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Andrej Karpathy says he built HackerTube, a YouTube-style site populated by videos recommended in Hacker News comments. Its collection contains 6,454 videos across 150 topics, drawn from 40,000 comments, according to his account. The scale and quality of the recommendations have not been independently verified.
Andrej Karpathy says he has launched HackerTube, a YouTube-style site that collects videos recommended in Hacker News comments. The catalog contains 6,454 videos across 150 topics, which Karpathy says were identified from about 40,000 comments posted between 2007 and 2026.
Karpathy described the project in a blog post dated October 31, 2026. He said he started it after finding YouTube’s recommendations unsuited to his tastes and asked the AI coding assistant Claude to make a browsing site from videos recommended on Hacker News. The report says the resulting collection was packaged in an interface modeled on YouTube.
According to Karpathy, the process involved downloading Hacker News comments, filtering them for video recommendations, and using a Claude workflow to remove spam. The resulting dataset includes 40,000 comments and 6,454 YouTube videos, spanning topics discussed on the forum over nearly two decades. Those counts and the filtering process are described by Karpathy; the report does not provide an independent audit of the dataset.
Karpathy says the site offers topic browsing, recommendations generated without user accounts, keyboard shortcuts, and an option to export the site’s data. He also says it uses a resized version of each video’s thumbnail. He reported spending about two hours on the project, with Claude handling much of the coding and deployment work. His account identifies creating a Google Cloud API key, starting a virtual private server and buying the domain as tasks he completed himself.
A Forum Archive Becomes a Video Guide
HackerTube turns a long-running public discussion archive into a different way to find videos: rather than relying on a viewer’s watch history, it draws on links that Hacker News users recommended in comments. That approach may appeal to people who want a catalog shaped by community discussion, though the source does not establish that the recommendations are more accurate or higher quality than YouTube’s.
The project also offers a concrete example of how AI coding tools can help one person assemble a small web product, from processing a dataset to deploying a site. Karpathy’s account is a description of his own workflow, not a measured test of how quickly or reliably such work can be repeated. The site’s usefulness will depend on factors the report does not quantify, including how many links still work and how well its topic groupings and recommendations perform.
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From Comment Links to a Site
Hacker News is a discussion forum where users share and comment on technology and other topics. Its comment threads can include links to videos, but those recommendations were not collected into a dedicated video browser before Karpathy’s project, according to his account.
Karpathy says he used Claude Code, with the Opus 5.5 model at medium effort, to carry out most of the work. He described a workflow that gathered and filtered comments, extracted video recommendations, then built and deployed the site. He said he supplied an API key for YouTube metadata and a server address, and asked Claude to update, deploy, secure and optimize the code. The report does not give technical documentation or independently verified details about the system.
What the Dataset Does Not Show
The blog post does not publish a full list of the extracted links, explain how recommendations were distinguished from other video mentions, or provide an independent review of the spam filtering. The statement that the catalog contains 6,454 recommended videos is therefore attributable to Karpathy, rather than independently confirmed here.
It is also unclear how the site handles videos that have been removed, made private, region-restricted or otherwise become unavailable. The report gives no traffic figures, user feedback, recommendation-performance data or detailed information about how the site’s “ForYou” suggestions are generated. Its description of the recommendations as “good” is Karpathy’s assessment, not an independently measured result.
Testing the Site in Use
HackerTube is available at hackertube.org, according to Karpathy’s post. The report does not announce a release schedule, planned updates or a formal evaluation. The next indications of how useful the project is will come from the site’s operation: whether the links remain playable, whether users find the categories helpful and whether the exported data supports other versions of the project.
Karpathy says the dataset can be exported so people can create their own version. Whether the collection will be updated as new Hacker News recommendations appear, and how frequently any updates might happen, remains unspecified.
Key Questions
What is HackerTube?
HackerTube is a YouTube-style video browsing site assembled from video recommendations found in Hacker News comments, according to its creator, Andrej Karpathy.
How many videos does it include?
Karpathy says the catalog contains 6,454 videos across 150 topics, extracted from about 40,000 comments spanning 2007 to 2026. Those figures come from his account and have not been independently audited in the source material.
How was the site built?
Karpathy says he used Claude Code to filter comments, identify video links, build the interface and deploy the site. He said he personally handled a Google Cloud API key, a virtual private server and the domain purchase.
Does HackerTube replace YouTube?
No. The report describes it as a separate browsing interface for YouTube videos found in Hacker News comments. It does not say that HackerTube hosts the videos or replaces YouTube’s service.
Will the catalog be updated?
The source does not say whether or how often HackerTube will be updated with new Hacker News comments. Karpathy says the site’s data can be exported, but gives no update schedule.
Source: karpathy.bearblog.dev
