What Is HackerTube?
Karpathy's Hacker News video site, explained — and how this catalog was rebuilt from its open data.
The short version
HackerTube is a site that answers one question: which YouTube videos does Hacker News keep telling people to watch? On October 31, 2026, Andrej Karpathy (former Tesla AI director, OpenAI founding member) published hackertube.org, built in about two hours with Claude. Instead of YouTube's watch-time algorithm, it ranks videos by something harder to fake: how many separate months Hacker News commenters kept recommending them, across two decades of threads.
How the data was made
- Read all of Hacker News. Every comment from 2007 to 2026 was scanned for YouTube links — turning up well over a hundred thousand distinct videos.
- Keep what HN keeps coming back to. A video stays only if several different people linked it with real commentary, across several months. One-off links fall away, leaving 6,454 videos.
- Read every linking comment with an AI model to tell genuine recommendations from citations, jokes and criticism — 39,834 comments labeled in total.
- Write a card for every video: a summary, why HN likes it, what kind of video it is, and how well it aged.
- Rank by lasting recommendations: being linked again and again over years counts for more than one viral spike.
What's on the pages
Each video page shows the video, why HN recommends it, its topic among 150 categories, and the actual Hacker News comments that mention it, linked back to the threads. Start from the most-recommended videos, browse the tech talks, or pick a year — 2012 is a good one.
About this site
HackerTube's full dataset is published under an open license (ODC-By 1.0) specifically so people can build their own versions. This site is one of those: an independent, search-friendly rebuild of the same catalog — every video, topic and year a directly linkable page — with the ranking logic, comments and HN signals intact. It is not affiliated with hackertube.org, YouTube, Hacker News or Y Combinator.
FAQ
Is HackerTube affiliated with Hacker News?
No. It's an independent project that reads the public HN archive.
Does it track you?
No accounts, no analytics on this rebuild. Likes and history stay in your browser.
Why not just use YouTube search?
YouTube ranks by engagement; this ranks by how long a community of
engineers has kept vouching for a video. The two lists barely overlap.
Data: HackerTube export (ODC-By 1.0), derived from the open-index/hacker-news dataset. Videos play via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed.