Karpathy built a YouTube for the 6,454 videos Hacker News commenters recommended
After a late-night session with YouTube's recommendations, Andrej Karpathy spent a Saturday morning with Claude Opus 5.5 building hackertube.org.
He filtered every HN comment down to about 40K that recommend a video, ending with 6,454 videos from 2007 to 2026 across 150 topics. The site has no account, a local-only ForYou feed, and mid-video thumbnails.
In the thread, he shipped a changelog of reader requests while commenters described their own YouTube escapes, from blank homepages to RSS readers.
From 40K comments to 6,454 videos
Karpathy's post says he built the site in about two hours after finding YouTube's recommendations unhelpful. He downloaded the full set of HN comments, had a Sonnet-based workflow filter out spam and low-quality ones, and kept roughly 40K that recommend a video. The result is 6,454 videos across 150 topics, each recommended by a few HN users.
The site shows frames from the middle of each video instead of the uploaded thumbnail, offers a ForYou feed that needs no account and keeps preferences in the browser, and has keyboard shortcuts. The data can be exported so others can hand it to an agent and build their own. Hosting is a hardened VPS.
The changelog written during the thread
Karpathy answered in the comments with a running list of changes: filters for upload date, duration and type; a "Recently recommended" sort so a 2012 talk linked last month floats up; a damped like-ratio sort; "Play all on YouTube", which turns up to 50 videos into a temporary playlist; and a view of every video over an hour. He also dropped the logo that looked like YouTube's.
Why a curated feed felt better
"I realised after a while that one of the main reasons I go online is to expand my horizons… So it turns out personalised feeds are actively curating against what I'm looking for." — a commenter reflecting on his own feeds
He noted that this is why the Hacker News format works for him: broad areas of interest, but not curated just for him.
Other readers had opted out entirely. One disabled recommendations and watch history, moved subscriptions to Grayjay and then to Miniflux and Newsraft RSS readers, so the homepage is blank. Another pointed out that the videos are still hosted on YouTube, and the problem for him is the ad rolls, which he described as AI-generated ads delivered as ten-minute pop songs.
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