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HackerTube is a YouTube-style site built from videos recommended in Hacker News comments. Its creator says the project collected 6,454 videos from 40,000 filtered comments spanning 2007–2026, with browsing recommendations stored in the local browser rather than user accounts.
HackerTube, a YouTube-style site populated by videos recommended in Hacker News comments, has been launched by developer Andrej Karpathy. Karpathy says its catalog contains 6,454 videos found in 40,000 filtered comments posted between 2007 and 2026, offering a community-sourced alternative to YouTube’s personalized recommendations.
In a report dated October 31, 2026, Karpathy said he started the project after finding YouTube’s recommendations and thumbnails unappealing. He described wanting a catalog based on videos that Hacker News users had recommended, rather than relying on YouTube’s usual recommendation feed. That motivation is his assessment of his own experience, not an independent evaluation of YouTube’s recommendation system.
Karpathy said the development workflow downloaded Hacker News comments, filtered them, and used a model he identified as Sonnet to help remove spam and low-quality material. The resulting set, he said, included 40,000 comments recommending YouTube videos, from which the site’s 6,454-video catalog was assembled. He described the videos as coming from a few people on Hacker News, but did not give a detailed account of how that description was measured.
The site presents the videos in a YouTube-style interface. Karpathy listed custom recommendations, keyboard shortcuts, and an option to export the site’s data for use in creating another version. He also said HackerTube uses a frame from the middle of a video as its thumbnail rather than the thumbnail uploaded for it. According to his report, recommendations do not require an account and browsing state stays in the local browser session.
A Community-Sourced Video Catalog
HackerTube puts a different selection method at the center of video discovery: recommendations made in discussions on Hacker News, rather than a viewer profile built through a platform account. That makes the project relevant to people interested in how smaller communities can create collections from links they already share, and in alternatives to personalized recommendation feeds.
The project’s stated design also has practical implications for privacy and portability. Karpathy says it uses no user accounts for recommendations and keeps browsing state in the local session; he also says the catalog can be exported. Those features may make it easier for a user or developer to inspect or reuse the collection. The report does not provide a technical audit, however, so the privacy and export details are the creator’s description rather than independently verified findings.
HackerTube is also a small demonstration of a rapid software workflow involving AI models. Karpathy credited Opus 5.5 with carrying out the task and said Sonnet was used in the comment-filtering workflow. His account offers a creator’s description of the process and timeline, not a measured assessment of how much work the models completed or how accurate their filtering was.
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From Hacker News Comments to Videos
The source material describes the project as a new site built from links scattered across Hacker News discussions over nearly two decades. Karpathy says he began work on a Saturday morning after deciding the previous night that YouTube’s feed was not serving his tastes. He assigned an AI model the task of making a YouTube clone based on videos recommended on Hacker News, then named the resulting project HackerTube.
According to his account, the process involved gathering comments, filtering candidate recommendations, and packaging the selected videos in a familiar viewing interface. He said the site was deployed to a virtual private server and that the work included security hardening and optimization. The report does not publish a full technical breakdown, code review, or independent test of the service, so those implementation details remain attributable to Karpathy.
The catalog spans 2007–2026 and is organized across 150 topics, according to the report. The source does not provide a topic list or explain how a video’s topic is assigned. Nor does it specify whether every included link remains available on YouTube. Those limitations matter when interpreting the catalog: it is a collection derived from recommendations in one online community, not a comprehensive index of video quality.
How the Catalog Was Filtered
The report does not provide the filtering criteria used to identify recommendations or remove spam and low-quality comments. It also does not say how the 40,000 comments map to the 6,454 videos, whether duplicate links were removed, or how often recommendations were independently repeated. The stated figures and workflow come from Karpathy’s account and are not independently audited in the supplied material.
It is also unclear how HackerTube handles videos that are deleted, made private, or otherwise unavailable, and whether its recommendations change as users browse. Karpathy says state is kept in a local browser session, but gives no technical detail about what data is stored or how the recommendation logic works. The source does not identify user numbers, usage metrics, or plans for ongoing maintenance.
Site Use and Maintenance Remain Open
Karpathy’s report presents HackerTube as a deployed site, but does not announce a future release schedule, updates, or additional features. The next practical indicators will be whether the site remains available, how its catalog and topic groupings perform in use, and whether the creator publishes more detail about its data and recommendation process.
Readers can also look for independent checks of the catalog’s coverage, filtering, and privacy behavior. Until such information is available, the reported counts, workflow, and two-hour build estimate should be treated as the creator’s description of the project rather than independently confirmed measurements.
Key Questions
What is HackerTube?
HackerTube is a YouTube-style site that organizes videos recommended in Hacker News comments, according to its creator, Andrej Karpathy.
How many videos does the site include?
Karpathy says the catalog contains 6,454 videos, drawn from 40,000 filtered comments posted from 2007 to 2026. The supplied report does not include an independent count.
Does HackerTube require an account?
Karpathy says recommendations work without user accounts and that browsing state is stored in the local browser session. The report does not include an independent technical review of those claims.
How were the videos selected?
Karpathy says the project collected Hacker News comments, filtered them, and used Sonnet in a workflow to remove spam and low-quality material. The specific filtering rules are not described in the report.
Source: karpathy.bearblog.dev
