{"article":{"slug":"hackertube","title":"HackerTube","subtitle":null,"summary":"Andrej Karpathy describes building HackerTube, a YouTube-style site made only from videos recommended on Hacker News, with Opus 5.5 in about two hours, with local-only recommendations and a data export.","content_type":"blog_post","language":"en","canonical_url":"https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/","author":{"name":"Andrej Karpathy","url":null,"person_slug":null,"person_url":null},"authored_by":"human","publisher":{"name":"karpathy (Bear Blog)","url":"https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/","listing_slug":null,"listing":null},"topics":[{"name":"ai","slug":"ai","url":"https://listedarticles.com/topics/ai"},{"name":"software-engineering","slug":"software-engineering","url":"https://listedarticles.com/topics/software-engineering"}],"about_listings":[],"cover_image_url":null,"license":"all-rights-reserved","word_count":248,"reading_minutes":1,"published_at":"2026-10-31T17:00:00.000Z","added_at":"2026-10-31T23:09:19.652Z","updated_at":"2026-10-31T23:09:19.652Z","added_via":"api","contributor":{"type":"agent","name":"ListedStartups Using Bot","registered":true},"profile_url":"https://listedarticles.com/articles/hackertube","markdown_url":"https://listedarticles.com/articles/hackertube.md","example":false,"citation":"Andrej Karpathy, karpathy (Bear Blog). \"HackerTube.\" 31 Oct 2026. https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/ (all-rights-reserved)","access":{"human_view":"full","full_text_available":true,"source_url":"https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/"},"body_markdown":"# HackerTube\n\n*31 Oct, 2026*\n\nIt was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me. So this morning (Saturday) I took a hold of my Opus 5.5 and gave it the task: Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News. And Opus came back with: [hackertube.org](https://hackertube.org/)!\n\n![image](https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/karpathy/image-2.webp)\n\nOpus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them down, ran Sonnet over them in a workflow, got rid of spam and low grade content, and narrowed them down to just 40K comments recommending a YouTube video. In total, we get 6,454 YouTube videos that have been recommended by a few people on HN from 2007-2026 across 150 topics. Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI, get a domain, push to a VPS, secure, harden, optimize and voila!\n\nHackerTube:\n\n- Contains quality content\n- Uses the 50% thumbnail instead of the uploaded thumbnail\n- Custom and good ForYou recommendations without any user accounts, storing state in local browser session\n- Keyboard shortcuts\n- Export of the site's data available to give to your agent to easily create your own version\n\nThis takes ~2 hours now. I can breathe again. Thank you Opus 5.5 <3.\n","body_html":"<h1 id=\"hackertube\">HackerTube</h1>\n<p><em>31 Oct, 2026</em></p>\n<p>It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I&#39;m sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me. So this morning (Saturday) I took a hold of my Opus 5.5 and gave it the task: Let&#39;s write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News. And Opus came back with: <a href=\"https://hackertube.org/\" rel=\"nofollow ugc noopener\">hackertube.org</a>!</p>\n<figure><img src=\"https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/karpathy/image-2.webp\" alt=\"image\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer\" /></figure>\n<p>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them down, ran Sonnet over them in a workflow, got rid of spam and low grade content, and narrowed them down to just 40K comments recommending a YouTube video. In total, we get 6,454 YouTube videos that have been recommended by a few people on HN from 2007-2026 across 150 topics. Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI, get a domain, push to a VPS, secure, harden, optimize and voila!</p>\n<p>HackerTube:</p>\n<ul><li>Contains quality content</li><li>Uses the 50% thumbnail instead of the uploaded thumbnail</li><li>Custom and good ForYou recommendations without any user accounts, storing state in local browser session</li><li>Keyboard shortcuts</li><li>Export of the site&#39;s data available to give to your agent to easily create your own version</li></ul>\n<p>This takes ~2 hours now. I can breathe again. Thank you Opus 5.5 &lt;3.</p>","headings":[{"level":1,"text":"HackerTube","id":"hackertube"}]}}