Andrej Karpathy has launched HackerTube, an alternative to YouTube that focuses on videos recommended by users of Hacker News. The project went online on October 31, 2026, after Karpathy decided to build his own platform instead of continuing to browse what he described as YouTube’s low-quality algorithmic recommendations.
The service is based on an analysis of roughly 43 million Hacker News comments published over two decades. Claude filtered the dataset to identify around 40,000 comments that explicitly recommended videos. That process produced a collection of 6,454 videos published between 2007 and 2026, organized into 150 topics and several curated playlists, including “The HN Canon.”
HackerTube borrows familiar features from YouTube, such as viewing history, watch-later options and playlists. However, users do not need an account to receive recommendations, while their viewing history is stored locally in the browser. The platform also replaces standard creator-selected thumbnails with an image taken from the middle of each video. A dedicated “HackerTube Longs” section offers a reference to short-form video platforms.
Karpathy has made the analyzed Hacker News data available as an archive so that others can use it with their own AI assistants. Versions based on the same material have already appeared, including a site focused on arXiv papers and an Android application.
Karpathy says he did not write the code himself. He used Claude Code in the Mac application with Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model set to a medium effort level. His manual work consisted of creating a Google Cloud API key, renting a server and purchasing the domain name. After the server was running, he asked Claude to update it, secure it and deploy HackerTube. According to Karpathy, the entire process took about two hours.
Sources: Numerama.