HackerTube is a free YouTube-style site by Andrej Karpathy that lists 6,454 videos recommended in Hacker News comments, with no account needed.

What it is: YouTube's layout, with Hacker News as the source

Karpathy published HackerTube on October 31, 2026, with a short post on his blog. He wrote that he went to YouTube one night and found "an enshittified wall of slop", so he asked Claude Opus 5.5 to build a YouTube clone from whatever videos Hacker News has recommended. The home page copies YouTube's look: a thumbnail grid with a search bar, a sidebar with Home, Longs, Liked, History, Watch later, Categories, Playlists and Settings, and a Filters button.

The collection: his post says the model downloaded all Hacker News comments, filtered them, and ran Sonnet over them in a Claude Code workflow to drop spam. That left about 40,000 comments recommending a YouTube video, which became 6,454 videos recommended by a few people from 2007 to 2026, across 150 topics.
What he says it does: it uses the video's 50% frame as the thumbnail instead of the uploaded one, gives "For You" recommendations with no account by keeping state in the local browser session, has keyboard shortcuts, and lets you export the site's data to give to your own agent so it can build a version of your own.
Comments: a news report on the launch says the comments shown under each video are the Hacker News ones. Videos play from YouTube. A commenter in the HN thread describes them as normal YouTube embeds, not re-hosted copies.

How it was built, in the author's words

Karpathy says the whole thing took about two hours. He used the Claude Code desktop app for Mac with Opus 5.5 on medium effort, and says he only did three things by hand: created a Google Cloud API key to read YouTube's video metadata, started a VPS and bought the domain. Then he gave Claude the server's IP and told it to update, deploy, secure, harden and optimize the code. That is the author's own account, and Seailife did not check it.

What to know before you use it

Picked by recommendation, not review: a video is in because people on Hacker News recommended it. "Contains quality content" is the author's description, not an independent check.
No price or account: the author's post describes no sign-up, and no price is listed on the site.
Code and data: the post offers an export of the site's data. Seailife found no statement that the site's code is open source, and a commenter in the HN thread asked about it.
A different site with the same name: hackertube.video calls itself independent of Hacker News and YouTube, lists a different set of videos and has its own ranking rule. It is not Karpathy's site.

How fresh it is

The site and post are from October 31, 2026. The Hacker News post of the launch had more than 2,800 points on the day Seailife checked, November 7, and was covered by outlets such as Gigazine and AI Weekly.
By the author's account it was built by one person in about two hours, and Seailife found no stated plan for updates. Seailife opened the home page and read the post and the thread, and did not watch the videos or use the recommendations.

What it is: YouTube's layout, with Hacker News as the source

The collection: his post says the model downloaded all Hacker News comments, filtered them, and ran Sonnet over them in a Claude Code workflow to drop spam. That left about 40,000 comments recommending a YouTube video, which became 6,454 videos recommended by a few people from 2007 to 2026, across 150 topics.

What he says it does: it uses the video's 50% frame as the thumbnail instead of the uploaded one, gives "For You" recommendations with no account by keeping state in the local browser session, has keyboard shortcuts, and lets you export the site's data to give to your own agent so it can build a version of your own.

Comments: a news report on the launch says the comments shown under each video are the Hacker News ones. Videos play from YouTube. A commenter in the HN thread describes them as normal YouTube embeds, not re-hosted copies.

How it was built, in the author's words

What to know before you use it

Picked by recommendation, not review: a video is in because people on Hacker News recommended it. "Contains quality content" is the author's description, not an independent check.

No price or account: the author's post describes no sign-up, and no price is listed on the site.

Code and data: the post offers an export of the site's data. Seailife found no statement that the site's code is open source, and a commenter in the HN thread asked about it.

A different site with the same name: hackertube.video calls itself independent of Hacker News and YouTube, lists a different set of videos and has its own ranking rule. It is not Karpathy's site.

How fresh it is

The site and post are from October 31, 2026. The Hacker News post of the launch had more than 2,800 points on the day Seailife checked, November 7, and was covered by outlets such as Gigazine and AI Weekly.

By the author's account it was built by one person in about two hours, and Seailife found no stated plan for updates. Seailife opened the home page and read the post and the thread, and did not watch the videos or use the recommendations.