HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

# HackerTube Source: [https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/](https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/) [## karpathy](https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/)[Home](https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/)[Blog](https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/blog/) *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/)\!  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\.