HackerTube — The YouTube HN Keeps Recommending

Andrej Karpathy

@karpathy · 4.4M followers

• Distilled 43M Hacker News comments from 20 years into 6,454 repeatedly recommended videos
• Login-free recommendations with state kept in the browser, plus representative mid-video thumbnails
• Built in about 2 hours, with Claude also handling VPS update, hardening and deployment; dataset zip is downloadable

“Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5: https://hackertube.org/ - Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session) - Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads - Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version - HackerTube Longs ✊ A bit more on the process: I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing. Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.”