HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

It's so refreshing browsing this compared to YouTube, it feels like I don't have to constantly be on high alert at being baited into some trap. Makes you wonder what kind of internet could be possible if all these tech giants weren't just optimizing for engagement and addiction.

I've been a bit fascinated by my lack of interest in the feeds that are curated for me. They are all things I'm supposedly interested in but I just am not when I see them in that format.

I realised after a while that one of the main reasons I go online is to expand my horizons. I'm actively looking for something new or interesting or surprising that I might not have encountered or thought about before. I am also looking for perspective - give me a broad picture of how the world is so I can calibrate and introspect where my own perspective differs and could be updated. I want to see the things that don't fully align with my ideas.

So it turns out personalised feeds are actively curating against what I'm looking for. I'm curious if others are like me or is this just something weird about me. I think it is very much why I like Hacker News format. It's in the broad areas of my interests but it is anything but curated just for me.

I just saw those sublines at the bottom of the descriptions:

> HN repeatedly calls it a fantastic explanation that made FFT click, with some rewatching it periodically.

I love them :D

You know what I like about this? It's 100% pure nerd content, no sneaky influencer videos or clickbaity news.

It does need a new-to-old sort though, which is easy to add in.

If you watched all of these videos, you would be the smartest, most annoying person ever. Lol

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.

While the project is very interesting in and of itself, the process section that has been edited a bit later to the post is even more revaling:

> A little bit more on my process. I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac). I use Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I don't actually do anything resembling traditional engineering anymore (read/write code, run commands in a terminal, or etc.), I only talk to Claude and have it do everything. In this case, the only "manual work" I did was: 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box and 3) I bought the domain name. I worked on this in between Claude's actual work so it still feels a little bit like team work :) Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, deploy, secure, harden and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.

It really does sound like you do not need to run models like Opus 5.5 on high reasoning effort for most tasks.

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.

You have no idea how big of a smile it put on my face when I saw the "Longs" option in the sidebar.

Seriously, thank you for prompting this into existence!

Wonderful!

> Fork it

> Everything behind this site is yours to reuse. The easiest way: give the zip to your AI agent (Claude Code or similar) and tell it what you want, such as a different interface, a weekly email of talks on your topics, a terminal browser, or an analysis. The zip includes a DATA.md written for agents: how the files fit together, the gotchas, example records, and how to walk you through getting YouTube metadata if you want it.

https://hackertube.org/about

Great! We need more things like this!

Similarly, you can replace the clickbait thumbnails on Youtube with just images from the video with a Firefox extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

This is what my dad (87) needs, filtered YouTube. He sits a lot on YouTube and often he is recommended a lot of negative World War 2 content. He is often trapped in that and although he also sees positive videos about other interesting things, depressing content gets the most attention. He has been to a geriatric doctor who also said he needs to stop watching that negative world war 2 content, since he is impacted by it.

I looked in YouTube if there is a way to filter out on key words or specific content like war, but could not find anything. YouTube Kids is a thing, but that is too restrictive.

YouTube is great for him if we could filter out stuff. This hackertube comes close. If anyone could make an app for the iPad that could filter content out by keywords that would be great.

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

Youtube has music and long form videos and shorts

They should have have a section only for non entertainment stuff. I don't want to see memes, funny videos . unless im in the mood for it .. I just want things I can learn from most of the time.

FP in 13 years, gratz

Youtube sometimes displays an 'Ask AI' button under the video. I recently searched 'Pride of America' (the cruise ship) and the top result was interesting but alarmist/clickbaity, along the lines of 'Don't make these 7 mistakes'. 'Ask AI' let me ask "what are the 7 mistakes": it told me, and in 10 seconds I could deem that video a waste of time. Very efficient.

Overall this 'Ask AI' button is going to smash content creators who rely on clickbait. As a user, it greatly improves my ability to skip bad/clickbaity content, which I really appreciate.

Very nice job, it'd be great if the links in the comments are actual links so we can navigate them.

This weirdly feels a lot like my own "subscription" tab.

It almost seems like we need a system where people you trust recommend interesting content, as opposed to algos thzt shove content which will produced anger / engagement / more ads revenue.

Who would have though ?

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.

Great idea. You know, it's weird, this looks very much like my feed in 2010, in terms of quality.

I recently logged into an account that hadn't been used since then, it was like a time capsule! But within a few days it figured out who I am and started showing me manmade horrors beyond comprehension.

So it sounds to me like there's a niche for a 2010tube as well.

But is this compliant with Google / YouTube terms?

I have wanted to make custom YouTube wrappers for specific interests that avoid ads and distractions. There are communities like say fans of a certain music genre etc that would find the curation etc useful. But I always thought posting publicly with your name attached is a bit grey/risky.

Gl with that.

Some time ago i build defcon.videos (down now) which basically was a similar project just full of videos from defcon conferences. Google came at me quite fast, because by their terms of service its forbidden to store a page like this if using API or automated grabbing of videos from the index (which i did logically not manually porting 100s of videos and metadata). They call in an alternate search index which is forbidden by them. Also they claim if you pull video data via their api your only to store it for limited time.

So best of luck to you

Great idea and works really well. Super easy to find interesting stuff!

If you ever add a link section to other sane video platforms, you might want to add media.ccc.de which has talks of nearly 500 hacker conferences. Also without spam.

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?

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.

Built (and still am) something like this, but hand-curated (watched end-to-end) rather than source-filtered. v0 test run: https://cabin.watch

no distribution means I'm having a bit of a hard time finding good videos fast enough (rejection rate through the roof rn), so send any if you know some.

> push to a VPS, secure, harden, optimize

In my opinion this is the part that's holding back _a lot_ more people from publishing. It's a barrier that's surely about to fall. Still interested what steps you took (and manually, or Claude did it all?)

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.

The more popular this gets, the more incentives there are for bad actors to flood hackernews with bullshit. Though I think it's safe to assume it won't be too popular and only a few people will use it for a while.

People want stuff recommended to them from similar people without a profit incentive, that's quite hard to come by... Myanimelist and other longer-form content lists work better because of the nature of the content.

Would love to see something similar with other forums, 4chan perhaps? That's also a forum where the incentive structure doesn't lead to advertising.

A lot of recent videos are about SpaceX IPO 'scandal'. Interesting

I attempted something similar a few months ago, but specifically for documentaries after I found two amazing documentaries in the comments sections (the Disney living characters one [1] and the Mars rover engineer one [2]).

I mostly used some basic string matching to pull out documentaries and put them in a spreadsheet [3]. I sorted them by random and was going through one a day, but the results weren’t great so I stopped.

I should give it another go with a more hands-off fully vibe-coded approach.

- [1] https://youtu.be/NyIgV84fudM?is=PTwtQ9v0sxQ1eCYl

- [2] https://youtu.be/QKSPk_0N4Jc?is=YGgIRFCpFpMbddu7

- [3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uoZiAe5qHGIyUTsqFPLG...

One feature I really like about this is how you've included a (presumably LLM generated?) summary of what Hacker News recommended a video, and then the actual comments recommending it. Nice to be able to see why a video is there and what people like about it.

Should it be rather "Show HN"?

I love the idea of different ways to access YouTube. We should be able to make a website like this that is essentially a meta channel around a topic. Great work

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.

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.

Gosh, the videos HN have recommended are amazing. What a community this is.

This prompted me to finish HackerNewsTV – YouTube playlist of latest HN videos, updated daily:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321248

Everyone has praised it already, so I won't be original, but I have to say that I've been looking for something like this for quite a while now. I consume a lot of long form videos on yt, similar to what you can find in your feed, but somehow yt keeps boxing me into very narrow space after a while with same videos over and over again. I've been trying to escape this trap by creating new accounts but eventually I keep finding myself in the same box.

Definitely something worth exploring.

I was thinking earlier how the comments or annotations could be implemented in the right way, to fix the problems with the Youtube's comments system. It is certainly not trivial, and one can argue whether this is even desirable. But it would be cool to be able to reference parts of different videos and other resources more fluently.

For example, Kurzgesagt channel prepares their mini-lecture videos very carefully, and they often have a document on their site, referenced in the description under the video, and which annotates the video, and justifies the choices they made in how to present things. The document gives quotes and references to academic sources. If one could navigate and update narratives like that, sort of like a wiki, with one-click references to the relevant snippets of the video, maybe that would work. But even for their videos, the comments section in Youtube is largely useless.

World wide web was unleashed by putting together in a seamless way a few things which were already common before it. One click hypertext navigation was already a standard thing for the technical manuals locally on PC. But making it work on-line, instead of typing several strings in command line made all the difference. Maybe today we could tweak the commenting system to make the comments much more convenient to navigate than they are today. Keep similar comments from multiplying unnecessarily. Allow finding and linking relevant information. I do not have a thought out solution, but there is definitely some room for innovation here, if one approached it imaginatively.

Interesting to see this person, who really spent effort to understand HOW things work, to brag (it is publicity for his employer, of course, but still) how he does not do any "real engineering" any more, making some clone of youtube (yes yes, "a much better clone, with quality content").

It is all so shallow and without any real sense.

You don't see that?

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.

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.

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.

Hey Andrej,

thanks for putting this site together, it's awesome! Even more so is might be your process. Can add some color about your prompts and how you direct the work. I find myself taking much longer for different but comparable types of work and would love to learn a bit about how you direct the model. I use Astra but hope there is some transferable bits here.

Kudos to Andrej for another demonstration of frontier vibe engineering (since MenuGen). Looking forward to the new recommendation model.

I created a new YouTube account that turn of history and that's my default. If I want to watch something I have to type and search, there is no recommendation and it's been great so far. Sharing this as I think someone might not know about this and they might find it interesting.

Andrej this is pretty awesome. Encompasses the need for all of us devs (junior through leads) to continue learning, while embodying what our current reality looks like in the development of the site itself.

Will say tho, your videos themselves have been the biggest help so far, so I would rather see more of those in the future. But I'll take this as a consolation :)

Its so refreshing to see the GUI. especially, since most of these videos are handpicked(?!) by users as suggestions and not originally intended to swim on the ratrace! AdBlockers helps you w/ UI distractions but the continious sloppy videos equipped q/ faulty thumbnails was/is my biggest distraction so far and thats what picked my attention on this fresh take.

I believe YT clients is inevitable (not just UI but something similar to this) similar to RES[1] happened for reddit!

[1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

This is very cool. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about owning your algorithms and what rss could have been.

Is there a file / feed of the data driving this?

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