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'll definitely be taking a look, but it seems that the videos are still hosted on Youtube?
The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.
Same feeling. For me the trap was mostly titles and thumbnails, A/B tested to trap my time.
I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.
It makes me yearn for what we lost. I remember when the Internet was all like this page, and it was bloody wonderful. I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free, and the brain rotting advertisement spam becomes a thing of the past.
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.
Dumb question maybe, but aren't these two metrics supposed to be aligned? How can they keep me watching if they don't show me stuff I want to click on?
On the one hand there's stuff you think is worthwhile to learn about, and on the other there's the dopamine brain candy that youtube throws at you along the way. They just want to keep you clicking, they don't care whether you feel good about it afterwards.
One common trick in Shorts is for the topic of the video to not be revealed until the end, while leaving enough clues that you think the topic will be worthwhile. "So anyways, I was reverse engineering this project with Claude and I came across this little detail that I think some of you might be interested to know. This IoT product that I've got in this box right here is a smart doorbell that quacks when you step on it. But actually by holding this button for five seconds you can make it meow instead."
If you swipe away when it shows it's about an IoT doorbell you watched half, and if you swipe away after seeing the button makes it meow you watched the whole thing. In either case the algorithm thinks you liked it more than average.
In long-form videos this doesn't really work but you can use vague titles to achieve higher click rates. Taken from my actual homepage: "DON'T GIVE ME HOPE, DON'T LET ME HOPE THIS MUCH" "Did you know about these...?" "Calcium Carbide Trick" "The WORST skill to train on OSRS" "They Were Busy With Their Big Plans" "If you were trying to destroy the economy..." "What happens when we don't need each other any more?"
You know which one I'm not going to click on? "FRACTRAN: 14 fractions that produce infinite primes". That's because I already know FRACTRAN is an esoteric programming language written in fractions.
that's really cool,
I don't know if it's possible to add `Return YouTube Dislike` integration to shows the dislike counts. API (OSS): https://returnyoutubedislike.com/docs
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
plus one when in programming mode; i have playlists on YT; but this helps to focus... and mostly I find HN has very interesting things that spawn a ton of thoughts...
Yeah, this is the first thing I looked for and when I couldn’t find it I easily decided it’s something I would never come back to. Add this feature and it’s something I would come to frequently
Not sure how but adding a live up to date version of https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com would be nice to see in channel form, I don't think this matches recently recommended (unless based on # of upvotes) - still thank you for putting this curation together.
I've been wanting to make that work for a long time! Assuming I understand you correctly: for HN to segment youtube domains so they show as youtube/channel the way github/username, twitter/username, etc., do.
I think I got stuck on needing some special account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
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.
I like the idea of playlists, might even work to ask Claude to make a few. Did you have in mind the ability to create and publish them on the site somehow?
I was actually thinking of publishing them directly to YouTube, under a HackerTube channel, with playlists automatically generated and maintained by your existing curation pipeline.
I've listened to plenty of podcast episodes with CGP Grey and he wasn't secretive about the fact that he does not really enjoy work that much. He also maintained that once he quits he won't make any announcements, but rather just silently disappear.
I assume he has decided that he has enough money and retired.
He (or someone else) is still changing the old video titles and thumbnails to optimise views, though. This particular video used to be called Humans need not apply.
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.
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.
My YouTube feed is pretty good; it's full of technical discourse on topics that I enjoy learning about, ranging from electronics hacking to civil engineering. That's probably the result of a long number of years of continuous training:
Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.
Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.
Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"
Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."
---
I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.
It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.
(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)
From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.
I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.
YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you usually do to fine tune your algorithm? Mine always seems to corrupt after some time even if I like and subscribe to specific channels. I have to delete all my history once a year or so.
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.
> HackerTube was built by Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code: the data pipeline, the search and recommendations, and this site.
I haven't used CC in a while, but I would bet this is sol that made this.
however I still get the same issues with sol getting more apologetic and is more likely to stop working when i tell it is wrong, instead of fixing course and trudging ahead.
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?
Personnaly I disabled recommendations/watch history/etc... so the youtube homepage is blank, there is absolutely nothing on it.
I first started by moving all my subscriptions to grayjay(where I also disabled the home page), that way I just click the subscriptions tab and there is everything there, you can even create subscription groups if needed.
Then as I had some issues with grayjay desktop(not the mobile app which works great) I then simply moved all my subscriptions to miniflux and newsrafts(which I now rarely use). I use feedflow on android and reminiflux on desktop as I don't like the miniflux frontend.
So now if there is a new channel I want to follow I just add the channel rss feed to miniflux/newsraft.
So for apple tv I guess you could use a RSS app but I am not sure the user experience would be great, so using grayjay could be an option as you can stream the video to the TV's but that would require another device (phone/computer) as it's not available on ios/apple tv.
I guess a good starting point would be to simply disable everything in your youtube settings to start off (watch history, recommandations, etc...).
I have an extension that blocks all recommendations and forces me to subscribe to the creators I like and search for content myself. Recommendations aren’t optimized for your benefit. Cutting out the recommendations really helps to not get sucked in.
I'm on subscription but I had Claude add it up: 504M input tokens (90% cached), 7.6M output tokens. 90+% of that was Sonnet calls to label the comments, all of the actual work, the app and deploy etc was ~1M tokens of Opus 5.5, I compacted context once. i.e. very small project by modern standards.
I wish someone would make a decision model that’s as good as sonnet but like 10-100x cheaper. Because for this project which is a pretty small dataset you’re spending ~$300 on sonnet usage. like jev can probably do this task but it’s not smart enough to reliably be used
GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it runs with latest PHP which required several rounds of fixes, optimize the system so it runs on the smallest 512MB droplet, harden the system so that ideally no one ever needs to look at it for another 10 years - it took about an hour, and cost a grand total of 4 american.... _cents_
I use Opus at work since we have a nearly unlimited AI budget, but for personal projects I just use GLM 5.3 and I don't see much difference between that and Opus.
You can make the ultimate anti-short attention span player by intercepting all keyboard/mouse inputs to prevent navigating away and requiring you to watch the whole video ◡.
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.
HackerTube Plus is only $5.99/mo. Among other amazing features it includes our new AI Amanda! You can connect Amanda to your Google account and get personalized recommendations.
Sorting would certainly be great. I'd especially welcome sorting by some kind of quality metric. The "thumbs down" count is not available via API anymore, but you could use thumbs up per views as a proxy, although that might require some reweighing, since videos with many views usually have fewer thumbs up.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.
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.
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.
The site won't disappear (imminently, as I'd like to use it personally!) but head over to the about/ section and download the .zip with the underlying data, which I put up for this purpose.
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.
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.
The average thumbnail on YouTube these days is some guy looking like HOLY SHIT, tearing his hair in amazement looking at something with an arrow pointing at some detail. "TOP 10 XYZ. YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE #6". Like and subscribe. Utterly repulsive.
i'd prefer to see the original thumbnail though so that i can recognize the video if i have seen it on youtube already. i also expect that the kind of videos that tend to be recommended on HN are less prone to have clickbait thumbnails.
HN's Firebase-based API (https://github.com/hackernews/api) makes that easy, until you want to reconstruct the threads (i.e. who replied to who) and then it's annoying.
For years* I've wanted to replace that API with one we operate ourselves, which will simply return a JSON version of any HN URL.
I've finally started working on this! Perhaps my favorite thing about LLMs is how they make projects possible which would otherwise not have gotten started.
Edit: perhaps I should explain what I mean by that last bit.
The way I want this new API to work is (1) HN should use it internally to generate HTML pages, and (2) there can't be any regressions - nothing should change in the web version. This is a pain to get right, as it's easy subtly alter the details, and it's annoying to regression-test everything. Also, (3) with a design like this, it is easy—and critical not to—leak data that ought to remain private (e.g. people's IP addresses)
This is the sort of pain and annoyance that LLMs are amazing at taking care of. I get to focus on the parts I want to think about—the design and (yes) the code—and have a tireless assistant do the gruntwork and review. Without this I don't think I'd have gotten around to working on it.
* (edit: over a decade in fact - see collapsed reply)
> 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?
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
Appreciate the effort, yet I think there is a place this is needed even more:
> 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.
I didn't publish the server because it's a vibe coded mess, but if you point your Opus 5.5 at the zip and ask for YouTube-like site it will be basically instant. This part was like 3 min.
EDIT: one caveat is that i couldn't distribute the YouTube data so you'd have to create a (free) API key for that part. Luckily it's only ~1 min of hassle.
- 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.
It is true and it is worth pointing out. Still, you have to admit that what he did here shows the distance of how easy it is to get from prompt to a working prototype if you have a clear idea of what you want to do (edit: his blog claims 3h.. which seems like a neat outcome if it includes gathering hn info from scratch ).
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'll definitely be taking a look, but it seems that the videos are still hosted on Youtube?
The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.
Same feeling. For me the trap was mostly titles and thumbnails, A/B tested to trap my time.
I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.
It makes me yearn for what we lost. I remember when the Internet was all like this page, and it was bloody wonderful. I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free, and the brain rotting advertisement spam becomes a thing of the past.
the recommendation system is so sad, its stealing good content from all of us. they just churn the same click back crap
Oh how I wish there was an Apple TV app for this. I do all my YouTube browsing on an Apple TV.
Oh, oh no.
I already have about 35 tabs open of YT to watch.
This is going to kill my productivity.
Still, great stuff thank you!
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
> It's 100% pure nerd content
well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music
You have no idea how big of a smile it put on my face when I saw the "Longs" option in the sidebar.
Seriously, thank you for prompting this into existence!
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.
I am not sure the personalize algorithm is based on what you want to watch, but what will keep you watching. That’s a measurable KPI.
Dumb question maybe, but aren't these two metrics supposed to be aligned? How can they keep me watching if they don't show me stuff I want to click on?
On the one hand there's stuff you think is worthwhile to learn about, and on the other there's the dopamine brain candy that youtube throws at you along the way. They just want to keep you clicking, they don't care whether you feel good about it afterwards.
One common trick in Shorts is for the topic of the video to not be revealed until the end, while leaving enough clues that you think the topic will be worthwhile. "So anyways, I was reverse engineering this project with Claude and I came across this little detail that I think some of you might be interested to know. This IoT product that I've got in this box right here is a smart doorbell that quacks when you step on it. But actually by holding this button for five seconds you can make it meow instead."
If you swipe away when it shows it's about an IoT doorbell you watched half, and if you swipe away after seeing the button makes it meow you watched the whole thing. In either case the algorithm thinks you liked it more than average.
In long-form videos this doesn't really work but you can use vague titles to achieve higher click rates. Taken from my actual homepage: "DON'T GIVE ME HOPE, DON'T LET ME HOPE THIS MUCH" "Did you know about these...?" "Calcium Carbide Trick" "The WORST skill to train on OSRS" "They Were Busy With Their Big Plans" "If you were trying to destroy the economy..." "What happens when we don't need each other any more?"
You know which one I'm not going to click on? "FRACTRAN: 14 fractions that produce infinite primes". That's because I already know FRACTRAN is an esoteric programming language written in fractions.
that's really cool, I don't know if it's possible to add `Return YouTube Dislike` integration to shows the dislike counts. API (OSS): https://returnyoutubedislike.com/docs
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
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
Well, build your own in 2.1hrs (or 2 minutes if you have access to the source)
added a few minutes ago!
Don't see it.
first do a search, then on top you'll see "Filter". might try to make more prominent from main page
Yes, please, I couldn't figure it out as well.
added! now can be done via Filter on the main page.
thanks!
plus one when in programming mode; i have playlists on YT; but this helps to focus... and mostly I find HN has very interesting things that spawn a ton of thoughts...
people like us don't have that much time...
Yeah, this is the first thing I looked for and when I couldn’t find it I easily decided it’s something I would never come back to. Add this feature and it’s something I would come to frequently
Seconded! (please)
Not sure how but adding a live up to date version of https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com would be nice to see in channel form, I don't think this matches recently recommended (unless based on # of upvotes) - still thank you for putting this curation together.
I've been wanting to make that work for a long time! Assuming I understand you correctly: for HN to segment youtube domains so they show as youtube/channel the way github/username, twitter/username, etc., do.
I think I got stuck on needing some special account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
At this point everything looks boring and possible (technically). I wonder what would change this.
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.
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.
I like the idea of playlists, might even work to ask Claude to make a few. Did you have in mind the ability to create and publish them on the site somehow?
I was actually thinking of publishing them directly to YouTube, under a HackerTube channel, with playlists automatically generated and maintained by your existing curation pipeline.
Having HackerTube videos as playlists inside YT makes the video selection available on any device with YouTube app on it, like TVs etc.
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.
> I wonder why he stopped making youtube videos.
I've listened to plenty of podcast episodes with CGP Grey and he wasn't secretive about the fact that he does not really enjoy work that much. He also maintained that once he quits he won't make any announcements, but rather just silently disappear.
I assume he has decided that he has enough money and retired.
He (or someone else) is still changing the old video titles and thumbnails to optimise views, though. This particular video used to be called Humans need not apply.
His last video was ~1 year ago which by the standards of late career youtubers isn't that long ago.
Hbomberguy's last video was 3 years ago for instance.
I don’t like that he keeps renaming it. This is “Humans Need Not Apply” and it even has its own Wikipedia page under that name!
And yes it’s deeply true. I remember watching this at the time and it was one of the reasons I got into AI. (That, and watching Person of Interest).
I even kept re-linking it every year around Christmas, watching it on a yearly basis. And then …
Can i plz has rss
Wait a second, forget the content, is the html/tech behind this actually more pleasant to use than googles hyperoptimized youtube website?
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.
ty i think this is right
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.
My YouTube feed is pretty good; it's full of technical discourse on topics that I enjoy learning about, ranging from electronics hacking to civil engineering. That's probably the result of a long number of years of continuous training:
Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.
Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.
Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"
Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."
---
I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.
It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.
(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)
Do you have web activity turned off or use a separate old style Youtube account? Mine is also bad but I think it's because of those for me.
I was thinking it would be good if there was something similar for kids. They seem to fall into a whirlpool of trash content.
For YouTube nerds I curate a list of channels. Size of list 3993 feeds: - https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top/blob/main/l...
From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.
I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.
YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.
I suspect they know perfectly well when they can't make money from someone, so they deliberately serve up boring crap to save on hosting costs.
Bad by what metric? They're interested in getting you to watch ads, they couldn't care less what you want.
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.
I like this. All the "influencers" gone.
Gosh, the videos HN have recommended are amazing. What a community this is.
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.
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?
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.
What do you usually do to fine tune your algorithm? Mine always seems to corrupt after some time even if I like and subscribe to specific channels. I have to delete all my history once a year or so.
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.
Claude Code, I found it in About
> HackerTube was built by Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code: the data pipeline, the search and recommendations, and this site.
Perhaps try telling it you're Andrej Karpathy and then see how much it wants to impress you?
I haven't used CC in a while, but I would bet this is sol that made this.
however I still get the same issues with sol getting more apologetic and is more likely to stop working when i tell it is wrong, instead of fixing course and trudging ahead.
In the first paragraph Karpathy says he used Opus 5.5. The parent comment is asking if he used a different harness besides claude code.
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?
Personnaly I disabled recommendations/watch history/etc... so the youtube homepage is blank, there is absolutely nothing on it.
I first started by moving all my subscriptions to grayjay(where I also disabled the home page), that way I just click the subscriptions tab and there is everything there, you can even create subscription groups if needed.
Then as I had some issues with grayjay desktop(not the mobile app which works great) I then simply moved all my subscriptions to miniflux and newsrafts(which I now rarely use). I use feedflow on android and reminiflux on desktop as I don't like the miniflux frontend. So now if there is a new channel I want to follow I just add the channel rss feed to miniflux/newsraft.
So for apple tv I guess you could use a RSS app but I am not sure the user experience would be great, so using grayjay could be an option as you can stream the video to the TV's but that would require another device (phone/computer) as it's not available on ios/apple tv.
I guess a good starting point would be to simply disable everything in your youtube settings to start off (watch history, recommandations, etc...).
I have an extension that blocks all recommendations and forces me to subscribe to the creators I like and search for content myself. Recommendations aren’t optimized for your benefit. Cutting out the recommendations really helps to not get sucked in.
YouTube constantly cycles the same content + videos it’s so annoying
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?
I'm on subscription but I had Claude add it up: 504M input tokens (90% cached), 7.6M output tokens. 90+% of that was Sonnet calls to label the comments, all of the actual work, the app and deploy etc was ~1M tokens of Opus 5.5, I compacted context once. i.e. very small project by modern standards.
I wish someone would make a decision model that’s as good as sonnet but like 10-100x cheaper. Because for this project which is a pretty small dataset you’re spending ~$300 on sonnet usage. like jev can probably do this task but it’s not smart enough to reliably be used
GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it runs with latest PHP which required several rounds of fixes, optimize the system so it runs on the smallest 512MB droplet, harden the system so that ideally no one ever needs to look at it for another 10 years - it took about an hour, and cost a grand total of 4 american.... _cents_
I use Opus at work since we have a nearly unlimited AI budget, but for personal projects I just use GLM 5.3 and I don't see much difference between that and Opus.
Yeah i'm pretty sure this is doable multiple times on a 20 dollar subscription, just wow
So it's unknowable how much it cost?
It'd cost ~$250 via API (ie. paying current API pricing per token).
Source: copy pasted the tokens into a chatbot and told it to figure it out.
But hardly anybody pays API pricing and this was made with a sub..
So the cost was zero.
Nice idea, thanks Andrej! When will you add HackerTube Shorts? (kidding :D)
NEVER. More inclined to add HackerTube Longs :D
You can make the ultimate anti-short attention span player by intercepting all keyboard/mouse inputs to prevent navigating away and requiring you to watch the whole video ◡.
You haven't posted on YouTube in a year or so. Working on any long-form videos we can expect to see anytime soon?
Anyway, loved your "GPT from scratch" video btw!
yes! I'd love that :D
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.
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.
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
No login/account? What a blasphemy. Feel in love from the first site.
HackerTube Plus is only $5.99/mo. Among other amazing features it includes our new AI Amanda! You can connect Amanda to your Google account and get personalized recommendations.
Would love to see the list of submissions and comments that positively contributed to this.
This is great, would love filters for duration and sort by upload date
Sorting would certainly be great. I'd especially welcome sorting by some kind of quality metric. The "thumbs down" count is not available via API anymore, but you could use thumbs up per views as a proxy, although that might require some reweighing, since videos with many views usually have fewer thumbs up.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.
added and pushed!
would be nice to be able to filter by hackernews upvotes on the recommending post
edit: and have the filter persist while navigating between topics
Holy shit, an actual AI celeb replied to my comment and did a thing! Thank you kind sir
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.
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.
The site won't disappear (imminently, as I'd like to use it personally!) but head over to the about/ section and download the .zip with the underlying data, which I put up for this purpose.
It would be nice to have some context for each video, a summary of the comments that recommended it in the thumbnail tooltip?
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.
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
Interesting idea! Also funny that the fourth recommendation for me was a video with Andrej himself :D
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.
Seeing Prejudice by Tim Minchin on the front page makes me very, very happy.
Love Tim Minchin <3
What is a 50% thumbnail?
I'd never heard this term either, but I'm assuming it means that if the video is N frames long, it uses frame N/2 as the thumbnail.
correct. it means the thumbnail is sourced from exactly halfway in the video, so you get a representative frame.
The average thumbnail on YouTube these days is some guy looking like HOLY SHIT, tearing his hair in amazement looking at something with an arrow pointing at some detail. "TOP 10 XYZ. YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE #6". Like and subscribe. Utterly repulsive.
i'd prefer to see the original thumbnail though so that i can recognize the video if i have seen it on youtube already. i also expect that the kind of videos that tend to be recommended on HN are less prone to have clickbait thumbnails.
configurable in the Settings! (see the menu on the left banner)
You may want to have a look at DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/
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.
Could this not just be a playlist?
It is 14,139 videos.
You can open categories and see playlists for each of them.
>>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews
I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl
HN's Firebase-based API (https://github.com/hackernews/api) makes that easy, until you want to reconstruct the threads (i.e. who replied to who) and then it's annoying.
For years* I've wanted to replace that API with one we operate ourselves, which will simply return a JSON version of any HN URL.
I've finally started working on this! Perhaps my favorite thing about LLMs is how they make projects possible which would otherwise not have gotten started.
Edit: perhaps I should explain what I mean by that last bit.
The way I want this new API to work is (1) HN should use it internally to generate HTML pages, and (2) there can't be any regressions - nothing should change in the web version. This is a pain to get right, as it's easy subtly alter the details, and it's annoying to regression-test everything. Also, (3) with a design like this, it is easy—and critical not to—leak data that ought to remain private (e.g. people's IP addresses)
This is the sort of pain and annoyance that LLMs are amazing at taking care of. I get to focus on the parts I want to think about—the design and (yes) the code—and have a tireless assistant do the gruntwork and review. Without this I don't think I'd have gotten around to working on it.
* (edit: over a decade in fact - see collapsed reply)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36371539 (June 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36363325 (June 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543023 (Aug 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28715212 (Oct 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22496476 (March 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798422 (Dec 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19231674 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219923 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19058455 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16720397 (March 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718683 (May 2016)
There turns out to be an export on HuggingFace as well as a bunch of parquets.
> 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?
> Media, journalism & propaganda
Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.
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
Really cool idea. I also realized recently that whenever I enter YT, I enter "nshittified wall of slop"...
Appreciate the effort, yet I think there is a place this is needed even more:
> 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.
Where is the source, so I can roll my own specialized video site?
I didn't publish the server because it's a vibe coded mess, but if you point your Opus 5.5 at the zip and ask for YouTube-like site it will be basically instant. This part was like 3 min.
EDIT: one caveat is that i couldn't distribute the YouTube data so you'd have to create a (free) API key for that part. Luckily it's only ~1 min of hassle.
I have found out that first round of data scrape/ingestion is pretty easy.
The "black box" (for me) represents the next update. How can I avoid having to download all the data again and just use the new additions?
Do you have a plan for updates?
Well, some portion of it was just served to you over HTTP.
It's very likely that your agents can just build the rest, if the backend source isn't provided.
I think the core data is available here: https://hackertube.org/data
Changelog push from HN comments on this thread:
- 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.
I can't find it on GitHub. Is it open source?
Remarkably the source is so small I can just post it here.
> Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.
> Is it open source? If not, I'm not going to use it.
Don't even use GitHub then as that is also closed source as well as this.
Can you add videos sourced from lobste.rs?
[dead]
One of the better ones but in all honesty a random ass vibed site that's on front page because Karpathy
It is true and it is worth pointing out. Still, you have to admit that what he did here shows the distance of how easy it is to get from prompt to a working prototype if you have a clear idea of what you want to do (edit: his blog claims 3h.. which seems like a neat outcome if it includes gathering hn info from scratch ).