HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

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.

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.

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

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

Wait a second, forget the content, is the html/tech behind this actually more pleasant to use than googles hyperoptimized youtube website?

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.

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.

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?

Would love to see the list of submissions and comments that positively contributed to this.

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.

Gosh, the videos HN have recommended are amazing. What a community this is.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

How many tokens (or $) does something like this take to make?

Nice idea, thanks Andrej! When will you add HackerTube Shorts? (kidding :D)

No login/account? What a blasphemy. Feel in love from the first site.

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.

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.

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.

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

It would be nice to have some context for each video, a summary of the comments that recommended it in the thumbnail tooltip?

This is great, would love filters for duration and sort by upload date

Do you plan to update the site with new videos and comments?

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the better ones but in all honesty a random ass vibed site that's on front page because Karpathy

It would be great to have an option to sort videos by upload date, so it's easier to discover recent content.

Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube

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.

Interesting idea! Also funny that the fourth recommendation for me was a video with Andrej himself :D

Seeing Prejudice by Tim Minchin on the front page makes me very, very happy.

Love Tim Minchin <3

What is a 50% thumbnail?

I can't find it on GitHub. Is it open source?

Could this not just be a playlist?

> 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?

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

> Media, journalism & propaganda

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

>>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews

I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl