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HackerTube is a YouTube-style site assembled from videos recommended in Hacker News comments. Its creator says the project filtered roughly 40,000 comments to identify 6,454 videos across 150 topics; the figures and curation process come from the creator’s account.
A developer known as karpathy has published HackerTube, a YouTube-style site populated with videos recommended in Hacker News comments. In a post dated October 31, 2026, the creator said the project drew on 6,454 videos identified from about 40,000 comments, offering a community-sourced alternative to YouTube’s standard recommendations.
According to the creator’s account, the project began after dissatisfaction with the videos and recommendations shown on YouTube. The following morning, the developer asked an AI coding assistant, identified in the post as Opus 5.5, to build a video site from links recommended on Hacker News. The account says the assistant processed the site’s comments, filtered them, and used Sonnet in a workflow to remove spam and lower-quality material.
The resulting collection contains 6,454 YouTube videos recommended by Hacker News users between 2007 and 2026, grouped across 150 topics, the developer wrote. The post says the selection came from around 40,000 comments that remained after filtering. The source does not provide an independent audit of those totals or a detailed account of how quality was judged.
HackerTube presents the videos in a familiar YouTube-style interface. The creator says it uses a thumbnail frame taken from the middle of each video rather than the uploaded thumbnail, provides topic-based browsing and personalized “ForYou” recommendations without user accounts, and keeps browsing state in the local browser session. The site also offers an export of its data, which the creator says users can provide to an AI agent to make a customized version.
A Different Route to Video Discovery
HackerTube tests a different basis for recommending videos: links that people chose to share in a technical community, rather than a platform’s personalized recommendation system. That makes the site useful as a curated discovery experiment, particularly for people who want to browse material surfaced in Hacker News discussions without relying on their own YouTube viewing history.
The project also shows how a large public discussion archive can be repackaged into a dedicated interface. Its export feature could let users inspect or adapt the collection, although the post does not describe the export’s format, completeness, or any limits on reuse. The site’s usefulness will depend on the quality of its filtering and whether Hacker News recommendations match the interests of people using it.
The creator’s criticism of YouTube’s recommendations is a personal account, not a finding about the service’s performance for all viewers. Likewise, the claim that HackerTube contains “quality content” reflects the project’s stated goal and filtering process; the post does not establish an objective quality standard.
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From Hacker News Comments to Videos
Hacker News is a discussion site where users submit links and comment on technology, science, business, and other subjects. Video recommendations can appear in those discussions, but they are dispersed among comments rather than gathered in one video-focused catalog. HackerTube’s stated approach was to collect those references and arrange them as a browsable library.
The creator described the development as a short, AI-assisted build: the task was set on Saturday morning after the idea arose Friday night, and the site was presented as complete about two hours later. That timeline and the reported processing steps are from the developer’s post; no separate documentation or technical evaluation was included in the supplied material. The post names Opus 5.5 and Sonnet as tools used in the workflow, but does not specify their exact roles beyond the comment processing and filtering description.
“Let’s write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.”
— HackerTube creator karpathy
How the Collection Was Filtered
The post does not name the developer beyond the handle karpathy, provide a complete methodology for classifying comments, or show how the claimed 40,000 comments and 6,454 videos were counted. It also does not explain how duplicates, dead links, deleted videos, or recommendations without clear endorsements were handled.
It is not clear how HackerTube’s recommendations are generated, whether they change as users browse, or how the site handles data and privacy beyond the claim that account-free browsing state remains in the local browser session. The source also does not provide independent assessments of the site’s security, uptime, content moderation, or compliance with YouTube’s terms. No information was supplied about traffic, user response, or plans to maintain the collection.
Testing the Site and Its Data
The next practical test is whether the site remains available and whether users find the collected videos useful. Readers can compare its topic browsing and recommendations with the source links in Hacker News discussions, and check whether the data export is accessible and sufficiently documented to reproduce or adapt the collection.
The creator’s post does not announce a roadmap, maintenance schedule, or future additions. Any changes to the catalog, recommendation features, or data-processing method remain unconfirmed unless the developer provides further updates.
Key Questions
What is HackerTube?
HackerTube is a YouTube-style video-browsing site populated with videos recommended in Hacker News comments, according to its creator.
How many videos does the site include?
The creator says the collection includes 6,454 videos across 150 topics, drawn from recommendations dated from 2007 to 2026. Those figures have not been independently verified in the supplied source.
How were the videos selected?
The creator says the workflow processed Hacker News comments, narrowed them to about 40,000 comments recommending YouTube videos, and used an AI workflow to filter spam and lower-quality material. The post does not give a full selection methodology.
Does HackerTube require an account?
The creator says the site offers recommendations without user accounts and stores browsing state in the local browser session. The post does not provide a fuller technical or privacy assessment.
Is the site’s content independently verified as high quality?
No independent quality review is described in the source. The characterization of the collection as quality content is the creator’s stated aim, and the post does not define a formal quality standard.
Source: karpathy.bearblog.dev
