YHK - yet another hacker news clone

HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

171 points karpathy 1 hour ago 85 comments

YouTube-style UI over 6,454 videos sourced from 39,834 HN comments since 2007.

https://hackertube.org/

sc970 1 hour ago | parent

How many tokens (or $) does something like this take to make?

karpathy 55 minutes ago | parent

I'm on subscription but I had Claude add it up: 504M input tokens (90% cached), 7.6M output tokens. 90+% of that was Sonnet calls to label the comments, all of the actual work, the app and deploy etc was ~1M tokens of Opus 5.5, I compacted context once. i.e. very small project by modern standards.

mixtureoftakes 50 minutes ago | parent

Yeah i'm pretty sure this is doable multiple times on a 20 dollar subscription, just wow

mips_avatar 39 minutes ago | parent

I wish someone would make a decision model that’s as good as sonnet but like 10-100x cheaper. Because for this project which is a pretty small dataset you’re spending ~$300 on sonnet usage. like jev can probably do this task but it’s not smart enough to reliably be used

gambiting 11 minutes ago | parent

GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it runs with latest PHP which required several rounds of fixes, optimize the system so it runs on the smallest 512MB droplet, harden the system so that ideally no one ever needs to look at it for another 10 years - it took about an hour, and cost a grand total of 4 american.... _cents_

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.

liquicity 59 minutes ago | parent

Nice idea will watch though some - I made something similar but for food vids (filters over YouTube chefs - such as only vids with ingredients)

https://mealplannr.io/discover

privacyishuman 58 minutes ago | parent

I like this a lot. I was just thinking about a site where you could share your YouTube cookies and then use anybody's curated algorithm because you can curate it quite fast in signed out mode.

Could you block all the trackers from loading from https://www.youtube-nocookie.com on your side?

farrelle25 56 minutes ago | parent

What a great idea. Does anyone know of a way of 'getting' / downloading all those URLs (maybe with the video title)..? I'm afraid of the site disappearing.

karpathy 54 minutes ago | parent

The site won't disappear (imminently, as I'd like to use it personally!) but head over to the about/ section and download the .zip with the underlying data, which I put up for this purpose.

mentalgear 52 minutes ago | parent

Appreciate the effort, yet I think there is a place this is needed even more:

> 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.

vfclists 51 minutes ago | parent

Where is the source, so I can roll my own specialized video site?

sejje 46 minutes ago | parent

Well, some portion of it was just served to you over HTTP.

It's very likely that your agents can just build the rest, if the backend source isn't provided.

farrelle25 37 minutes ago | parent

I think the core data is available here: https://hackertube.org/data

karpathy 30 minutes ago | parent

I didn't publish the server because it's a vibe coded mess, but if you point your Opus 5.5 at the zip and ask for YouTube-like site it will be basically instant. This part was like 3 min.

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.

jumploops 51 minutes ago | parent

I’m always surprised how bad YouTube’s recommendation algorithm seems to be.

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.

gleenn 49 minutes ago | parent

Do you have web activity turned off or use a separate old style Youtube account? Mine is also bad but I think it's because of those for me.

smokel 47 minutes ago | parent

I suspect they know perfectly well when they can't make money from someone, so they deliberately serve up boring crap to save on hosting costs.

thijson 46 minutes ago | parent

I was thinking it would be good if there was something similar for kids. They seem to fall into a whirlpool of trash content.

globular-toast 46 minutes ago | parent

Bad by what metric? They're interested in getting you to watch ads, they couldn't care less what you want.

renegat0x0 44 minutes ago | parent

For YouTube nerds I curate a list of channels. Size of list 3993 feeds: - https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top/blob/main/l...

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.

morphle 50 minutes ago | parent

Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube

gosen 49 minutes ago | parent

Nice idea, thanks Andrej! When will you add HackerTube Shorts? (kidding :D)

karpathy 24 minutes ago | parent

NEVER. More inclined to add HackerTube Longs :D

gosen 22 minutes ago | parent

yes! I'd love that :D

twalichiewicz 16 minutes ago | parent

You can make the ultimate anti-short attention span player by intercepting all keyboard/mouse inputs to prevent navigating away and requiring you to watch the whole video ◡.

sarmadgulzar 13 minutes ago | parent

You haven't posted on YouTube in a year or so. Working on any long-form videos we can expect to see anytime soon?

Anyway, loved your "GPT from scratch" video btw!

jahala 48 minutes ago | parent

This is great, would love filters for duration and sort by upload date

gpugreg 43 minutes ago | parent

Sorting would certainly be great. I'd especially welcome sorting by some kind of quality metric. The "thumbs down" count is not available via API anymore, but you could use thumbs up per views as a proxy, although that might require some reweighing, since videos with many views usually have fewer thumbs up.

You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.

karpathy 32 minutes ago | parent

added and pushed!

sejje 48 minutes ago | parent

> Media, journalism & propaganda

Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.

gpugreg 45 minutes ago | parent

How do the categories work? I'd download the video transcripts and embed the text (maybe summarized first). This way you could support custom categories via embedding similarity.

mixtureoftakes 45 minutes ago | parent

I wish there was a way to sort by recency, if i'm mainly interested in finding obscure gems from like last 6 to 12 months of ai and tech updates

mtVessel 33 minutes ago | parent

Seconded! (please)

Aboutplants 33 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, this is the first thing I looked for and when I couldn’t find it I easily decided it’s something I would never come back to. Add this feature and it’s something I would come to frequently

karpathy 28 minutes ago | parent

added a few minutes ago!

kkotak 24 minutes ago | parent

Don't see it.

karpathy 21 minutes ago | parent

first do a search, then on top you'll see "Filter". might try to make more prominent from main page

macote 17 minutes ago | parent

Yes, please, I couldn't figure it out as well.

mixtureoftakes 10 minutes ago | parent

thanks!

cromka 43 minutes ago | parent

I pay for YT premium but noticed the quality of recommendations is subpar yet I still end up wasting time watching it. So I decided I need to limit my feed to my subscribed videos only, which YT app makes annoyingly difficult.

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?

aeriose 42 minutes ago | parent

YouTube constantly cycles the same content + videos it’s so annoying

nwmck 40 minutes ago | parent

I have an extension that blocks all recommendations and forces me to subscribe to the creators I like and search for content myself. Recommendations aren’t optimized for your benefit. Cutting out the recommendations really helps to not get sucked in.

0fflineuser 5 minutes ago | parent

Personnaly I disabled recommendations/watch history/etc... so the youtube homepage is blank, there is absolutely nothing on it.

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...).

iugtmkbdfil834 43 minutes ago | parent

I currently use downloaded and curated youtube videos on my local server ( mostly for my kid so that I don't have to deal with youtube autoplay or her clicking something kid would ), but this is just a reminder of much google has changed for the worse.

reorder9695 42 minutes ago | parent

I find it amazing how close the front page of this is to what I actually watch/want to watch on YouTube. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it feels like an unpersonalised feed (besides being based on Hacker News) shouldn't have a significantly better hitrate for me than YouTube's "personalised" feed.

rileymat2 8 minutes ago | parent

I am not sure the personalize algorithm is based on what you want to watch, but what will keep you watching. That’s a measurable KPI.

GodelNumbering 42 minutes ago | parent

This is such a good use of tech! Although I have heard in the past that youtube is quick to ban any use of its content on a third party site. I hope I am wrong and this stays.

beaconflint 42 minutes ago | parent

Recency sort needs a pick between comment date and upload date, since a 2012 talk linked last month is exactly the gem you'd want.

zahrevsky 42 minutes ago | parent

Do you plan to update the site with new videos and comments?

twalichiewicz 40 minutes ago | parent

Interesting project, but have you considered publishing the curated videos as automatically maintained playlists (organized by topic, popularity, or recency) on a YouTube channel?

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.

karpathy 34 minutes ago | parent

I like the idea of playlists, might even work to ask Claude to make a few. Did you have in mind the ability to create and publish them on the site somehow?

twalichiewicz 25 minutes ago | parent

I was actually thinking of publishing them directly to YouTube, under a HackerTube channel, with playlists automatically generated and maintained by your existing curation pipeline.

waschl 25 minutes ago | parent

Having HackerTube videos as playlists inside YT makes the video selection available on any device with YouTube app on it, like TVs etc.

mhrmsn 39 minutes ago | parent

Interesting idea! Also funny that the fourth recommendation for me was a video with Andrej himself :D

kiuiras 39 minutes ago | parent

It would be great to have an option to sort videos by upload date, so it's easier to discover recent content.

ninjahawk1 39 minutes ago | parent

Really cool idea, you might consider bundling taps when you click a video so it auto-plays instead of opening up the native web browser for youtube. That would make it feel more like the official client. Could easily hide it behind a “buffering” screen.

ciefa 34 minutes ago | parent

Seeing Prejudice by Tim Minchin on the front page makes me very, very happy.

Love Tim Minchin <3

saikiran91 34 minutes ago | parent

I can't find it on GitHub. Is it open source?

furyofantares 31 minutes ago | parent

Remarkably the source is so small I can just post it here.

> Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.

rvz 30 minutes ago | parent

> Is it open source? If not, I'm not going to use it.

Don't even use GitHub then as that is also closed source as well as this.

mbed92 33 minutes ago | parent

Really cool idea. I also realized recently that whenever I enter YT, I enter "nshittified wall of slop"...

skyberrys 32 minutes ago | parent

What is a 50% thumbnail?

fasterik 30 minutes ago | parent

I'd never heard this term either, but I'm assuming it means that if the video is N frames long, it uses frame N/2 as the thumbnail.

karpathy 22 minutes ago | parent

correct. it means the thumbnail is sourced from exactly halfway in the video, so you get a representative frame.

waschl 18 minutes ago | parent

You may want to have a look at DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/

karpathy 17 minutes ago | parent

The average thumbnail on YouTube these days is some guy looking like HOLY SHIT, tearing his hair in amazement looking at something with an arrow pointing at some detail. "TOP 10 XYZ. YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE #6". Like and subscribe. Utterly repulsive.

aizk 32 minutes ago | parent

Nitpick, maybe adding the youtube dislike counter estimation for videos might be a nice touch (yes it's an estimate but it's pretty decent). Though on second thought, perhaps these videos don't need them.

flir 32 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how "spam and low grade content" is defined.

(I'll just put this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv5Uk9UUx_M here)

Doohickey-d 28 minutes ago | parent

Someone did something similar for the current front page: https://hn.video

There was also another one with a more youtube-like UI, which I can't find anymore.

codingisfreedom 27 minutes ago | parent

Out of curiosity - was this created using claude code? Cli or gui? I am not even remotely getting that kind of thoroughness from claude with opus 5.5 or anything really. It seems to want to stop as soon as it thinks it figured things out and then the rest of the conversation is just itself saying that its previous claims were wrong.

Really having a bad time with LLMs lately.

wyre 22 minutes ago | parent

I haven't used CC in a while, but I would bet this is sol that made this.

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.

surround 19 minutes ago | parent

In the first paragraph Karpathy says he used Opus 5.5. The parent comment is asking if he used a different harness besides claude code.

macote 12 minutes ago | parent

Claude Code, I found it in About

> 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.

mi_lk 21 minutes ago | parent

One of the better ones but in all honesty a random ass vibed site that's on front page because Karpathy

iugtmkbdfil834 19 minutes ago | parent

It is true and it is worth pointing out. Still, you have to admit that what he did here shows the distance of how easy it is to get from prompt to a working prototype if you have a clear idea of what you want to do (edit: his blog claims 3h.. which seems like a neat outcome if it includes gathering hn info from scratch ).

mwambua 20 minutes ago | parent

> I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me

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?

victor9000 19 minutes ago | parent

Could this not just be a playlist?

doginasuit 17 minutes ago | parent

You may want to change the logo, it is a different color but close enough to cause confusion. Not sure what a trademark court would say but it would definitely be enough to draw intimidation from Google if they wanted to.

karpathy 9 minutes ago | parent

ty i think this is right

sarmadgulzar 16 minutes ago | parent

Wow, this is genuinely so good. I just browsed it for a few minutes and the difference between this and the YouTube homepage is astounding.

gambiting 15 minutes ago | parent

>>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews

I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl

Flere-Imsaho 7 minutes ago | parent

What a smart idea!

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.