---
title: "HackerTube"
slug: hackertube
url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/hackertube
canonical_url: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/
content_type: blog_post
language: en
published_at: 2026-10-31T17:00:00.000Z
updated_at: 2026-10-31T23:09:19.652Z
author: "Andrej Karpathy"
authored_by: human
publisher: "karpathy (Bear Blog)"
publisher_url: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/
topics: ["ai", "software-engineering"]
license: all-rights-reserved
word_count: 248
reading_minutes: 1
citation: "Andrej Karpathy, karpathy (Bear Blog). \"HackerTube.\" 31 Oct 2026. https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/ (all-rights-reserved)"
---

# HackerTube

> 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.

# HackerTube

*31 Oct, 2026*

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'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/)!

![image](https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/karpathy/image-2.webp)

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!

HackerTube:

- Contains quality content
- Uses the 50% thumbnail instead of the uploaded thumbnail
- Custom and good ForYou recommendations without any user accounts, storing state in local browser session
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Export of the site's data available to give to your agent to easily create your own version

This takes ~2 hours now. I can breathe again. Thank you Opus 5.5 <3.