2026-10-31 HackerTube - Karpathy rebuilt YouTube from Hacker News comments
Canonical version: 2026-10-31 HackerTube - Karpathy rebuilt YouTube from Hacker News comments.
On Friday (31 October), Andrej Karpathy opened YouTube, saw "an enshittified wall of slop", and decided to build his own. Two hours later, HackerTube was live: a YouTube clone that only contains videos recommended in Hacker News comments.
What he built
- 6,454 videos recommended by HN users from 2007 to 2026, across 150 topics
- The YouTube interface you know: home feed, long videos, liked, history, watch later, categories, playlists
- "For You" without an account. Recommendations run on state stored in your browser
- Thumbnails taken at 50% of the video, not the ones the creator uploaded. Goodbye shocked faces and red arrows
- A data export, so you can feed it to your own agent and build your own version
The pipeline is short. He downloaded every HN comment from a public dataset on HuggingFace, filtered them, had Claude Sonnet remove the spam in a Claude Code workflow, and ended up with about 40,000 comments that recommend a YouTube video. Then metadata from the YouTube API, a YouTube-style UI, and a VPS. His manual work: an API key, a VPS and a domain name. Claude did the deployment and even the security hardening.
His summary: "I only talk to Claude and have it do everything."
My take
I love this one, for two reasons.
First, the signal. YouTube ranks what keeps you watching (Algorithmic Curation). HackerTube starts from a builder who bothered to write "watch this talk" in the middle of a technical discussion. That's a smaller pool, but every video passed a human filter that no engagement metric touched. It's exactly why Hacker News is still my number one source for tech news: the comments are often better than the links.
Second, the cost. A useful, nicely designed app for one person's taste, built in an evening between two other tasks. That's Software for One in practice. And the data export tells you what Karpathy really shipped: a recipe, not a product. Take a community you trust, extract what its members recommend, let an LLM clean it up, and you have your own feed. I can already think of a few sources in my own vault where this would work...
The limits? It's a snapshot (no new videos unless he refreshes the data), it reflects HN's tastes (lots of talks and engineering, little else), and it runs on a Google API key that can be revoked any day. Still, try it next time YouTube's home page annoys you.
The details are in my HackerTube note.
That's it for today! ✨
References
- HackerTube: https://hackertube.org
- Andrej Karpathy, "HackerTube" (2026-10-31): https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/
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