Karpathy builds HackerTube from videos recommended on Hacker News
Karpathy says Claude helped turn 43 million Hacker News comments into a 6,454-video catalog in about two hours.
Andrej Karpathy has introduced HackerTube, a site for discovering YouTube videos recommended in Hacker News discussions. He says he built it with Claude Opus 5.5 in about two hours after becoming frustrated with YouTube's recommendations.
His blog announcement is dated October 31. In a November 1 post on X, he said Claude filtered 43 million comments spanning roughly 20 years into a catalog of 6,454 videos.
Community recommendations, a different interface
According to Karpathy's write-up, the workflow used Sonnet to help remove spam and narrow the material to about 40,000 comments recommending videos. The resulting collection spans 150 topics.
HackerTube presents those videos in a familiar browsing interface. Karpathy says it uses a frame from halfway through each video instead of the uploader's chosen thumbnail.
Other features include:
- Personalized recommendations without accounts, with state kept in the local browser session.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- A data export for people who want to build their own version.
What the build involved
Karpathy says his manual tasks included creating a Google Cloud API key for YouTube metadata, provisioning a server, and buying the domain. He delegated implementation and deployment to Claude.
The catalog size and two-hour build time are his reported figures. The project offers a concrete example of using coding agents to turn an existing community archive into a new browsing tool.