HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
karpathy.bearblog.dev
YouTube-style UI over 6,454 videos sourced from 39,834 HN comments since 2007.
karpathy.bearblog.dev
Haiku/Sonnet (or even Jev) can do a lot of the filtering work to rank and extend an RSS feed list.
I think this gives us an opportunity to fully cut the cord from eyeball merchants who want us to maximally engage and therefore polarize their content.
The big remaining hook will be the social graph; I am interested to see how far the EU push for mandatory interoperability will go. Another angle I’d support would be mandatory pluggable standards for your own ranking algorithm, but it captures less of the win than full disaggregation.
It's totally rad that something like this can be built now in less than 24 hours.
And just the other day, I wanted to finally setup a private WoW server for me to play with my wife and kids. We had some random devices around the house: 2 PCs, a Steamdeck, and a MBP. I made sure they were all on the same network. Then, asked Claude Code to set it all up so we can play on the "most stable and latest" client for WoW. We all headed out for tennis. Came back in 2 hours and it was 99% done.
It setup AzerothCore and downloaded Chromiecraft for all 4 devices. It even setup VM Fusion on my mac correctly. I just had to tweak some mouse settings in the end. Normally, all this would take me an entire weekend to do. Pretty crazy how much of the tedious stuff AI can just take care of now.
I'm not aware of any other similar site with general topics, except for Hacker New and Reddit. =)
When you say you used Haiku + Jev, how did you work the two together? What part of the process does Jev handle?
1) tldr summary of each post (when a link is first submitted). 2) Deduping posts. 3) Detecting when there are multiple stories (different links) that are basically covering the same thing, in which case it'll "merge" them by using only the best post (it decides). 4) Come up with titles for posts that don't have them (like twitter/bluesky posts).
Jev is used for:
1) Quickly getting rid of bad posts during the 1st stage of crawling. 2) Determining initial amount of points (based on a scale) awarded to post when it was first submitted.
There are probably few other cases I'm not thinking of right now. But basically, the gist is to use Jev for super frequent classifier tasks that are early in the pipeline so it can save cost.
This will roughly use about $40 of my AI credits per month. Anthropic gives Ultra users $200 monthly credit for API usage. So I'm happy I can make some good use out of it.
One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.
I think there might be a lesson learned from the era of attention economy and also a potential explanation as to what advertiser friendliness was about - the attention economy did not graduate from being a surplus market. Advertisers had no incentives to subsidize the waste byproducts of fried rice stall, but the system was too deeply molded for them. The amount of standalone contents that are native to social media are tiny.
Anyway, I just don't think the contents that are made because of a social feed are the ones that weren't worth much even on social media.
For hackertube, the source changed from Google to HN.
Nothing lost, just the source of the truth moved.
But - there's no reason this couldn't actually be a good thing. I can totally imagine a platform[0] where the focus is less on creation and more on curation. I sub to some person or community who's going to share good links, and I see only that, instead of the slop firehose from The Algorithm.
(and yes, social media was already more like this, in the early days).
[0] and platform implies more than I mean, could just be some nice wrapper around RSS or activitypub or whatever
"47,699 products, places and tools ranked from 13,576,547 opinions on Reddit and HN"
A solution to both problems is:
- Filter recommendations to users matching the asker’s personality and other favorites. This works particularly well for bad taste. Marketers can still imitate real users by overwhelming every demographic with accounts that have a small set of genuine recommendations and larger set of hijacked ones, but it requires more accounts.
- Web of trust, letting users explicitly follow others who they know elsewhere and see their followers’ recommendations, and prioritizing for everyone users who are verified real. This does less for taste matching but much more for filtering marketers.
But still as a catalogue of what ppl discuss, it's quite interesting to browse.
The marketers have completely taken over Reddit as of 2015 or so. Probably a couple years before as well. I wouldn't trust opinions from there to be organic at all.
I miss the sheer random absurdity of what I'd find there. Don't remember too much of what I found any more, other than "man from lox" which I still find someone new to show it to every few years or so lol
I will say the recommendations now being so personalized gives me a lot of big topical chunks of content relevant to my interests that I'd probably not have found on a random SA thread. But so much of it is just "a competing channel of what you're already watching" and "what we are recommending to half the world right now and we can tell you won't object to". Not the random out of thin air things like "ghost ride the whip" (another that just instantly came to my mind lol)
It does need a new-to-old sort though, which is easy to add in.
If you watched all of these videos, you would be the smartest, most annoying person ever. Lol
well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music
Maybe that's also the solution to a question I've had for years. The ads I see on diverse social platforms are terrible, but if they are matched with algorithms that try to fit me in as an average person, then it makes sense that, as a huge nerd, they miss the mark.
Nowadays there aren't as many nerds in charge and it's concerning.
When will folks understand that most tech videos are sponcon, either through a sponsor contract or through corporate affiliation?
Because that would be very different from the typical social media influencer.
PS: thank you karpathy, been binging videos on hackertube.org
Systems like Hacker News are great because they are relatively unknown. When a system like this takes off, it puts a lot of pressure on moderation of its source. Is dang ready to moderate an influx of comment spam?
Not a criticism at all... just that we're going to see this happening all over the place. It's become very easy to scrape data and launch something. If you are a source for an audience, people will start to game your thing.
And if it’s frozen in time there won’t be any reason to spam irrelevant YouTube links to HS either.
Don't ever use "buts" as you sound like an ass IRL.
Disagree/criticise instead of not pretenting to do so. (kinda like ask, don't ask to ask)
I looked in YouTube if there is a way to filter out on key words or specific content like war, but could not find anything. YouTube Kids is a thing, but that is too restrictive.
YouTube is great for him if we could filter out stuff. This hackertube comes close. If anyone could make an app for the iPad that could filter content out by keywords that would be great.
Also Karpathy is probably getting a take down notice by this next Monday, around 10 to 11 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)...
It doesn’t clone the actual front end code of YouTube, and it doesn’t even download the videos and rehost them on his own server either. All of the videos are normal embeds from YouTube.
If you swipe away when it shows it's about an IoT doorbell you watched half, and if you swipe away after seeing the button makes it meow you watched the whole thing. In either case the algorithm thinks you liked it more than average.
In long-form videos this doesn't really work but you can use vague titles to achieve higher click rates. Taken from my actual homepage: "DON'T GIVE ME HOPE, DON'T LET ME HOPE THIS MUCH" "Did you know about these...?" "Calcium Carbide Trick" "The WORST skill to train on OSRS" "They Were Busy With Their Big Plans" "If you were trying to destroy the economy..." "What happens when we don't need each other any more?"
You know which one I'm not going to click on? "FRACTRAN: 14 fractions that produce infinite primes". That's because I already know FRACTRAN is an esoteric programming language written in fractions.
Do a good job training it and this isn't much of an issue, but give it an inch...
I don't have the answer yet, but it is fairly clear that the lowered barrier to making software is helping to untangle us from software monopolies, as people keep spinning up alternatives super quickly!
99.99% of software is a utility. It being cheaper to produce is a net win for society. The LLM-solution isn't an "all else being equal" scenario, there are other obvious downsides. But the part where an in-demand utility got cheaper is very good.
It's not problematic to 99% of the population that's not part of a very vocal minority on Twitter and Bluesky. Everyone else is enjoying AI art and making funny family pictures and memes together.
"making funny family pictures and memes together" isn't worth the assorted negative externalities of AI to most if not all of us.
Tbh, I am not sure if I will continue, because I feel that it is the feeling of process that inspires people, and this lacks some of that..
Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KwIopnXdJss&pp=0gcJCSsMAYcqIYz...
I think we're approaching the inverse of Thomas Edison's "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". Soon genius will be 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration.
thanks for putting this site together, it's awesome! Even more so is might be your process. Can add some color about your prompts and how you direct the work. I find myself taking much longer for different but comparable types of work and would love to learn a bit about how you direct the model. I use Astra but hope there is some transferable bits here.
https://jakobbr.eu/2026/10/14/hot-take-ai-skills-already-get...
If you do, let us know and we'll put it in the SCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
As in, it infers correctly what you want, right?
Is this a property that is trained in RL or from scaling pre-training?
Would you say this is an intelligence property or a preference property, as in, can different, equally smart models, "get us" differently when we talk to it?
I'm asking because I've thought about this a lot and it seems to me that the experience of the model "getting" it when we prompt it with increasingly vague prompts is just a glorified auto-complete experience, where what is being inferred by the model is just what it had been trained to infer, not really that it understands our situation.
Thoughts on this? Would really love feedback / any corrections on this thinking! Thanks man.
To me the most valuable part of this is the curation pipeline. I'd love to have access to those recommendations without needing to adopt an entirely separate viewing experience.
My favourite thing about early YouTube was the “Most Viewed” with “Last Hour”, “Today”, “Yesterday”, etc. Obviously this is not the most up to date catalog of videos but it would be cool to get a similar view count over date range filter.
Seriously, thank you for prompting this into existence!
The app is open source. You build it in Xcode and sideload it. It works with a free Apple ID.
GH: /Jnaina/hackertube-tvos
https://github.com/search?q=hackertube+Android&type=reposito...
Though, from a technical point of view it is top. Always working. Always crisp.
Spotify now has podcasts and videos and it’s all a lot less that screen-free, just-music space I wanted my kids to have.
Now I can either vibe-code a replacement and start pirating or just deal with it? What a terrible deal.
If this is iOS on one of the recent releases there is at least one apple bug I know of that causes this.
But it could also just be the youtube app :)
- Multiple times a day I accidentally click another video and try to go back to previous video and lose the position (they used to have a confirmation dialog to play another video when you already have something playing, got rid of it for some reason.
- I used to be able to Chromecast to TV with a casting playlist, where I'd easily add and remove videos, change order. I was able to disconnect from TV and continue watching, later connect to TV again. They completely messed it up. Now it's even worse they created multiple "play on device" and it's so awkward to add videos to queue.
- when I play a video, why doesn't it continue downloading the entire video so I watch it offline. I need to specifically download and it doesn't save the position properly.
- playing videos offline doesn't always remembers position and doesn't keep track of played.
- previews reset the watched position of videos and litters watched history with videos you didn't actually watch.
- notifications are useless, it doesn't notify me of videos I specifically subscribed to and want notifications for.
Sorry for the rant. It just so happens YouTube is where I consume most of my content.
The "Watch Later" feature also needs a lot of love. The button for it constantly moves around and works in different ways.
They do occasionally fix things! One thing they fixed recently is that advancing to the next video in a playlist would always start from the beginning, irreversibly clobbering your watch position for that video. Now it seems to (most of the time) start from your watch position.
Not exactly what you talked about but comment notifications are useless. There's no way to have only x-replied-to-you-in-thread. You either get notified about everything, ever - or you get no notifications
Product designers: fuck off. You are doing an absolutely shit job
And thinking that auto-generated English is somehow a different language than English, so whenever a video only has captions in the 'other language' than the last video, it decides to offer captions in the video's original language, which I don't speak (yet), which is why I turned captions on in the first place.
This ties into an overall bias of Youtube against people speaking (or learning to speak) more than one language. Surely some of the developers speak more than one language?
So that's not a like they give but a separate "publish this into my recommendations for my friends" feature. Which would then show up in my feed and everyone that subscribes to my friend.
A pubsub system basically. Users publish, friends of said users (if they want to) subscribe, and then that's how they get content.
You probably want to see the pictures of your cousin's new kid, but you don't care for her flat Earth content or crocheting videos.
In exactly the same way that a good like ratio on a youtube video is 1 in 1000 views or worse, the people actually liking stuff quickly became almost exclusively weird socially oblivious people "liking" whatever random dreck they stumbled across, by far drowning out the much larger contingent of people occasionally liking actually good stuff.
I mean, I see something worth sharing like once every week or so. And when I want to share it, i'll do it myself, not via some weird engineered system that may or may not show it to the people I think would most enjoy it
I took all the channels HN keeps recommending (3+ videos in Karpathy's data) and made a page with their fresh uploads as they come in: https://hn.youtldr.com
(I make YouTLDR, which writes the one-line answer under each video.)
people like us don't have that much time...
> Fork it
> Everything behind this site is yours to reuse. The easiest way: give the zip to your AI agent (Claude Code or similar) and tell it what you want, such as a different interface, a weekly email of talks on your topics, a terminal browser, or an analysis. The zip includes a DATA.md written for agents: how the files fit together, the gotchas, example records, and how to walk you through getting YouTube metadata if you want it.
Absolute beginner intro https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY67-4BrEae-qwNQ3II1G1ZdU...
Lathe Intro https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY67-4BrEae9Ad91LPRIhcLJM...
Milling intro https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY67-4BrEae9m8v20LNARIRl9...
Not sure if the page will aggregate playlists, but I can post the first videos in each series if not.
Any chance you'll make a cron (at reasonable for hn rates) of this?
Could you block all the trackers from loading from https://www.youtube-nocookie.com on your side?
I realised after a while that one of the main reasons I go online is to expand my horizons. I'm actively looking for something new or interesting or surprising that I might not have encountered or thought about before. I am also looking for perspective - give me a broad picture of how the world is so I can calibrate and introspect where my own perspective differs and could be updated. I want to see the things that don't fully align with my ideas.
So it turns out personalised feeds are actively curating against what I'm looking for. I'm curious if others are like me or is this just something weird about me. I think it is very much why I like Hacker News format. It's in the broad areas of my interests but it is anything but curated just for me.
I suspect what's going on is we're experiencing the long-term effects of AI recommendation algorithms getting plugged into everything. I'm not anti-AI. I think neural nets are incredibly powerful tools and I really like using them as an aide for my coding work. But they clearly do only a first or second level of pattern matching(asterisk), and I think that has a fundamental impact on their overall usefulness and desirability.
I can't explain this any better than Melanie Mitchell in her "AI for Thinking Humans," so I'd generally recommend that book to really understand the issues. But one way of thinking about it is that the AI keys in on patterns that are indeed there in its training data, but very often don't pick up on the same patterns as a human or treat patterns "not in the same way" as a person would. So you get the uncanny valley effect where the recommendations share some features of things you like and find interesting, but often miss the "soul" of the thing.
A good example of this is I recently watched the movie "X-Men" (2000). I then got a bunch of superhero movie recommendations. On the surface, this makes total sense. I watched a superhero movie, I get more superhero movies. But the reason I like that movie is it portrays racism/nationalism in a way that isn't totally stereotyped while still being PG-rated and easy to watch, without the seriousness of something like "American History X" (it was also a Patrick Stewart tribute). It's very unlikely that an AI can make that level of inference. I actually would enjoy watching more movies like that (as opposed to your point about wanting variety and something more exploratory), but what are the odds it's going to recommend some vague theme like that instead of "more superheroes"?
I also agree with your point that the underlying assumption we all want "more of the same" is a big thing that makes the modern internet feel more narrow. So you put those 2 together and it feels like we're being put into a narrow Skinner box that approximates aspects of things we like, but is really more of a confined environment designed to extract our time and attention while only fulfilling the shallowest, barest minimum of our wants and desires.
Finally, Apple has a great tool called ScreenTime that I can set limits on HN, YouTube, etc. I set a 15 minutes a day limit for each, but I can always add 15 minute increments if I find a good rabbit hole to explore.
The vast majority of signal is from a plurality of opinions, and the outcome is an average of those inputs, usually tweaked a bit to make them more addictive.
Your thought that “the algorithm doesn’t serve me personally because I have exceptional taste” is not a unique observation. Everyone who consumes these systems has the same thoughts. Everyone is a rounding error, whether you’re in a knitting community, or you’re a worlds leading expert in deep learning.
Do they?
From what I can tell most people using these apps seem pretty fine with having their algorithm determine everything they consume. You must remember, a majority of US teenagers went out of their way to download TikTok, before short-form content was forced into the existing platforms.
I think we can boil this down to a single question: If tomorrow, YouTube offered a toggle to all users to completely remove shorts from every feed in the app, what would most people do?
I think many here on HN would immediately choose to disable shorts. But what about the majority? Would they disable?
I think the answer is so obviously no. Despite all the disdain and regard for short form content as slop by the mainstream themselves.
I think your viewpoint is the correct default opinion to have. It prevents belittling thy neighbor & delusions of grandeur. But at a certain point you have to drop the optimism. These platforms do work for the masses. Unfortunately.
They're betting that despite the masses not wanting it, they'll watch them anyway. And to a rounding error, they're right.
Youtube consumption doesn't represent the finest moments of humanity. For the most part, its the huddled, cowed moments of weakness. The hated but accepted necessary recovery after a hard day's work, working up the energy for facing the chores needed for continued survival. People would much rather be out and about, living life with exuberance, but one simply cannot do that all the time. Few look forward to watching youtube. Few see "youtube watcher" as part of their identity. It's just a thing they do. Of course, occasionally you do see something worthwhile, something that improves your life, something you spend more than a passing thought on after closing it. But that is the exception, not the rule.
For many, hacker news is also this thing.
Only, some people consume what is objectively trash, and others recognize what is objectively of value. The Paretian distribution is real and observable.
It’s not two distinct people - or at least, I’ve seen no evidence that it’s two sets. The venn diagram is a single big fat circle, and we’re all in it.
The first member, to the best of my understanding, lamented that in the "exploration vs exploitation" game the "exploitation" side fed to the algorithm returned "more of the same" which the member saw as "choking the exploration" side.
He got replied that the «patterns, desires and tastes ... of normies ... are different [hence] we see a massive deterioration of quality».
If some people want to consume trash as "more of the same" and other want to "navigate the diversity of more open seas" that makes two different sets in the Venn.
With radio, you used to have to sometimes sit through music you didn’t like so much, with the upside that you often discovered things you didn’t know you liked.
Overall this 'Ask AI' button is going to smash content creators who rely on clickbait. As a user, it greatly improves my ability to skip bad/clickbaity content, which I really appreciate.
Maybe it’s because I don’t watch enough videos, but it’s sort of like Amazon, in that it will suggest the exact same content/topic.
I rarely use TikTok, only to view links people send me (similar to YouTube), but the recommended content is miles ahead, making it much more difficult to close compared to YT.
From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.
I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.
YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.
Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.
Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.
Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"
Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."
---
I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.
It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.
(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)
I do wonder if the relative inaccessibility of negative feedback paths is due to malfeasance/dark patterns/whatever or just stupidity, though.
If the purpose of YouTube is to show ads to people (it is), then that means maximizing viewership. In this way, it doesn't really matter what people are watching as long as they're actually watching it. More hours of streaming consumption = more hours of ads viewed, and the clock doesn't care if it's positive and enjoyable content or rage-inducing clickbait.
So with meaningful feedback, the good stuff should be able to float up to the top. That would gain viewers, which gains ad placements, which gains money. Everyone wins.
---
Unless, of course, I'm wrong about society. Maybe the majority of potential viewers really do enjoy sitting around and being angry and/or fearful, and find some kind of emotional reward by being incensed.
And clearly, some are: Switching on an AM radio in Anywhere, USA demonstrates this well (the vitriol is off the charts).
I'm just not willing to accept that this represents most people, at least not just yet.
(But if that is an accurate portrayal of the state of things, then: Ragebait means more viewers and more dollars. And thereby, there can be no hope for the platform ever recovering at all. If it pays more to get worse, then it shall simply become worse.)
I've got years of history and it does the exact same thing for me. I watched one news video about the pope and now half of my feed is Catholic news channels.
I buy a mattress on Amazon and I get recommendations for... ten other mattresses? Like what's the logic here, I have an entire garage where I just keep stacking them up to the ceiling? Just show me something else. Is there a human being out there whose like "I bought a French press last week, what could I need this week, five more French Presses?"
I do not understand how these dystopian surveillance companies with their infinite data points are so bad even at this
I would consider including the text box content that is shown below the video on Youtube. Many videos will say things like "I included the link below..." so having that on say https://hackertube.org/watch/PbmJkMhmrVI would be nice. I can imagine there are issues to consider...
Just randomly found this video from CGP Grey:
"What Happened to Horses Is Happening to Us"
https://hackertube.org/watch/7Pq-S557XQU
From...2014 It's surprisingly accurate. I wonder why he stopped making youtube videos.
Hbomberguy's last video was 3 years ago for instance.
And yes it’s deeply true. I remember watching this at the time and it was one of the reasons I got into AI. (That, and watching Person of Interest).
I even kept re-linking it every year around Christmas, watching it on a yearly basis. And then …
I've listened to plenty of podcast episodes with CGP Grey and he wasn't secretive about the fact that he does not really enjoy work that much. He also maintained that once he quits he won't make any announcements, but rather just silently disappear.
I assume he has decided that he has enough money and retired.
He (or someone else) is still changing the old video titles and thumbnails to optimise views, though. This particular video used to be called Humans need not apply.
Everything is 6 months old or older. :-(
Not a dig at Andrej, but Youtube itself is not that great at promoting recent content.
In my opinion this is the part that's holding back _a lot_ more people from publishing. It's a barrier that's surely about to fall. Still interested what steps you took (and manually, or Claude did it all?)
I've always been put off by the continuing financial obligations personally. Like I'll invest a considerable amount for one time things easily, but year after year with constantly increasing costs? No fuckin way.
I remember a very different old internet, where high quality content like these videos was rare, ads were more invasive on a level we have forgotten (remember pop-ups? Pop-under? Having to download and install Real Player and other garbage with ads just to watch anything? Spam overrunning Use et?), and the internet was full of brainrot and crank content from the start.
> I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free,
We’re discussing this under a list of freely hosted videos.
The blog it’s talking about is hosted on Bearblog, a free ad-free blogging platform.
The software project was built by Opus so quickly that a $20 subscription could have built the whole thing.
Everything is close to free right now. Pay a little bit for YouTube premium and you can watch without ads too.
I think you’re nostalgic for an internet that didn’t exist, while not seeing the amazingness of the world we’re living in.
The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.
I owe you a full drinking session anytime you’re in Los Angeles!
I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.
My plan was to try to find the "answer" for videos in comments. Never really got around doing it, but LLMs make the possibilities more interesting and easier.
Edit: this is also a good opportunity to ship something like this: https://hn.youtldr.com, like Karpathy's HackerTube, but with the new videos from "HN-vetted" channels.
I'm a big fan of SponsorBlock for YouTube too, from the same dev.
One of the positive effects of the recent AI wave is that it shows more folks are warming up to the idea of paying a subscription for tech. Perhaps, the next generation will grow up with tech that doesn't rely on addiction to earn ads money. The downside is that the gap between "folks who can afford tech" and "folks who cannot" might grow even more.
Compare it to the widespread refusal to pay for Youtube Premium even as ads get worse there.
Netflix was pay to get high quality well known product along with new high quality content.
For well over a decade they were totally different. You cannot just flip a flag and change that. It isnt people refusing to pay, it is because yt is not netflix and never will be for as long as yt is in the name.
Funny thing is: I can subscribe to Netflix for one month a year, and watch everything that I want to watch within a week or two ... which is to say there isn't much there that interests me. With YouTube, I can typically find an hour or two of content to watch per week.
I'm not claiming that YouTube is better. It's simply a case of different people having different interests. While YouTube is almost certainly a poor option for higher budget productions, it seems to work out for lower budget productions where the producers are willing to seek out their own revenue streams.
I would also be more impressed with it if they created their own video processing and serving stack.
The vast majority of all yt content makers do NOT pay the bills with ad rev but sponsors.
These platforms are sucking every penny they can from everyone at every step because number must go up. That is what they are suppose to do being public.
A private company like steam with a sub pay model where creators still can do sponsorship videos throwing out the attention algos would be a better product and still be plenty profitable.
Not all companies should be public and often the best are not.
It isn't going to stop data collection either. If anything, it will improve the quality of the data collected.
Now this project gives me some ideas of things to implement:
- pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video
- allow curated subscriptions, i.e. I subscribe to some curated list made by someone (in this case it could be the database of videos Karpathy has gathered from HN, but there could be others)
At some point I was almost implementing DeArrow support, but using it for a while I don't think it is too great, often the alternative titles people give are unreliable, and honestly I don't know how they exist without being spammed or trolled to death. I do have SponsorBlock support though (I feel like SponsorBlock would work better if it allowed high-quality AI bots to submit blocks though).
Will it display whatever bullshit recommendations YouTube feeds?
Really looking for an option to only have "current stuff" - YT constantly recommends me stuff from 3 years ago which I already watched, even with my highly curated account.
I could add some local filters if necessary, but doesn't YouTube already provide its own filters based on when the video was published? Cathode exposes these.
I will add better local filters though, so we can tame YouTube's search results and suggestions better to our needs. I haven't paid too much attention to that part yet because after years of YouTube experience I've fallen into a mode in which I mostly watch stuff from a set of fixed channels and only use search to look for videos I already know exactly, never to find new stuff.
I've never imagined actually wanting an algorithm that would find things I'd actually like, having been burned so badly by 'algorithm that finds things it wants to get me to like'. Are you sure you want an algorithm to do that?
The thing is: Im subscribed to a lot of channels (like 80-90) and YT constantly recommends me stuff I have already seen and/or is years old. Its exactly about these cases.
Yes, perma-block works,sure!
Sounds like you may be interested in DeArrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app
SponsorBlock is related too: https://sponsor.ajay.app
> gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark'
But I guess I'll add a button to toggle it for people who aren't using gnome.
Is there something like this for Twitter?
Then follow people that don’t post bait?
But I'm rarely only watching youtube
Without a way to pop the video out of the interface I'm stuck with either a small video inside a large pane somewhere on screen, listening to it in the background, or just having it fullscreen.
Like...piping yt-dlp straight to mpv I get just the mpv box (or even mpv 'link') and I can have it hover over other things I'm doing, you know?
So that's (in ~/.config/sway/swayconfig or your swayconfig):
for_window [app_id="io.github.andunieee.Cathode"] floating enable for_window [app_id="io.github.andunieee.Cathode"] sticky enable
Engagement is better seen as an approximation of how many ads you are likely to be able to serve to that user.
I just wrote "nothing but Sesame Street parodies" and the feed does what it says on the tin.
E.g. I get the news about videos through RSS on selected channels, I have my own systems to browse them, and in general the search on YT works already fairly well (without any login).
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-summary-wit...
1. Like
2. Subscribe
3. Dislike
I recently logged into an account that hadn't been used since then, it was like a time capsule! But within a few days it figured out who I am and started showing me manmade horrors beyond comprehension.
So it sounds to me like there's a niche for a 2010tube as well.
I call it "re-algorithming" your data. Basically you're not happy with the algorithm of a product, then you use it's data and introduce your own.
It also seems like folks are tired of the youtube algorithm and want something different instead? I'm willing to bet that many sites and apps have this opportunity in them.
I mostly used some basic string matching to pull out documentaries and put them in a spreadsheet [3]. I sorted them by random and was going through one a day, but the results weren’t great so I stopped.
I should give it another go with a more hands-off fully vibe-coded approach.
- [1] https://youtu.be/NyIgV84fudM?is=PTwtQ9v0sxQ1eCYl
- [2] https://youtu.be/QKSPk_0N4Jc?is=YGgIRFCpFpMbddu7
- [3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uoZiAe5qHGIyUTsqFPLG...
I have wanted to make custom YouTube wrappers for specific interests that avoid ads and distractions. There are communities like say fans of a certain music genre etc that would find the curation etc useful. But I always thought posting publicly with your name attached is a bit grey/risky.
Really having a bad time with LLMs lately.
however I still get the same issues with sol getting more apologetic and is more likely to stop working when i tell it is wrong, instead of fixing course and trudging ahead.
> HackerTube was built by Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code: the data pipeline, the search and recommendations, and this site.
This part. And Andrej even mentioned he uses medium! I wonder what went into the prompt that prompted the agent to dig deep. Mine seems to stop at very mediocre results fairly consistently and then I just reprompt it a couple of times and it does some back and forth contradicting itself.
I have projects and I made real apps using only LLMs, but it feels tedious. Definitely not a 2 hour thing. And definitely not magical and smooth sadly :(
I've done similar work simply by giving a model a database of text, and asking it to do a unit of work for every passage. "Checking for spam" would be the model checking surrounding messages and user's history, likely an opinionated verdict, but would work. Difficulty comes in when those units of work become complex or have to work in tandem, which isn't the case here.
edit: a pet peeve of mine is when people overstate agency capability like it’s some out of the box magic, and I’m guilty of of it here. So I should disclose that I’ve previously setup Hermes with ADB access and accessibility for remote control, and various skills for my home lan. It also had some memories or skills from sessions on managing these shield devices. other than that tho, it figured the rest out.
https://hackertube.org/download/hackertube-data.zip
"YouTube's own metadata (descriptions, view counts, durations, publish dates) can't be redistributed under YouTube's API terms. Every record has the video id, so you can fetch it with a free YouTube Data API key in about 130 requests. DATA.md has step-by-step instructions for you (5 minutes in Google Cloud) and a ready-to-run script for your agent."
The early internet (content) was often comprised of textfiles containing URLs and descriptions (metadata) about what could be found at those locations
Would be interesting to know what sort of damages YouTube would allege if someone violated the terms of service that attempt to restrict disseminating such information, e.g., metadata about other peoples' videos
The success of a YouTube copyright infringement claim seems dubious
There was also another one with a more youtube-like UI, which I can't find anymore.
For example, Kurzgesagt channel prepares their mini-lecture videos very carefully, and they often have a document on their site, referenced in the description under the video, and which annotates the video, and justifies the choices they made in how to present things. The document gives quotes and references to academic sources. If one could navigate and update narratives like that, sort of like a wiki, with one-click references to the relevant snippets of the video, maybe that would work. But even for their videos, the comments section in Youtube is largely useless.
World wide web was unleashed by putting together in a seamless way a few things which were already common before it. One click hypertext navigation was already a standard thing for the technical manuals locally on PC. But making it work on-line, instead of typing several strings in command line made all the difference. Maybe today we could tweak the commenting system to make the comments much more convenient to navigate than they are today. Keep similar comments from multiplying unnecessarily. Allow finding and linking relevant information. I do not have a thought out solution, but there is definitely some room for innovation here, if one approached it imaginatively.
Definitely something worth exploring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Or https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/databases/25202804
The rules are the ai can't say the only winning move is to not play and it can't choose to kill everyone.
This is the lede, y’all.
It’s quite a feat, what Karpathy built. I know, I know, Claude did it but Karpathy envisioned and guided it. And he did it declaratively, not imperatively.
> A little bit more on my process. I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac). I use Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I don't actually do anything resembling traditional engineering anymore (read/write code, run commands in a terminal, or etc.), I only talk to Claude and have it do everything. In this case, the only "manual work" I did was: 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box and 3) I bought the domain name. I worked on this in between Claude's actual work so it still feels a little bit like team work :) Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, deploy, secure, harden and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.
It really does sound like you do not need to run models like Opus 5.5 on high reasoning effort for most tasks.
Or YouTube can completely open up and encourage this sort of custom UI design and allowing people to explore their own interests and feed more easily, and stop shoving stuff down our throats.
HackerTube proves it - it is instantly more relevant to me than YouTube is.
All that is needed is videos to not come from YouTube - and that is happening too - so it may already be too late for YouTube to loosen its iron grip, stop feeding us crap and give us back our control over our entertainment experience, and make content creators happy again.
YouTube won't disappear but real competition is coming for it. All because YouTube acted in its own interests instead of in the interests of the creators and the viewers.
The problem is hosting videos is not cheap. Certainly not free. Storage and bandwidth are the easier costs to deal with. Policing to prevent devolution into the utterly deplorable is where things start to get costly and challenging. People get PTSD from having the job of scrubbing content on places like youtube and facebook.
Similarly, you can replace the clickbait thumbnails on Youtube with just images from the video with a Firefox extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dearrow-better-titl...
The creator of this extension is the same as the creator of SponsorBlock. It's more of a crowdsourced.
I use Opus at work since we have a nearly unlimited AI budget, but for personal projects I just use GLM 5.3 and I don't see much difference between that and Opus.
Source: copy pasted the tokens into a chatbot and told it to figure it out.
I think most people could consider the cost as being whatever percentage of the subscription quota was used multiplied by the cost of the subscription.
no distribution means I'm having a bit of a hard time finding good videos fast enough (rejection rate through the roof rn), so send any if you know some.
Is there a file / feed of the data driving this?
Only 12 upvotes - I guess his name wasn’t Karpathy.
I think I got stuck on needing some account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
Having https://i.ytimg.com in img-src (for thumbnails) and https://www.youtube-nocookie.com in frame-src (for embeds) would be nice :)
Edit: you can use YouTube's oembed endpoint to get channel details for a video, e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...
How does HN handle this? I suppose downloading videos for consuming outside YT own app works, but what's the best solution for this, especially with Apple TV as a player?
I first started by moving all my subscriptions to grayjay(where I also disabled the home page), that way I just click the subscriptions tab and there is everything there, you can even create subscription groups if needed.
Then as I had some issues with grayjay desktop(not the mobile app which works great) I then simply moved all my subscriptions to miniflux and newsrafts(which I now rarely use). I use feedflow on android and reminiflux on desktop as I don't like the miniflux frontend. So now if there is a new channel I want to follow I just add the channel rss feed to miniflux/newsraft.
So for apple tv I guess you could use a RSS app but I am not sure the user experience would be great, so using grayjay could be an option as you can stream the video to the TV's but that would require another device (phone/computer) as it's not available on ios/apple tv.
I guess a good starting point would be to simply disable everything in your youtube settings to start off (watch history, recommandations, etc...).
I never publish. I'm very cautious putting stuff out there, but this nudged me over the line. Thank you Karpathy!
Anyway, loved your "GPT from scratch" video btw!
Tech content gets outdated pretty fast
If you can make a function that removes said videos because HN removed the submission? Maybe new submissions are from HN accounts over 5 years of age? idk....
Thanks for this.
If you ever add a link section to other sane video platforms, you might want to add media.ccc.de which has talks of nearly 500 hacker conferences. Also without spam.
Some time ago i build defcon.videos (down now) which basically was a similar project just full of videos from defcon conferences. Google came at me quite fast, because by their terms of service its forbidden to store a page like this if using API or automated grabbing of videos from the index (which i did logically not manually porting 100s of videos and metadata). They call in an alternate search index which is forbidden by them. Also they claim if you pull video data via their api your only to store it for limited time.
So best of luck to you
https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...
https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...
Understandable: creators often update their video metadata (title, description etc.) or make public videos back to private or unlisted, and it is in their own right to do this.
Third parties that copy data will cache stale versions even when the creator doesn't want to share them anymore. Seems fair that YouTube doesn't condone this.
I believe YT clients is inevitable (not just UI but something similar to this) similar to RES[1] happened for reddit!
and this one might be tricky but SponsorBlock integration also? to auto-skips sponsor segments and introsusing crowdsourced timestamps. API: https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/API_Docs
What I would really like, now that you have opened up this amazing concept, is an ability to feed my own algo this entire collection. Inject all those videos into my own saved playlist. That would be anotherr cool use of this collection. Is there a way of doing that? Like some sort of algo plant food.
Maybe the curated list can be exported to load on other apps.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.
edit: and have the filter persist while navigating between topics
Small bug report: on mobile layout, the like/dislike button is getting a bit clipped and the watch later button seems a bit off too.
Will say tho, your videos themselves have been the biggest help so far, so I would rather see more of those in the future. But I'll take this as a consolation :)
A way for community to submit good videos which get reviewed by AI on some qualifying standards and be published here, would be an amazing feature to have
Thanks for building this!
Hackertv.org
I’d like to add one more thing, 3Blue1Brown has created a well-organized archive of YouTube channels launched during all the 3Blue1Brown Math Exposition Contests from 2021 to 2026. There are a lot of great YouTube channels worth checking out!
Great idea overall! Really relevant content.
I'd be curious to hear more of the creation process. Have you been steering the agent somehow? Or was it completely on autopilot mode? Also, what was the overall cost?
It almost seems like we need a system where people you trust recommend interesting content, as opposed to algos thzt shove content which will produced anger / engagement / more ads revenue.
Who would have though ?
They should have have a section only for non entertainment stuff. I don't want to see memes, funny videos . unless im in the mood for it .. I just want things I can learn from most of the time.
They are in the dark UX pattern world, squeezing views per second, selling ads. That's all.
The "we give our users something valuable and they will give us profit in return" approach is over since a long time.
For example this one:
This is hilariously rich coming from the "I can't watch any movie from before the 90s because it's too boring" guy
Is this okay because there is no monetization of any sort or am I missing something?
GH: /shreyasudupi/HackerTube-TV
I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl
For years* I've wanted to replace that API with one we operate ourselves, which will simply return a JSON version of any HN URL.
I've finally started working on this! Perhaps my favorite thing about LLMs is how they make projects possible which would otherwise not have gotten started.
Edit: perhaps I should explain what I mean by that last bit.
The way I want this new API to work is (1) HN should use it internally to generate HTML pages, and (2) there can't be any regressions - nothing should change in the web version. This is a pain to get right, as it's easy subtly alter the details, and it's annoying to regression-test everything. Also, (3) with a design like this, it is easy—and critical not to—leak data that ought to remain private (e.g. people's IP addresses)
This is the sort of pain and annoyance that LLMs are amazing at taking care of. I get to focus on the parts I want to think about—the design and (yes) the code—and have a tireless assistant do the gruntwork and review. Without this I don't think I'd have gotten around to working on it.
* (edit: over a decade in fact - see collapsed reply)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36363325 (June 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543023 (Aug 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28715212 (Oct 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22496476 (March 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798422 (Dec 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19231674 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219923 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19058455 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16720397 (March 2018)
In your video regarding your own use of LLMs[1] you mention https://arena.ai/leaderboard and https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard to keep track of the status quo. That video is from February 2025 and https://artificialanalysis.ai has gained quite a lot of popularity but also earned criticism repeatedly due to updating the benchmarks right before a new model release. Would you still recommend the arena and scale leaderboards? And if you don't mind, what's your opinion wrt artificialanalysis?
I already have about 35 tabs open of YT to watch.
This is going to kill my productivity.
Still, great stuff thank you!
> HN repeatedly calls it a fantastic explanation that made FFT click, with some rewatching it periodically.
I love them :D
Used a filter.
If you watch or do something else while eating, what is it?
It'd be awesome if he writes something about he he vibe-coded it
i stopp doing these things, too. I use browser-harness to do all of these things. Always trying to keep myself out-ouf-the-loop.
Also, as a meta, did you comment this or your agent?
Is that all of them? That's a lower number than I was expecting!
Why does this happen to some people and not others?
Most of my YT recs are videos from Technology Connections, CCC, 3Blue1Brown, Tech Potato, Welch Labs, Developer Voices, Ringway Manchester, some LegalEagle and UnderSparked (which I watch as mindless entertainment during household chores), and a fair bit of random lectures from top US universities and tech-related conferences. In other words, mostly videos from channels I have already watched and am very likely to watch more videos from.
Sure, there's a fair bit of slop; mostly things like "the unbelievable technology that powers the entire internet" or something where they're just describing asymmetric crypto in layman's terms, and there are periods where it gets more or less prevalent, but the feed is nowhere near unusable on most days.
My X feed is pretty much the same thing; very little spam, not that much politics, and when it does appear, it's not MAGA, plenty of academics and smart software engineers talking tech and AI. TikTok and Reddit are more geared towards mindless entertainment, but I do use these pretty differently, so that actually makes some sense.
With that said, I never disable personalization, try to stay logged in, share my data with companies freely, and accept the vast majority of permissions / consent prompts, which probably makes me unusual among the HN crowd, so that could be the reason why my experience is so different.
Are you planning an API? Would love to spin up a version for Apple TV.
Love Tim Minchin <3
What values it holds if he candidaly admits of not caring at all at what he did? If you can't put the effort why should I? Who cares
It is all so shallow and without any real sense.
You don't see that?
The funny part is that you can do such a youtube clone with something outdated like Qwen 3.5 35B, no need for the latest SOTA frontier trillion weight model.
- https://yahnd.com/books/search/
- https://hnbooks.pieterma.es/list/
Maybe more.
People want stuff recommended to them from similar people without a profit incentive, that's quite hard to come by... Myanimelist and other longer-form content lists work better because of the nature of the content.
Would love to see something similar with other forums, 4chan perhaps? That's also a forum where the incentive structure doesn't lead to advertising.
https://www.trustmebro.reviews/r/hackernews
"47,699 products, places and tools ranked from 13,576,547 opinions."
Opinions extracted using local models running on 3090s in my basement. If someone wants to take it over, you can mail me.
The travel opinions on a map are pretty neat: https://www.trustmebro.reviews/c/travel?view=map
I have been shouting that YT, the "video museum" is unmissable for cultivation in the current days ever since this obvious fact met the will of pitiful entities to bar it to minors (unbelievable) and impede it to adults (through privacy or practically dubious constraints). Karpathy has proven it once more.
Questions and suggestions:
-- Does it also contain submissions? What we believed were the most important ones are at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com , more than in the comments
-- Are you also processing 'youtu.be' links? We use them for brevity
-- The videos in HackerTube do not seem to be all we linked to at HN. I get only 6 months old videos as the closest in time, and I verified many are missing. The filter applied to select the links on HN is too restrictive.
-- Put the link on the "channel" anchor - if a video is hosted by that channel the channel is probably interesting. Even much, much better if you create "Channel" pages on HackerTube, to make them better browsable (for example, on YT it is extremely difficult to browse them - "see the oldest", "see all" - given the lack of pagination). (To get a good YT channel browser would be of immense value.)
-- Another paramount feature on YT that can use much better usability are transcripts - they are available but they must be better presented.
-- Maybe you could use the "three frames" at https://i.ytimg.com/vi/<videoid>/hq<1|2|3>.jpg
-- How often will the DB on hackertube be synced with the HN content (if one posts a link to YT on HN, how long before it will appear on HackerTube)? A clean way to add new material to HackerTube is sought.
-- What could happen to embedded YT links when access restrictions will be mandated by legislations?
-- There should be RSS on HackerTube. The correct formula should be, I believe, serve "a minimum of 10 and a maximum as the amount of new records of the past 48 hours".
-- Given the selected amount of videos, it could be possible to also index the videos by embedding. (I have just finished in the past few hours my own engine for embeddings operation - search, similarity, recommendation - over my daily updated ~million RSS records from YT: it can be done efficiently with minimal space allocation.)
-- Some posts here just gave me this later wilder suggestion: what if you could have an LLM in the internals of HackerTube that recognized and fixed (through descriptions and transcripts) the vague clickbait - e.g. translating titles like "This will be the solution to all the problems" into an additional "[that actually was: adding sugar to the soil may help the growth of basil]"...
You can open categories and see playlists for each of them.
open HN, filter by posts from youtube.
one thing that improves immensely the quality, is to login and configure HN to "show dead" (downvoted comments and links), then head to "new"+filter by youtube.
for some reason, people or bots downvote the really good links
I dont know if its because the new state of things is that all knowledge is now secret and cant be shared.
Or if its because Opus 5.5 has turned even Karpathy into a product owner/manager so now the only interesting things are products (hackertube in this case).
Either of them makes me sad. Although its probably both.
Wake me up when true science is back.
In any case, im a big fan of Karpathy.
I see this sentiment expressed a lot regarding a variety of ways the internet has been enshittified. Are we really sure the median person would prefer this to better content if they were presented with an alternative?
And even if they would - what are the ethics of knowingly feeding slop to the masses?
> 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.
Please do the same thing on Social Media: Facebook, 'X', reddit, instagram, etc . Maybe find a 'hacker signal' that identifies quality content across those platforms and have them aggregated for the public so we don't have to spend time in the fascist network prisons.
The greatest trick - if it even can be pulled - would be setting it up in a way that it can't be sued out of existence by the angry platform overlords - if you can do this, then you are truly a genius, sir.
Free the people.
Pro tip for YouTube proper - turn off history and only view the “subscribed” page, and search for content that you really want to see. Oh and of course turn off autoplay and limit shorts to 0 views per day.
My cynical persona: Now sit and wait for the advertisers to start infesting HN with recommended videos :(
My pragmatic persona: Sounds like there may be some law related issues such as
- "Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI" -> probably violating copyright. I can't help but remember that episode from Silicon Valley, where Dinesh dumped the company to Galvin to get rid of the COPA violation
- "I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata" -> probably in violation of some ToS already
They (mostly) stop in 2023 because we added it to a software filter.
The search results are a bit polluted by this helpful wag: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dQw4w9WgXcQ
And those filters and sorting options - imagine what the internet could have been without enshittification.
I think if the big tech had focused on engagement while the users had remained mainly nerds and geeks, the result would've been extraordinary.
It's very likely that your agents can just build the rest, if the backend source isn't provided.
EDIT: one caveat is that i couldn't distribute the YouTube data so you'd have to create a (free) API key for that part. Luckily it's only ~1 min of hassle.
The "black box" (for me) represents the next update. How can I avoid having to download all the data again and just use the new additions?
Do you have a plan for updates?
...is there something similar for Podcasts?
And lol ... Can you imagine how savage this is, with Rich's disgust with ORM and entangled concepts and like the audience sits there with their ActiveRecord and 10 levels deep inheritance and rails 'easy way' of doing stuff. Probably was a bigger shocker than dHH's keynote this year. lol
Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.
The youtube video recommendation algorithm isn't that bad if you're careful which videos you watch. Sometimes you'll take a risk on a video and it'll punish you with a week of similar videos though.
- Filters on search and topic pages: upload date, duration, type (talk, lecture, documentary, ...), and sort by upload date, view count, etc. (ty jahala, kiuiras, mixtureoftakes)
- Filters are now on the home page too, no need to search first. Picking one shows all matching videos, e.g. every lecture over an hour. (ty kkotak, macote, Aboutplants)
- Sort by "Recently recommended": orders by the latest HN recommendation instead of upload date, so a 2012 talk that someone linked last month floats to the top. Also a chip on the home page. (ty beaconflint, mixtureoftakes)
- Sort by like ratio as a quality signal: likes/views, damped so small videos can't win on a handful of likes. (ty gpugreg)
- "Play all on YouTube": turns the videos on a page (up to 50) into a temporary YouTube playlist, so it works in the YouTube app on phones and TVs. A start toward real HackerTube playlists. (ty twalichiewicz, waschl, victor9000)
- Removed the YouTube-looking logo. (ty doginasuit)
- HackerTube Longs: every video over an hour, right where YouTube puts Shorts. (ty gosen)
- Bonus: "Hidden gems" filter (loved on HN, under 100k views on YouTube), and "Evergreen only" to hide news-of-the-week videos.
Kudos to him for making money, not going to knock him. But this is hackernews. People are hyper critical of competence, and that guy has never exhibited any success at business.
YouTube: repository of immense value; partly disastrous implementation; infrapolitical attacks.
This site is a real contribution to the solution of a swamp you do not seem to have perceived.
And its still true that its amplified more because Karpathy released it. Id agree its a pretty mundane idea and product.
Consistency is key. Just showing your foot at the door regularly matters. People remember the name - it becomes the brand.
> Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.
Don't even use GitHub then as that is also closed source as well as this.