What is HackerTube?
HackerTube is a free website, made by the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy and launched on 31 October 2026, that collects the YouTube videos people recommend in Hacker News comments. It holds 6,454 videos recommended between 2007 and 2026 by 15,041 different commenters, sorted into 150 topics in 16 areas, plus 27 playlists. Each video page shows the Hacker News comments that recommended it, with links back to the threads.
The site was built by Claude Opus 5.5 working in Claude Code, with teams of Claude Sonnet 5.5 agents labelling the comments and writing the video summaries. There are no accounts and no paid plan. The underlying data is a free download under the ODC-By 1.0 licence; the server code is not published. HackerTube is not affiliated with YouTube, Google, Hacker News or Y Combinator.
Is HackerTube worth it?
Open YouTube after a long day and the home page has a good idea of what you will click and a poor idea of what you will still be glad you watched. The talk that changed how a friend writes software rarely makes it past the thumbnails with red arrows on them.
HackerTube, which Andrej Karpathy put up on 31 October 2026, swaps the algorithm for a crowd. It holds 6,454 YouTube videos that Hacker News commenters pointed each other to between 2007 and 2026, sorted into 150 topics. A video only gets in if at least three different people linked it, with some real comment, in at least three different months; the site says that cut well over 100,000 linked videos down to roughly 7,000 before clean-up. Videos rank by how many separate months people recommended them in, so a lecture that keeps coming up for a decade beats one that went viral for a week.
That is the part Hacker News's own search cannot give you. Search it for YouTube links and you get comments one at a time, with jokes, rebuttals and genuine tips mixed together. HackerTube had Claude Sonnet 5.5 read each of the 39,834 comments it kept, alongside the title of the story it sat under, and label it as a recommendation, a citation, a joke or a criticism. Every video page then shows those comments with links back to the threads, which is what a YouTube playlist never tells you: why someone thought this was worth an hour.
It feels like YouTube without the account. Likes, history and Watch later live only in your browser, and videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed. A Hidden gems filter finds videos HN loves that have under 100,000 YouTube views, Longs gathers everything over an hour, and Play all on YouTube turns up to 50 videos into a temporary playlist for the app on your TV. Search matches topics as well as words, so "distributed systems" finds talks that never use the phrase.
Karpathy says Claude Opus 5.5 built the whole thing in Claude Code in about two hours; his only manual jobs were a YouTube API key, a server and the domain. By Claude's own tally, which he posted on Hacker News, the run used 504 million input tokens, 90% of them cached, and 7.6 million output tokens, mostly for labelling comments. The dataset is a free download under the ODC-By 1.0 licence, and within days people had built Apple TV, Android TV and Chinese-language versions from it.
The catch: this is one person's side project, and it is run like one. Karpathy has not published the server code, calling it "a vibe coded mess". The downloadable data is dated 31 October 2026 and no refresh schedule is published, so newer recommendations may not appear. The summaries and labels were written by Claude, and the site itself warns that a few will be off. And the taste is Hacker News's taste: a brilliant video its commenters never linked three times, in three different months, is simply not here.
Our take: HackerTube is the well-read friend who sends you links, not a library. For a weekend of conference talks or a lecture series you might actually finish, it is a better starting point than a feed tuned for watch time; for anything recent, YouTube's own search still has to do the work.
Where it earns its place
A backend developer with a free Saturday afternoon
Find a conference talk worth the full hour
Search a topic such as distributed systems, switch to Longs, and read the HN comments under each video before pressing play. It costs nothing and needs no sign-in; the only risk is that the newest talks may be missing.
A computer science lecturer putting together a watch list for first-year students
Choose lectures and documentaries that still hold up years later
Browse the Mathematics & Theoretical CS and Computing History & Culture areas, check each card's note on whether the video has aged well, then use Play all on YouTube to hand students a playlist of up to 50 videos. The summaries are AI-written, so check one before quoting it.
A data engineer at a two-person newsletter start-up
Build a weekly email of talks on each reader's topics
Download the 17.8 MB data zip, which includes the labelled comments, the topic list and 384-dimension search embeddings, and point a coding agent at it. ODC-By 1.0 allows commercial use with credit; YouTube's own metadata needs your own free API key.
Before you commit
- Setup
- Open hackertube.org in a browser; there is nothing to install and no account, so the first video is one click away.
- Integrations
- Videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed, and Play all on YouTube builds a temporary playlist of up to 50 videos for phones and TVs. Apple TV and Android TV apps exist, built by fans from the data, not by Karpathy.
- Data and privacy
- No accounts; likes, history and Watch later are stored only in your browser. The data download is ODC-By 1.0 and leaves out YouTube's own metadata, which YouTube's terms do not allow it to redistribute.
- Cost at scale
- Free to use. Building it took, by Claude's count, 504 million input tokens and 7.6 million output tokens; Karpathy ran it on a Claude subscription and gave no dollar figure.
- Limits
- The data download is dated 31 October 2026 and no refresh schedule is published. A video needs at least three recommenders across three months to appear, so new and niche picks are left out, and every summary was written by Claude.
What’s good
- Every video vouched for by at least three people in three different months
- Real HN comments on each video page, linked to their threads
- Free, with no account; likes and history stay in your browser
- Hidden gems, Longs and topic search that YouTube does not offer
- Full dataset downloadable under ODC-By 1.0
What’s not
- One-person side project with no published refresh schedule
- Server code not published
- Labels and summaries written by AI, which the site says may be off
- Only covers what Hacker News commenters happened to link
Best for
Programmers, engineers and curious students who want long talks and lectures that other people have vouched for, without signing in to anything.
HackerTube alternatives
HackerTube: common questions
- Is HackerTube worth it?
- A free, sign-in-free shortlist of the YouTube talks Hacker News has vouched for since 2007, worth a bookmark as long as you remember it is a weekend project that may not be kept up. We rate it 3.8 out of 5.
- How much does HackerTube cost?
- Free; no accounts and no paid plan.
- What are the downsides of HackerTube?
- One-person side project with no published refresh schedule; server code not published; labels and summaries written by AI, which the site says may be off; only covers what Hacker News commenters happened to link.
- Who is HackerTube best for?
- Programmers, engineers and curious students who want long talks and lectures that other people have vouched for, without signing in to anything.
- How much does HackerTube cost for a team or in production?
- Free to use. Building it took, by Claude's count, 504 million input tokens and 7.6 million output tokens; Karpathy ran it on a Claude subscription and gave no dollar figure.
- Is HackerTube safe for company data?
- No accounts; likes, history and Watch later are stored only in your browser. The data download is ODC-By 1.0 and leaves out YouTube's own metadata, which YouTube's terms do not allow it to redistribute.
- What are the best HackerTube alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are Perplexity and Google Gemini.
Answers checked Nov 9, 2026.