--- title: HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN description: Karpathy built HackerTube, a YouTube clone showing only videos recommended in Hacker News comments. He used Opus 5.5 to download all HN comments, run Sonnet... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/hackertube-youtube-built-from-videos-recommended-by-hn-cbrsmspr0 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN | daily.dev og:description: Karpathy built HackerTube, a YouTube clone showing only videos recommended in Hacker News comments. He used Opus 5.5 to download all HN comments, run Sonnet... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/hackertube-youtube-built-from-videos-recommended-by-hn-cbrsmspr0 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/cBRSMspr0.png og:image:alt: HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Karpathy built HackerTube, a YouTube clone showing only videos recommended in Hacker News comments. He used Opus 5.5 to download all HN comments, run Sonnet over them to get rid of spam and low grade content, and narrow 40,000 comments down to 6,454 recommended videos spanning 2007 to 2026 across 150 topics. The site uses the 50% thumbnail instead of the uploaded thumbnail, offers custom 'For You' recommendations without user accounts by storing state in the local browser session, and includes keyboard shortcuts. It also exports the site's data so others can give it to their agent to create their own version. The project took about two hours now. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is HackerTube and how was it built? HackerTube is a YouTube alternative showing only videos recommended in Hacker News comments, built by Andrej Karpathy using Claude Opus 5.5. The AI agent downloaded all HN comments, ran Claude Sonnet over them to filter spam and low-quality mentions, and narrowed 40,000 recommending comments down to 6,454 videos across 150 topics spanning 2007 to 2026. The whole build took about two hours. _Developers curious how far agentic coding tools can go can follow projects like this on daily.dev._ ### How does HackerTube generate video recommendations without user accounts? It stores recommendation state in local browser session data instead of requiring sign-in, generating a custom 'For You' feed from that local state. The site also uses a frame captured at 50% of each video's runtime as its thumbnail rather than the creator's uploaded thumbnail, and offers keyboard shortcuts plus a data export so others can rebuild their own version with an agent. _Anyone weighing account-free personalization approaches can track similar experiments via daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 128 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-31). **TL;DR:** Developers are enthusiastic about the curated, slop-free alternative to YouTube's recommendations, praising both the concept and the speed with which the creator shipped feature requests live during the discussion, while also probing the cost, data provenance, and sustainability of the project. **Sentiment:** 65% positive · 28% mixed · 7% skeptical **The case for** - Many found the front page surprisingly well-matched to their actual interests despite having no personalization or account. - People appreciated that the creator was actively shipping requested features (like date filtering) in real time during the thread. - The lack of clickbait thumbnails, ragebait, and ads was called refreshing compared to normal YouTube browsing. - Several liked that the underlying data/export was made available so others could build their own versions. **The pushback** - Multiple commenters immediately wanted recency/upload-date sorting and were put off that it was initially missing. - Some questioned the real cost of the project, pointing out that subscription-based token usage doesn't reflect true API pricing. - A few were skeptical it was anything more than a 'vibe coded' site boosted mainly by the creator's fame. - Concerns were raised about YouTube potentially banning or cracking down on third-party use of its content. - One commenter wanted the original (not halfway-frame) thumbnails preserved for recognizability, though this was later made configurable. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Overwhelmingly enthusiastic, with rapid back-and-forth as the creator implemented requested features live, alongside broader tangents about YouTube's recommendation algorithm and ad content being unpleasant. **Hottest debate:** Whether YouTube's recommendation algorithm is genuinely trying to serve viewers' interests or is purely optimized to maximize watch time regardless of content quality. **Open questions** - Will the site be updated with new videos and comments over time, and how will incremental updates work without re-downloading everything? - Could the curated videos be published as maintained YouTube playlists/channel for easier access on TVs and other devices? - Will YouTube allow continued use of its content on a third-party site like this? **Highlights** > 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. > — [pocksuppet on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320610) > 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 that they make projects possible which would otherwise have been too hard to get 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, rather than generating HTML directly as it has always done; and (2) there can't be any regressions - nothing should change in the web version. This is a pain to get right, since it's very easy to miss subtle details, and it's also annoying to regression-test everything. 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. Without this I don't think I'd have gotten around to working on it. * (edit: over a decade in fact - see collapsed reply) > — [dang on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320641) > 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. > — [karpathy on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319793) > One of the better ones but in all honesty a random ass vibed site that's on front page because Karpathy > — [mi\_lk on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320187) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510) · 230 points · 128 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [QuickTube: a free, open-source way to save videos and music on Android](https://daily.dev/posts/quicktube-a-free-open-source-way-to-save-videos-and-music-on-android-qqeyy8gkh) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight](https://daily.dev/posts/auto-grading-decade-old-hacker-news-discussions-with-hindsight-kzkorkxqh) · Hacker News · 3 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#claude](https://daily.dev/tags/claude), [#vibe-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/vibe-coding), [#recommendation-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/recommendation-systems) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/hackertube-youtube-built-from-videos-recommended-by-hn-cbrsmspr0) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/hackertube-youtube-built-from-videos-recommended-by-hn-cbrsmspr0","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/hackertube-youtube-built-from-videos-recommended-by-hn-cbrsmspr0"},"datePublished":"2026-10-31T20:50:42.068Z","dateModified":"2026-10-31T22:21:42.215Z","description":"Karpathy built HackerTube, a YouTube clone showing only videos recommended in Hacker News comments. 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