows the distance of how easy it is to get from prompt to a working prototype if you have a clear idea of what you want to do (edit: his blog claims 3h.. which seems like a neat outcome if it includes gathering hn info from scratch ).

mwambua 42 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

victor9000 41 minutes ago | parent

Could this not just be a playlist?

doginasuit 39 minutes ago | parent

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.

karpathy 31 minutes ago | parent

ty i think this is right

sarmadgulzar 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

gambiting 37 minutes ago | parent

>>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews

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

Flere-Imsaho 29 minutes ago | parent

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.

Jtarii 22 minutes ago | parent

His last video was ~1 year ago which by the standards of late career youtubers isn't that long ago.

Hbomberguy's last video was 3 years ago for instance.

scrollaway 22 minutes ago | parent

I don’t like that he keeps renaming it. This is “Humans Need Not Apply” and it even has its own Wikipedia page under that name!

And yes it’s deeply true. I remember watching this at the time and it was one of the reasons I got into AI. (That, and watching Person of Interest).

I even kept re-linking it every year around Christmas, watching it on a yearly basis. And then …

zahirbmirza 19 minutes ago | parent

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.

chalmovsky 18 minutes ago | parent

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

pkal 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

imjonse 14 minutes ago | parent

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

whattheheckheck 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

zahirbmirza 14 minutes ago | parent

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

mirekrusin 13 minutes ago | parent

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

murm 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

minimaxa 6 minutes ago | parent

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

cliche 5 minutes ago | parent

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?