HackerTube: The YouTube Built From Hacker News Comments

HackerTube is a video site that only shows clips Hacker News readers have linked to in comments. It indexes 6,454 videos drawn from 39,834 HN comments going back to 2007, presented in a YouTube-style interface. Andrej Karpathy published it on October 31, 2026, and it reached the top of Hacker News within hours.

What is HackerTube and who made it?

HackerTube is a filtered front end for YouTube, built by Andrej Karpathy and hosted at hackertube.org. Instead of a recommendation algorithm guessing what you want, the video list comes from a single signal: whether someone on Hacker News thought a video was worth sharing in a discussion thread.

The site describes itself as “the YouTube videos that Hacker News keeps telling each other to watch,” and the interface mirrors YouTube’s layout.

Karpathy announced it on his blog on October 31, framed as a reaction to algorithmic feeds: opening YouTube to a wall of low-value recommendations and wanting a list that came from humans instead.

How much content is actually indexed?

The numbers describe a corpus that already existed — nothing was generated for this.

Metric	Value
Videos indexed	6,454
Source comments parsed	39,834
Earliest comment scanned	2007
Interface	YouTube-style: feed, categories, playlists, history

Starting in 2007 means nineteen years of technical discussion, so the list skews toward talks, conference recordings, demos, and engineering explainers rather than entertainment.

Why did it reach number one on Hacker News?

Because the audience it was built for is the same audience that reads the front page. The submission climbed from #24 to #1 in about four hours and then stayed there.

Time (UTC)	Hacker News position
Oct 31, 20:37	#24
Oct 31, 22:07	#2
Nov 1, 00:22	#1
Nov 1 – Nov 2	held #1 across more than 150 checks
Final score	2,566 points, 563 comments

Google Trends shows the same shape from the search side: the term registered zero for the last week of October, then 25 on November 1 and 100 on November 2.

Which HackerTube clones appeared within 48 hours?

The idea turned out to be cheap to copy, and other developers applied it to different source material almost immediately.

Site	What it aggregates	Traction
hackerbooks.org	Books mentioned in HN comments	1,363 points on HN
wikihack.netlify.app	Wikipedia articles mentioned on HN	146 points on HN
hackertube.tv	Android TV client for HackerTube	Open source, small
hackertube-zh	Traditional Chinese static version	Open source, small

Two days, four derivatives. The difficulty was in the idea and the data collection, not the code.

What can you actually do with the videos once you find them?

Watching is what the interface is built for. The more interesting use is treating the list as a starting point.

A video worth keeping usually needs work beyond a single viewing — clip a section, join it to another, pull a segment into a longer piece. That is ordinary editing, and a free open-source editor covers it; our Concat video editor walkthrough covers install, platform support, and where it stops being enough.

The other option is rebuilding the pipeline: pull a comment corpus through an API, extract video links with a regex, deduplicate, then classify and rank. Classification is where an agent framework earns its place, because a model has to judge thousands of titles and contexts; our Tarko AI breakdown explains which of the products under that name is the runtime framework.

If you run that step with a hosted model, cost is driven by how many comments you feed it, not how many videos come out. The Opus 5.5 pricing analysis works through why per-token pricing and per-task cost diverge — the gap that bites when processing tens of thousands of short documents.

What are the known limits and risks?

Three limits are visible already.

The list is only as good as the discussion. Hacker News comments include disagreements, joke links, and videos shared to be criticized. The site surfaces what was linked, not what was endorsed, so the corpus carries the community’s noise along with its taste.

The media is not hosted. Every video remains on YouTube. The site is a catalogue, so any change to embedding or to the source videos affects it without warning. Readers raised this directly in the HN thread, asking how to download the full URL list in case the site disappears.

The demand is attached to the launch, not the tool. Related queries are dominated by the person: “karpathy” scores 100 against “hacktube” at 11. Searches spiked because a known developer shipped something — a different curve from ongoing need.

The durable asset in this pattern is the corpus and the extraction rule, not the interface. An interface takes an afternoon; a nineteen-year comment archive does not.

Frequently asked questions

Is HackerTube free? Yes. There is no pricing page, no account requirement, and no paid tier. The site is a free front end over publicly posted Hacker News comments.

Did Karpathy open source HackerTube? His announcement post describes the approach but the project is not published as an official repository. Several independent clients and localized versions exist on GitHub under the same name, built by other developers.

Does it show every video ever posted to Hacker News? No. It indexes videos that appeared in comments — 6,454 of them from 39,834 comments. Videos posted as standalone submissions, rather than discussed in threads, are a different set and are not necessarily included.

Can I get the same thing for other platforms? Not yet from HackerTube itself. The HN thread contains repeated requests to apply the same filter to Reddit, X, and Facebook, and at least one commenter pointed to a similar project for food videos. The pattern is straightforward to port; nobody has published a general version.

Sources

• hackertube.org — site interface and self-description
• Hacker News item 50319510 — 2,566 points, 563 comments, position history
• karpathy.bearblog.dev — launch post “HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN”
• Google Trends — search interest for “hackertube”, October–November 2026
• GitHub — repositories named hackertube (24 total, including hackertube.tv and hackertube-zh)