Andrej Karpathy builds HackerTube, a YouTube-style site of 6,454 videos recommended in Hacker News comments
Karpathy's short post explains why he built it and exactly how little he did by hand; the site itself is the fun part.
Fed up with YouTube's recommendations late on a Friday night, Andrej Karpathy says he asked Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 the next morning to build a YouTube clone made only of videos recommended on Hacker News. Per his October 31 post, the agent downloaded HN's comments, used Claude Sonnet to filter out spam and found about 40,000 comments recommending a YouTube video, which gave 6,454 videos recommended by a few people each between 2007 and 2026, across 150 topics. The result, hackertube.org, has a YouTube-style interface, "For You" recommendations kept in the browser with no user accounts, keyboard shortcuts and a downloadable data export.
Karpathy says the whole thing took about two hours. His only manual steps were creating a Google Cloud API key for video metadata, starting a server and buying the domain; Claude Code deployed and hardened it.
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Enshittification
After exploring HackerTube – karpathy, for the named idea behind his complaint about YouTube, read about Enshittification.
Explains the term, also called platform decay, for online services that get worse over time as they shift value from users to business customers and then to shareholders.
Wikipedia · Wade · 5 min
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