HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music
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.
Seriously, thank you for prompting this into existence!
> 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.
people like us don't have that much time...
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.
I have wanted to make custom YouTube wrappers for specific interests that avoid ads and distractions. There are communities like say fans of a certain music genre etc that would find the curation etc useful. But I always thought posting publicly with your name attached is a bit grey/risky.
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.
Could you block all the trackers from loading from https://www.youtube-nocookie.com on your side?
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.
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.)
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.
Overall this 'Ask AI' button is going to smash content creators who rely on clickbait. As a user, it greatly improves my ability to skip bad/clickbaity content, which I really appreciate.
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'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.
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'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.
Hbomberguy's last video was 3 years ago for instance.
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 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...
Really having a bad time with LLMs lately.
> 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.
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.
Definitely something worth exploring.
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.
thanks for putting this site together, it's awesome! Even more so is might be your process. Can add some color about your prompts and how you direct the work. I find myself taking much longer for different but comparable types of work and would love to learn a bit about how you direct the model. I use Astra but hope there is some transferable bits here.
There was also another one with a more youtube-like UI, which I can't find anymore.
Will say tho, your videos themselves have been the biggest help so far, so I would rather see more of those in the future. But I'll take this as a consolation :)
I believe YT clients is inevitable (not just UI but something similar to this) similar to RES[1] happened for reddit!
Is there a file / feed of the data driving this?
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?
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...).
Anyway, loved your "GPT from scratch" video btw!
I think I got stuck on needing some account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
It'd be awesome if he writes something about he he vibe-coded it
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
Maybe the curated list can be exported to load on other apps.
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!
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.
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.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.
If you watch or do something else while eating, what is it?
Is that all of them? That's a lower number than I was expecting!
Only 12 upvotes - I guess his name wasn’t Karpathy.
I already have about 35 tabs open of YT to watch.
This is going to kill my productivity.
Still, great stuff thank you!
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?
Love Tim Minchin <3
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
This is hilariously rich coming from the "I can't watch any movie from before the 90s because it's too boring" guy
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'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl
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)
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.
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 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?
And those filters and sorting options - imagine what the internet could have been without enshittification.
I think if the big tech had focused on engagement while the users had remained mainly nerds and geeks, the result would've been extraordinary.
> 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.
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
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.
Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.
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.
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?
It's very likely that your agents can just build the rest, if the backend source isn't provided.
- 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.
> Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.
Don't even use GitHub then as that is also closed source as well as this.