HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

Haiku/Sonnet (or even Jev) can do a lot of the filtering work to rank and extend an RSS feed list.

I think this gives us an opportunity to fully cut the cord from eyeball merchants who want us to maximally engage and therefore polarize their content.

The big remaining hook will be the social graph; I am interested to see how far the EU push for mandatory interoperability will go. Another angle I’d support would be mandatory pluggable standards for your own ranking algorithm, but it captures less of the win than full disaggregation.

PS: thank you karpathy, been binging videos on hackertube.org

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

I don't have the answer yet, but it is fairly clear that the lowered barrier to making software is helping to untangle us from software monopolies, as people keep spinning up alternatives super quickly!

I looked in YouTube if there is a way to filter out on key words or specific content like war, but could not find anything. YouTube Kids is a thing, but that is too restrictive.

YouTube is great for him if we could filter out stuff. This hackertube comes close. If anyone could make an app for the iPad that could filter content out by keywords that would be great.

So that's not a like they give but a separate "publish this into my recommendations for my friends" feature. Which would then show up in my feed and everyone that subscribes to my friend.

A pubsub system basically. Users publish, friends of said users (if they want to) subscribe, and then that's how they get content.

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.

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.

https://hackertube.org/about

I would consider including the text box content that is shown below the video on Youtube. Many videos will say things like "I included the link below..." so having that on say https://hackertube.org/watch/PbmJkMhmrVI would be nice. I can imagine there are issues to consider...

Everything is 6 months old or older. :-(

Not a dig at Andrej, but Youtube itself is not that great at promoting recent content.

Could you block all the trackers from loading from https://www.youtube-nocookie.com on your side?

I call it "re-algorithming" your data. Basically you're not happy with the algorithm of a product, then you use it's data and introduce your own.

It also seems like folks are tired of the youtube algorithm and want something different instead? I'm willing to bet that many sites and apps have this opportunity in them.

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.

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.

edit: a pet peeve of mine is when people overstate agency capability like it’s some out of the box magic, and I’m guilty of of it here. So I should disclose that I’ve previously setup Hermes with ADB access and accessibility for remote control, and various skills for my home lan. It also had some memories or skills from sessions on managing these shield devices. other than that tho, it figured the rest out.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This is the lede, y’all.

Or YouTube can completely open up and encourage this sort of custom UI design and allowing people to explore their own interests and feed more easily, and stop shoving stuff down our throats.

HackerTube proves it - it is instantly more relevant to me than YouTube is.

All that is needed is videos to not come from YouTube - and that is happening too - so it may already be too late for YouTube to loosen its iron grip, stop feeding us crap and give us back our control over our entertainment experience, and make content creators happy again.

YouTube won't disappear but real competition is coming for it. All because YouTube acted in its own interests instead of in the interests of the creators and the viewers.

> A little bit more on my process. I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac). I use Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I don't actually do anything resembling traditional engineering anymore (read/write code, run commands in a terminal, or etc.), I only talk to Claude and have it do everything. In this case, the only "manual work" I did was: 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box and 3) I bought the domain name. I worked on this in between Claude's actual work so it still feels a little bit like team work :) Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, deploy, secure, harden and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.

It really does sound like you do not need to run models like Opus 5.5 on high reasoning effort for most tasks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321248

Similarly, you can replace the clickbait thumbnails on Youtube with just images from the video with a Firefox extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

There was also another one with a more youtube-like UI, which I can't find anymore.

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.

Definitely something worth exploring.

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.

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?

Some time ago i build defcon.videos (down now) which basically was a similar project just full of videos from defcon conferences. Google came at me quite fast, because by their terms of service its forbidden to store a page like this if using API or automated grabbing of videos from the index (which i did logically not manually porting 100s of videos and metadata). They call in an alternate search index which is forbidden by them. Also they claim if you pull video data via their api your only to store it for limited time.

So best of luck to you

Great idea overall! Really relevant content.

A way for community to submit good videos which get reviewed by AI on some qualifying standards and be published here, would be an amazing feature to have

Thanks for building this!

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/

https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/

https://mealplannr.io/discover

I'd be curious to hear more of the creation process. Have you been steering the agent somehow? Or was it completely on autopilot mode? Also, what was the overall cost?

Only 12 upvotes - I guess his name wasn’t Karpathy.

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.

Is this okay because there is no monetization of any sort or am I missing something?

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.

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 :)

For example this one:

https://hackertube.org/watch/RcU7FaEEzNU

It almost seems like we need a system where people you trust recommend interesting content, as opposed to algos thzt shove content which will produced anger / engagement / more ads revenue.

Who would have though ?

...is there something similar for Podcasts?

They should have have a section only for non entertainment stuff. I don't want to see memes, funny videos . unless im in the mood for it .. I just want things I can learn from most of the time.

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.

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

If you ever add a link section to other sane video platforms, you might want to add media.ccc.de which has talks of nearly 500 hacker conferences. Also without spam.

My cynical persona: Now sit and wait for the advertisers to start infesting HN with recommended videos :(

My pragmatic persona: Sounds like there may be some law related issues such as

- "Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI" -> probably violating copyright. I can't help but remember that episode from Silicon Valley, where Dinesh dumped the company to Galvin to get rid of the COPA violation

- "I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata" -> probably in violation of some ToS already

> HN repeatedly calls it a fantastic explanation that made FFT click, with some rewatching it periodically.

I love them :D

Why does this happen to some people and not others?

Most of my YT recs are videos from Technology Connections, CCC, 3Blue1Brown, Tech Potato, Welch Labs, Developer Voices, Ringway Manchester, some LegalEagle and UnderSparked (which I watch as mindless entertainment during household chores), and a fair bit of random lectures from top US universities and tech-related conferences. In other words, mostly videos from channels I have already watched and am very likely to watch more videos from.

Sure, there's a fair bit of slop; mostly things like "the unbelievable technology that powers the entire internet" or something where they're just describing asymmetric crypto in layman's terms, and there are periods where it gets more or less prevalent, but the feed is nowhere near unusable on most days.

My X feed is pretty much the same thing; very little spam, not that much politics, and when it does appear, it's not MAGA, plenty of academics and smart software engineers talking tech and AI. TikTok and Reddit are more geared towards mindless entertainment, but I do use these pretty differently, so that actually makes some sense.

With that said, I never disable personalization, try to stay logged in, share my data with companies freely, and accept the vast majority of permissions / consent prompts, which probably makes me unusual among the HN crowd, so that could be the reason why my experience is so different.

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

I already have about 35 tabs open of YT to watch.

This is going to kill my productivity.

Still, great stuff thank you!

i stopp doing these things, too. I use browser-harness to do all of these things. Always trying to keep myself out-ouf-the-loop.

Are you planning an API? Would love to spin up a version for Apple TV.

If you watch or do something else while eating, what is it?

It'd be awesome if he writes something about he he vibe-coded it

Is that all of them? That's a lower number than I was expecting!

https://endtime-instruments.org/zentube/

https://hackertube.org/download/hackertube-data.zip

https://hackertube.org/data

"YouTube's own metadata (descriptions, view counts, durations, publish dates) can't be redistributed under YouTube's API terms. Every record has the video id, so you can fetch it with a free YouTube Data API key in about 130 requests. DATA.md has step-by-step instructions for you (5 minutes in Google Cloud) and a ready-to-run script for your agent."

The early internet (content) was often comprised of textfiles containing URLs and descriptions (metadata) about what could be found at those locations

Would be interesting to know what sort of damages YouTube would allege if someone violated the terms of service that attempt to restrict disseminating such information, e.g., metadata about other peoples' videos

The success of a YouTube copyright infringement claim seems dubious

Love Tim Minchin <3

People want stuff recommended to them from similar people without a profit incentive, that's quite hard to come by... Myanimelist and other longer-form content lists work better because of the nature of the content.

Would love to see something similar with other forums, 4chan perhaps? That's also a forum where the incentive structure doesn't lead to advertising.

I have been shouting that YT, the "video museum" is unmissable for cultivation in the current days ever since this obvious fact met the will of pitiful entities to bar it to minors (unbelievable) and impede it to adults (through privacy or practically dubious constraints). Karpathy has proven it once more.

Questions and suggestions:

-- Does it also contain submissions? What we believed were the most important ones are at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com , more than in the comments

-- Are you also processing 'youtu.be' links? We use them for brevity

-- The videos in HackerTube do not seem to be all we linked to at HN. I get only 6 months old videos as the closest in time, and I verified many are missing. The filter applied to select the links on HN is too restrictive.

-- Put the link on the "channel" anchor - if a video is hosted by that channel the channel is probably interesting. Even much, much better if you create "Channel" pages on HackerTube, to make them better browsable (for example, on YT it is extremely difficult to browse them - "see the oldest", "see all" - given the lack of pagination). (To get a good YT channel browser would be of immense value.)

-- Another paramount feature on YT that can use much better usability are transcripts - they are available but they must be better presented.

-- Maybe you could use the "three frames" at https://i.ytimg.com/vi/<videoid>/hq<1|2|3>.jpg

-- How often will the DB on hackertube be synced with the HN content (if one posts a link to YT on HN, how long before it will appear on HackerTube)? A clean way to add new material to HackerTube is sought.

-- What could happen to embedded YT links when access restrictions will be mandated by legislations?

-- There should be RSS on HackerTube. The correct formula should be, I believe, serve "a minimum of 10 and a maximum as the amount of new records of the past 48 hours".

-- Given the selected amount of videos, it could be possible to also index the videos by embedding. (I have just finished in the past few hours my own engine for embeddings operation - search, similarity, recommendation - over my daily updated ~million RSS records from YT: it can be done efficiently with minimal space allocation.)

-- Some posts here just gave me this later wilder suggestion: what if you could have an LLM in the internals of HackerTube that recognized and fixed (through descriptions and transcripts) the vague clickbait - e.g. translating titles like "This will be the solution to all the problems" into an additional "[that actually was: adding sugar to the soil may help the growth of basil]"...

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

It is all so shallow and without any real sense.

You don't see that?

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

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

This is hilariously rich coming from the "I can't watch any movie from before the 90s because it's too boring" guy

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.

And those filters and sorting options - imagine what the internet could have been without enshittification.

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

open HN, filter by posts from youtube.

one thing that improves immensely the quality, is to login and configure HN to "show dead" (downvoted comments and links), then head to "new"+filter by youtube.

for some reason, people or bots downvote the really good links

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

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.

- 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.