HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
7 hours ago (karpathy.bearblog.dev)
YouTube-style UI over 6,454 videos sourced from 39,834 HN comments since 2007.
7 hours ago (karpathy.bearblog.dev)
YouTube-style UI over 6,454 videos sourced from 39,834 HN comments since 2007.
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.
It’s true, we are just optimizing for engagement, which is a first-order (and our best current) approximation of happiness. I’m hopeful that as the attention economy evolves, we will evolve objective metrics that reflect the long-term health and happiness of users.
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 could be the database of videos Karpathy has gathered from HN, but there could be others)
At some point I was almost implementing DeArrow support, but using it for a while I don't think it is too great, often the alternative titles people give are unreliable, and honestly I don't know how they exist without being spammed or trolled to death. I do have SponsorBlock support though (I feel like SponsorBlock would work better if it allowed high-quality AI bots to submit blocks though).
> pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video
Sounds like you may be interested in DeArrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app
SponsorBlock is related too: https://sponsor.ajay.app
Can I search with your app for ONLY the latest uploaded videos and filter for content length?
Will it display whatever bullshit recommendations YouTube feeds?
Really looking for an option to only have "current stuff" - YT constantly recommends me stuff from 3 years ago which I already watched, even with my highly curated account.
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It makes me yearn for what we lost. I remember when the Internet was all like this page, and it was bloody wonderful. I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free, and the brain rotting advertisement spam becomes a thing of the past.
But we didn't lose it - it's right here, and if this one goes down you can make your own with 2 hours of an Opus 5.5 subscription. Honestly, I whipped up something similar to this the other day for Arxiv papers.
[dead]
Same feeling. For me the trap was mostly titles and thumbnails, A/B tested to trap my time.
I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.
Fantastic domain. I hope you get whatever you want out of it.
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the recommendation system is so sad, its stealing good content from all of us. they just churn the same click back crap
Opinions are my own.
One of the positive effects of the recent AI wave is that it shows more folks are warming up to the idea of paying a subscription for tech. Perhaps, the next generation will grow up with tech that doesn't rely on addiction to earn ads money. The downside is that the gap between "folks who can afford tech" and "folks who cannot" might grow even more.
Businesses will seek out more than one revenue source for the same product. For example: newspapers and magazines had advertising, even though the customer paid for the product. Cable television had advertising, even though people paid for cable (and cable companies paid for the channels).
It isn't going to stop data collection either. If anything, it will improve the quality of the data collected.
Let's be realistic. Most of the videos on hackertube.org wouldn't exist if it weren't for the enormous sums of money YouTube pays their creators because of...ads.
I would also be more impressed with it if they created their own video processing and serving stack.
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I (and millions of other people) literally had a netflix streaming subscription for 15 years (up until I cancelled it last year after 4 or 5 price hikes). The desire and ability to pay for stuff has always been there - but at the same time, there's a reason youtube has youtube content and netflix has netflix content.
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I'll definitely be taking a look, but it seems that the videos are still hosted on Youtube?
The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.
Pssst, Firefox and UBlock origin still solve that even for youtube.
Thank you for giving me a glimpse. Reading half through your comment made me realize I never saw YouTube ads since the AI cancer, naturally, I wondered what it feels like.
[flagged]
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Really? I quickly found some awful horrific racist material on "HackerTube". No thanks.
What did you find?
Do you leave all platforms like that or just this one?
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.
I think many experiencing the same thing but we're way too small drop of a drop in the bucket that it doesn't even resolve in all of their measurements and A/B tests. The vast majority of the "gradient signal" is from normies and their patterns, desires and tastes are different. Basically I think we see a massive deterioration of quality because we are a rounding error.
I have the same experience, and I don't think it's just us.
I suspect what's going on is we're experiencing the long-term effects of AI recommendation algorithms getting plugged into everything. I'm not anti-AI. I think neural nets are incredibly powerful tools and I really like using them as an aide for my coding work. But they clearly do only a first or second level of pattern matching(asterisk), and I think that has a fundamental impact on their overall usefulness and desirability.
I can't explain this any better than Melanie Mitchell in her "AI for Thinking Humans," so I'd generally recommend that book to really understand the issues. But one way of thinking about it is that the AI keys in on patterns that are indeed there in its training data, but very often don't pick up on the same patterns as a human or treat patterns "not in the same way" as a person would. So you get the uncanny valley effect where the recommendations share some features of things you like and find interesting, but often miss the "soul" of the thing.
A good example of this is I recently watched the movie "X-Men" (2000). I then got a bunch of superhero movie recommendations. On the surface, this makes total sense. I watched a superhero movie, I get more superhero movies. But the reason I like that movie is it portrays racism/nationalism in a way that isn't totally stereotyped while still being PG-rated and easy to watch, without the seriousness of something like "American History X" (it was also a Patrick Stewart tribute). It's very unlikely that an AI can make that level of inference. I actually would enjoy watching more movies like that (as opposed to your point about wanting variety and something more exploratory), but what are the odds it's going to recommend some vague theme like that instead of "more superheroes"?
I also agree with your point that the underlying assumption we all want "more of the same" is a big thing that makes the modern internet feel more narrow. So you put those 2 together and it feels like we're being put into a narrow Skinner box that approximates aspects of things we like, but is really more of a confined environment designed to extract our time and attention while only fulfilling the shallowest, barest minimum of our wants and desires.
Youtube feeds work the other way around it appears. Content seeks you. Things promoters think you may click on haunt you. There are videos I see are there in the feed and I don't click on because I am not interested and they linger there, trying to dupe me to click on. Absolutely disgusting.
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
> no sneaky influencer videos
Considering that every Veritasium and Technology Connections video ever made has gotta be linked in there, I think you need to check your biases.
I'm not even saying they make particularly disagreeable content, but that they present a very narrow sometimes stubbornly incorrect worldview and inevitably veer into some politics (especially TC). The rants about dishwashers and HVAC were memorable for being completely impractical advice and ignorant of world economics.
The viewership of both channels skew younger and more naive. They tend to parrot ideas like "Bayesian thinking" without realizing how it made them overeager to promote and accept AI as "generally intelligent". Veritasium sold out a really long time ago before the majority even realized it.
> The rants about dishwashers and HVAC were memorable for being completely impractical advice and ignorant of economics
How you got that message from hour long rants and findings about dishwashers I'll never now.
The main take aways I got were: - You might be using way too much soap - Run your tap until it is hot before starting the dishwasher
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> It's 100% pure nerd content
well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music
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.
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.
Dumb question maybe, but aren't these two metrics supposed to be aligned? How can they keep me watching if they don't show me stuff I want to click on?
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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
Has anyone tried to download? The download links are slightly broken (but they work if you try differently).
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!
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.
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?
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.
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Having HackerTube videos as playlists inside YT makes the video selection available on any device with YouTube app on it, like TVs etc.
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
added a few minutes ago!
Why's the newest video 5 months old?
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Don't see it.
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thanks!
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
plus one when in programming mode; i have playlists on YT; but this helps to focus... and mostly I find HN has very interesting things that spawn a ton of thoughts...
people like us don't have that much time...
Seconded! (please)
Well, build your own in 2.1hrs (or 2 minutes if you have access to the source)
It's so cool to browse youtube like this again, So many cool recommendations, a much needed project
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/
Karpathy is such a legend.
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.
> 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?)
I didn’t touch anything manually I only talked to Claude the whole project, except for YouTube API key, domain, its DNS record and VPS node boot.
Curious about the hardening and optimizing - how much extra prompting is spent to ensure a ‘clean’ software supply chain for this, versus having Claude at its own discretion use third-party packages/libraries/etc (or not)?
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would love to see a write up on this too. my own tech experience has been all back end stuff and doing everything myself, so tying into "the way things are done online" aint so easy. and my patience for reading 3-4 books on it is close to zero.
I’ll add a bit more to the post when I get back from trick or treating
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> Buy a VPS, publish to it, buy a domain and link it, then keep paying for both in perpetuity.
I've always been put off by the continuing financial obligations personally. Like I'll invest a considerable amount for one time things easily, but year after year with constantly increasing costs? No fuckin way.
I rented a hetzner server years ago and have steadily grown into it. No increasing costs so far.
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?
I'm sad that there seems to be no RSS feed. It looks very nice indeed if I can remember to look.
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.
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.
It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.
(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)
I think that most people make little use of the negative feedback options, mainly because they are more clicks away (dark patterns). A addon that gives them a button next to the thums up could help.
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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.
I was thinking it would be good if there was something similar for kids. They seem to fall into a whirlpool of trash content.
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.
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.
>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've got years of history and it does the exact same thing for me. I watched one news video about the pope and now half of my feed is Catholic news channels.
I buy a mattress on Amazon and I get recommendations for... ten other mattresses? Like what's the logic here, I have an entire garage where I just keep stacking them up to the ceiling? Just show me something else. Is there a human being out there whose like "I bought a French press last week, what could I need this week, five more French Presses?"
I do not understand how these dystopian surveillance companies with their infinite data points are so bad even at this
Bad by what metric? They're interested in getting you to watch ads, they couldn't care less what you want.
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...
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.
> I wonder why he stopped making youtube videos.
I've listened to plenty of podcast episodes with CGP Grey and he wasn't secretive about the fact that he does not really enjoy work that much. He also maintained that once he quits he won't make any announcements, but rather just silently disappear.
I assume he has decided that he has enough money and retired.
He (or someone else) is still changing the old video titles and thumbnails to optimise views, though. This particular video used to be called Humans need not apply.
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.
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 …
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.
I also found turning off history and heavily pruning subcribed channels was the only way to fix youtube sloppification; particularly avoiding shorts being heavily forced by google
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.
Kudos to Andrej for another demonstration of frontier vibe engineering (since MenuGen). Looking forward to the new recommendation model.
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.
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.
Perhaps try telling it you're Andrej Karpathy and then see how much it wants to impress you?
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.
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.
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.
Gosh, the videos HN have recommended are amazing. What a community this is.
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
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
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.
AI companies sell tokens to produce slops. Then they sell more tokens to shield people from those slops.
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.
ty i think this is right
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.
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.
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?
This prompted me to finish HackerNewsTV – YouTube playlist of latest HN videos, updated daily:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321248
It seems that even HN can't avoid linking the clickbaity titles.
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.
Could it be that the huggingface export mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320784 is out of date?
lol no good content has been created since 5 months humans have lost all creativity
Hehe, longs. I'd love to see this iterated on to keep adding new content that's in line with this kind of thing!
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.
How many tokens (or $) does something like this take to make?
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.
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
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Yeah i'm pretty sure this is doable multiple times on a 20 dollar subscription, just wow
So it's unknowable how much it cost?
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Very nice, I've had great experience using hn to recommend, more like a feed though: https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html
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?
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...).
Thanks, much appreciated!
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.
What's the add-ons name?
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YouTube constantly cycles the same content + videos it’s so annoying
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.
I've been wanting to make that work for a long time! Assuming I understand you correctly: for HN to segment youtube domains so they show as youtube/channel the way github/username, twitter/username, etc., do.
I think I got stuck on needing some account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
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.
Nice idea, thanks Andrej! When will you add HackerTube Shorts? (kidding :D)
NEVER. More inclined to add HackerTube Longs :D
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 ◡.
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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!
yes! I'd love that :D
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
What do you usually do to fine tune your algorithm? Mine always seems to corrupt after some time even if I like and subscribe to specific channels. I have to delete all my history once a year or so.
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
Wait a second, forget the content, is the html/tech behind this actually more pleasant to use than googles hyperoptimized youtube website?
This is great, would love filters for duration and sort by upload date
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.
added and pushed!
would be nice to be able to filter by hackernews upvotes on the recommending post
edit: and have the filter persist while navigating between topics
Holy shit, an actual AI celeb replied to my comment and did a thing! Thank you kind sir
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.
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.
Do you plan to update the site with new videos and comments?
Oh how I wish there was an Apple TV app for this. I do all my YouTube browsing on an Apple TV.
At this point everything looks boring and possible (technically). I wonder what would change this.
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
I love that this perfectly highlights all the HN astroturfing.
YouTube itself needs a competitor. There's too much ads.
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!
Amazing! If only it would appear on my AppleTV...
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.
No login/account? What a blasphemy. Feel in love from the first site.
HackerTube Plus is only $5.99/mo. Among other amazing features it includes our new AI Amanda! You can connect Amanda to your Google account and get personalized recommendations.
It makes me want to login in, to share the history and recommendations between screens. I think a neat way to do that would be to authenticate with some other service that can just store and sync an encrypted blob that is the Local Storage of the site. That could be fairly private and doesn't put any load on the first site, it wouldn't need accounts. This could be a browser feature but then it doesn't work between browsers.
Nice. This is excessively large so it probably took a while to curate. Well done
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.
It would be great if this could be keyboard navigable, using arrow keys and enter to play.
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.
I actually love it. Thanks for finding it and sharing it here!
Maybe the UI put people off? idk because this seems cool as well.
Nah, it’s people upvoting the person rather than the product. Average human behaviour.
The product isn’t really that interesting, but it’s been built by a nerd celebrity so people gush for it and upvote it.
You see the same thing with blog posts all the time: some “celeb” posts an average, run of the mill take that plenty of people have had before them and only now it’s suddenly relevant and insightful, with people thanking their celeb for sharing some amazing basic idea that has been shared countless times before by other people.
Steve Yegge is another one I see a lot. These folks could fart and it’d reach the front of HN.
I like this. All the "influencers" gone.
Is there a list of influencers and a nice way to automatically block them?
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.
What is a 50% thumbnail?
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.
correct. it means the thumbnail is sourced from exactly halfway in the video, so you get a representative frame.
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Feedback: On mobile, swipe back from video jumps back to top of feed with different video order.
It would be nice to have some context for each video, a summary of the comments that recommended it in the thumbnail tooltip?
Would love to see the list of submissions and comments that positively contributed to this.
Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube
It would be great to have an option to sort videos by upload date, so it's easier to discover recent content.
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.
I think I’m getting a different homepage or just unfamiliar with what you are referring to - is this what you mean by IDW? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web
Yes. It appears to be random but the first time I loaded the page, on mobile, half of the videos featured well known IDW and populist types like Joe Rogan. So hardly what I would expect from culling recommended videos by a technical crowd.
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Interesting idea! Also funny that the fourth recommendation for me was a video with Andrej himself :D
cool! It would be nice to have a "watch a random video" button
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
Seeing Prejudice by Tim Minchin on the front page makes me very, very happy.
Love Tim Minchin <3
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.
Can i plz has rss
a lot of this is still too maintstream
How come there are no ads?
Sounds good, but could you please make it so that it can also be viewed without Javascript being enabled?
Could this not just be a playlist?
It is 14,139 videos.
You can open categories and see playlists for each of them.
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.
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.
>>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews
I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl
HN's Firebase-based API (https://github.com/hackernews/api) makes that easy, until you want to reconstruct the threads (i.e. who replied to who) and then it's annoying.
For years* I've wanted to replace that API with one we operate ourselves, which will simply return a JSON version of any HN URL.
I've finally started working on this! Perhaps my favorite thing about LLMs is how they make projects possible which would otherwise not have gotten started.
Edit: perhaps I should explain what I mean by that last bit.
The way I want this new API to work is (1) HN should use it internally to generate HTML pages, and (2) there can't be any regressions - nothing should change in the web version. This is a pain to get right, as it's easy subtly alter the details, and it's annoying to regression-test everything. Also, (3) with a design like this, it is easy—and critical not to—leak data that ought to remain private (e.g. people's IP addresses)
This is the sort of pain and annoyance that LLMs are amazing at taking care of. I get to focus on the parts I want to think about—the design and (yes) the code—and have a tireless assistant do the gruntwork and review. Without this I don't think I'd have gotten around to working on it.
* (edit: over a decade in fact - see collapsed reply)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718683 (May 2016)
There turns out to be an export on HuggingFace as well as a bunch of parquets.
> 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?
Ur filter missed Patrick Boyle, not only that dudes content is slop but his voice too xD
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.
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
Now redo it with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, see how it compares.
Really cool idea. I also realized recently that whenever I enter YT, I enter "nshittified wall of slop"...
"I have doors that open like this. Not like this."
i wished yt would be so fast. yt itself is the most bloated heavy app
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.
> Media, journalism & propaganda
Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.
Where is the source, so I can roll my own specialized video site?
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.
I have found out that first round of data scrape/ingestion is pretty easy.
The "black box" (for me) represents the next update. How can I avoid having to download all the data again and just use the new additions?
Do you have a plan for updates?
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.
I think the core data is available here: https://hackertube.org/data
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No personal attacks, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
john oliver. Simon Sinek. c'mon guys
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.
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I can't find it on GitHub. Is it open source?
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.
That's not the source; that's an exercise for the reader.
> 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.
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Can you add videos sourced from lobste.rs?
A majority of right wing extremism starts via YouTube.
sure it's not tiktok?
Why do you think right wing extremism starts via youtube?
January 6th report and every court case in federal court was cited. Not an argument, But fact. YouTube leads to red pill, anti government views. Tech doesn’t want to be regulated, so the algorithm promotes fascist anti government positions. They all donated to Trump and all profit at the end of democracy. DOGE is a perfect example.
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One of the better ones but in all honesty a random ass vibed site that's on front page because Karpathy
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 ).