About HackerTube

Built from 40,000 Hacker News comments. Zero dollars of ad spend, zero tracking.

Why this exists

YouTube's recommendations are tuned for watch time. Hacker News commenters, for nearly two decades, have been pointing each other at exactly the other kind of video — the conference talk that changed how someone writes software, the lecture series that finally made a subject click. Those recommendations were scattered across millions of comments. This catalog collects them: 6,454 videos, each one linked and argued for in real HN threads, ranked by how the data was made.

How ranking works

A video's standing comes from how many separate months people recommended it in. Being linked again and again over the years counts for more than one viral spike. "Hidden gems" marks videos recommended across multiple months by several people, but discussed by few.

Credits & license

The underlying catalog is the HackerTube dataset by Andrej Karpathy, released under ODC-By 1.0 and derived from the public open-index/hacker-news archive. Comments remain the work of their authors; labels, summaries and topic cards were written by AI models, so expect a few to be off.

Privacy

No accounts, no analytics, no cookies. Your likes, history and Watch later list are stored only in this browser. Videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed.

This independent rebuild is not affiliated with YouTube, Google, Hacker News, Y Combinator or hackertube.org.