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.
One of the positive effects of the recent AI wave is that it shows more folks are warming up to the idea of paying a subscription for tech. Perhaps, the next generation will grow up with tech that doesn't rely on addiction to earn ads money. The downside is that the gap between "folks who can afford tech" and "folks who cannot" might grow even more.
Let's be realistic. Most of the videos on hackertube.org wouldn't exist if it weren't for the enormous sums of money YouTube pays their creators because of...ads.
I would also be more impressed with it if they created their own video processing and serving stack.
I (and millions of other people) literally had a netflix streaming subscription for 15 years (up until I cancelled it last year after 4 or 5 price hikes). The desire and ability to pay for stuff has always been there - but at the same time, there's a reason youtube has youtube content and netflix has netflix content.
Same feeling. For me the trap was mostly titles and thumbnails, A/B tested to trap my time.
I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.
It makes me yearn for what we lost. I remember when the Internet was all like this page, and it was bloody wonderful. I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free, and the brain rotting advertisement spam becomes a thing of the past.
I'll definitely be taking a look, but it seems that the videos are still hosted on Youtube?
The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.
Thank you for giving me a glimpse. Reading half through your comment made me realize I never saw YouTube ads since the AI cancer, naturally, I wondered what it feels like.
I watched the entire thing to provide meta-commentary as I just did. I explicitly try not to solidify my position with knee-jerk reactions to the world. So yes I did watch the entire thing to fully qualify the poison-experience.
What you can do is start a channel where you feature your emotional reactions to each long-form ad as it rolls on the screen. Then, you can purchase the items from the ads and explain how they totally were not the solution they promised to us. Then, having monetized your reaction/review channel, you should have enough to pay for YouTube Premium every month!
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 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.
Dumb question maybe, but aren't these two metrics supposed to be aligned? How can they keep me watching if they don't show me stuff I want to click on?
One common trick in Shorts is for the topic of the video to not be revealed until the end, while leaving enough clues that you think the topic will be worthwhile. "So anyways, I was reverse engineering this project with Claude and I came across this little detail that I think some of you might be interested to know. This IoT product that I've got in this box right here is a smart doorbell that quacks when you step on it. But actually by holding this button for five seconds you can make it meow instead."
If you swipe away when it shows it's about an IoT doorbell you watched half, and if you swipe away after seeing the button makes it meow you watched the whole thing. In either case the algorithm thinks you liked it more than average.
In long-form videos this doesn't really work but you can use vague titles to achieve higher click rates. Taken from my actual homepage: "DON'T GIVE ME HOPE, DON'T LET ME HOPE THIS MUCH" "Did you know about these...?" "Calcium Carbide Trick" "The WORST skill to train on OSRS" "They Were Busy With Their Big Plans" "If you were trying to destroy the economy..." "What happens when we don't need each other any more?"
You know which one I'm not going to click on? "FRACTRAN: 14 fractions that produce infinite primes". That's because I already know FRACTRAN is an esoteric programming language written in fractions.
On the one hand there's stuff you think is worthwhile to learn about, and on the other there's the dopamine brain candy that youtube throws at you along the way. They just want to keep you clicking, they don't care whether you feel good about it afterwards.
Do a good job training it and this isn't much of an issue, but give it an inch...
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.
I like the idea of playlists, might even work to ask Claude to make a few. Did you have in mind the ability to create and publish them on the site somehow?
I was actually thinking of publishing them directly to YouTube, under a HackerTube channel, with playlists automatically generated and maintained by your existing curation pipeline.
Yes please, not sure why this does not exist yet. I would even think that almost all YouTube video links from HN would make a better experience compared to the algo feed.
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.
Yeah, this is the first thing I looked for and when I couldn’t find it I easily decided it’s something I would never come back to. Add this feature and it’s something I would come to frequently
plus one when in programming mode; i have playlists on YT; but this helps to focus... and mostly I find HN has very interesting things that spawn a ton of thoughts...
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.
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?)
Curious about the hardening and optimizing - how much extra prompting is spent to ensure a ‘clean’ software supply chain for this, versus having Claude at its own discretion use third-party packages/libraries/etc (or not)?
> Buy a VPS, publish to it, buy a domain and link it, then keep paying for both in perpetuity.
I've always been put off by the continuing financial obligations personally. Like I'll invest a considerable amount for one time things easily, but year after year with constantly increasing costs? No fuckin way.
would love to see a write up on this too. my own tech experience has been all back end stuff and doing everything myself, so tying into "the way things are done online" aint so easy. and my patience for reading 3-4 books on it is close to zero.
I've listened to plenty of podcast episodes with CGP Grey and he wasn't secretive about the fact that he does not really enjoy work that much. He also maintained that once he quits he won't make any announcements, but rather just silently disappear.
I assume he has decided that he has enough money and retired.
He (or someone else) is still changing the old video titles and thumbnails to optimise views, though. This particular video used to be called Humans need not apply.
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.
Is it right that there haven't been any interesting or good videos for the past 5 months? I filtered by “upload date,” and the most recent videos are from 5 months ago. Still, I like it. Is it open source? I'd like to know what kind of tech stack was used here.
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.
> HackerTube was built by Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code: the data pipeline, the search and recommendations, and this site.
I haven't used CC in a while, but I would bet this is sol that made this.
however I still get the same issues with sol getting more apologetic and is more likely to stop working when i tell it is wrong, instead of fixing course and trudging ahead.
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.
My YouTube feed is pretty good; it's full of technical discourse on topics that I enjoy learning about, ranging from electronics hacking to civil engineering. That's probably the result of a long number of years of continuous training:
Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.
Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.
Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"
Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."
---
I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.
It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.
(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)
I think that most people make little use of the negative feedback options, mainly because they are more clicks away (dark patterns). A addon that gives them a button next to the thums up could help.
Yeah, perhaps I'm more-willing to put effort into it than some others are and making it easier would help us all out.
I do wonder if the relative inaccessibility of negative feedback paths is due to malfeasance/dark patterns/whatever or just stupidity, though.
If the purpose of YouTube is to show ads to people (it is), then that means maximizing viewership. In this way, it doesn't really matter what people are watching as long as they're actually watching it. More hours of streaming consumption = more hours of ads viewed, and the clock doesn't care if it's positive and enjoyable content or rage-inducing clickbait.
So with meaningful feedback, the good stuff should be able to float up to the top. That would gain viewers, which gains ad placements, which gains money. Everyone wins.
---
Unless, of course, I'm wrong about society. Maybe the majority of potential viewers really do enjoy sitting around and being angry and/or fearful, and find some kind of emotional reward by being incensed.
And clearly, some are: Switching on an AM radio in Anywhere, USA demonstrates this well (the vitriol is off the charts).
I'm just not willing to accept that this represents most people, at least not just yet.
(But if that is an accurate portrayal of the state of things, then: Ragebait means more viewers and more dollars. And thereby, there can be no hope for the platform ever recovering at all. If it pays more to get worse, then it shall simply become worse.)
From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.
I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.
YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.
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.
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.
Not sure how but adding a live up to date version of https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com would be nice to see in channel form, I don't think this matches recently recommended (unless based on # of upvotes) - still thank you for putting this curation together.
I've been wanting to make that work for a long time! Assuming I understand you correctly: for HN to segment youtube domains so they show as youtube/channel the way github/username, twitter/username, etc., do.
I think I got stuck on needing some special account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
that's really cool,
I don't know if it's possible to add `Return YouTube Dislike` integration to shows the dislike counts. API (OSS): https://returnyoutubedislike.com/docs
and this one might be tricky but SponsorBlock integration also? to auto-skips sponsor segments and introsusing crowdsourced timestamps. API: https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/API_Docs
I'm on subscription but I had Claude add it up: 504M input tokens (90% cached), 7.6M output tokens. 90+% of that was Sonnet calls to label the comments, all of the actual work, the app and deploy etc was ~1M tokens of Opus 5.5, I compacted context once. i.e. very small project by modern standards.
I wish someone would make a decision model that’s as good as sonnet but like 10-100x cheaper. Because for this project which is a pretty small dataset you’re spending ~$300 on sonnet usage. like jev can probably do this task but it’s not smart enough to reliably be used
GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it runs with latest PHP which required several rounds of fixes, optimize the system so it runs on the smallest 512MB droplet, harden the system so that ideally no one ever needs to look at it for another 10 years - it took about an hour, and cost a grand total of 4 american.... _cents_
I use Opus at work since we have a nearly unlimited AI budget, but for personal projects I just use GLM 5.3 and I don't see much difference between that and Opus.
I pay for YT premium but noticed the quality of recommendations is subpar yet I still end up wasting time watching it. So I decided I need to limit my feed to my subscribed videos only, which YT app makes annoyingly difficult.
How does HN handle this? I suppose downloading videos for consuming outside YT own app works, but what's the best solution for this, especially with Apple TV as a player?
Personnaly I disabled recommendations/watch history/etc... so the youtube homepage is blank, there is absolutely nothing on it.
I first started by moving all my subscriptions to grayjay(where I also disabled the home page), that way I just click the subscriptions tab and there is everything there, you can even create subscription groups if needed.
Then as I had some issues with grayjay desktop(not the mobile app which works great) I then simply moved all my subscriptions to miniflux and newsrafts(which I now rarely use). I use feedflow on android and reminiflux on desktop as I don't like the miniflux frontend.
So now if there is a new channel I want to follow I just add the channel rss feed to miniflux/newsraft.
So for apple tv I guess you could use a RSS app but I am not sure the user experience would be great, so using grayjay could be an option as you can stream the video to the TV's but that would require another device (phone/computer) as it's not available on ios/apple tv.
I guess a good starting point would be to simply disable everything in your youtube settings to start off (watch history, recommandations, etc...).
I have an extension that blocks all recommendations and forces me to subscribe to the creators I like and search for content myself. Recommendations aren’t optimized for your benefit. Cutting out the recommendations really helps to not get sucked in.
You can make the ultimate anti-short attention span player by intercepting all keyboard/mouse inputs to prevent navigating away and requiring you to watch the whole video ◡.
Very interesting. I find that my youtube feed is nicely curated to my interests. Adapting my interests with the algo well. Discovery is mostly en pointe. It is only when I use an unlogged-in browser that I see the world outside the Matrix. That is a slopfest indeed.
What I would really like, now that you have opened up this amazing concept, is an ability to feed my own algo this entire collection. Inject all those videos into my own saved playlist. That would be anotherr cool use of this collection. Is there a way of doing that? Like some sort of algo plant food.
What do you usually do to fine tune your algorithm? Mine always seems to corrupt after some time even if I like and subscribe to specific channels. I have to delete all my history once a year or so.
Really cool idea, you might consider bundling taps when you click a video so it auto-plays instead of opening up the native web browser for youtube. That would make it feel more like the official client. Could easily hide it behind a “buffering” screen.
I guess I learn something new about the HN crowd every day. When I loaded the page, half of the first screen were videos by IDW folks.
Pro tip for YouTube proper - turn off history and only view the “subscribed” page, and search for content that you really want to see. Oh and of course turn off autoplay and limit shorts to 0 views per day.
Yes. It appears to be random but the first time I loaded the page, on mobile, half of the videos featured well known IDW and populist types like Joe Rogan. So hardly what I would expect from culling recommended videos by a technical crowd.
Sorting would certainly be great. I'd especially welcome sorting by some kind of quality metric. The "thumbs down" count is not available via API anymore, but you could use thumbs up per views as a proxy, although that might require some reweighing, since videos with many views usually have fewer thumbs up.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.
Nah, it’s people upvoting the person rather than the product. Average human behaviour.
The product isn’t really that interesting, but it’s been built by a nerd celebrity so people gush for it and upvote it.
You see the same thing with blog posts all the time: some “celeb” posts an average, run of the mill take that plenty of people have had before them and only now it’s suddenly relevant and insightful, with people thanking their celeb for sharing some amazing basic idea that has been shared countless times before by other people.
Steve Yegge is another one I see a lot. These folks could fart and it’d reach the front of HN.
What a great idea. Does anyone know of a way of 'getting' / downloading all those URLs (maybe with the video title)..? I'm afraid of the site disappearing.
The site won't disappear (imminently, as I'd like to use it personally!) but head over to the about/ section and download the .zip with the underlying data, which I put up for this purpose.
It makes me want to login in, to share the history and recommendations between screens. I think a neat way to do that would be to authenticate with some other service that can just store and sync an encrypted blob that is the Local Storage of the site. That could be fairly private and doesn't put any load on the first site, it wouldn't need accounts. This could be a browser feature but then it doesn't work between browsers.
HackerTube Plus is only $5.99/mo. Among other amazing features it includes our new AI Amanda! You can connect Amanda to your Google account and get personalized recommendations.
It might be neat to integrate DeArrow to fetch thumbnails instead of just arbitrarily picking picking a 50% screenshot. It could also be used to replace the titles on the server side.
I currently use downloaded and curated youtube videos on my local server ( mostly for my kid so that I don't have to deal with youtube autoplay or her clicking something kid would ), but this is just a reminder of much google has changed for the worse.
How do the categories work? I'd download the video transcripts and embed the text (maybe summarized first). This way you could support custom categories via embedding similarity.
The average thumbnail on YouTube these days is some guy looking like HOLY SHIT, tearing his hair in amazement looking at something with an arrow pointing at some detail. "TOP 10 XYZ. YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE #6". Like and subscribe. Utterly repulsive.
i'd prefer to see the original thumbnail though so that i can recognize the video if i have seen it on youtube already. i also expect that the kind of videos that tend to be recommended on HN are less prone to have clickbait thumbnails.
I went into the blog, and saw only two entries in 2026. I dont know how to feel.
I dont know if its because the new state of things is that all knowledge is now secret and cant be shared.
Or if its because Opus 5.5 has turned even Karpathy into a product owner/manager so now the only interesting things are products (hackertube in this case).
Either of them makes me sad. Although its probably both.
HN's Firebase-based API (https://github.com/hackernews/api) makes that easy, until you want to reconstruct the threads (i.e. who replied to who) and then it's annoying.
For years* I've wanted to replace that API with one we operate ourselves, which will simply return a JSON version of any HN URL.
I've finally started working on this! Perhaps my favorite thing about LLMs is how they make projects possible which would otherwise not have gotten started.
Edit: perhaps I should explain what I mean by that last bit.
The way I want this new API to work is (1) HN should use it internally to generate HTML pages, and (2) there can't be any regressions - nothing should change in the web version. This is a pain to get right, as it's easy subtly alter the details, and it's annoying to regression-test everything. Also, (3) with a design like this, it is easy—and critical not to—leak data that ought to remain private (e.g. people's IP addresses)
This is the sort of pain and annoyance that LLMs are amazing at taking care of. I get to focus on the parts I want to think about—the design and (yes) the code—and have a tireless assistant do the gruntwork and review. Without this I don't think I'd have gotten around to working on it.
* (edit: over a decade in fact - see collapsed reply)
> I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me
I see this sentiment expressed a lot regarding a variety of ways the internet has been enshittified. Are we really sure the median person would prefer this to better content if they were presented with an alternative?
And even if they would - what are the ethics of knowingly feeding slop to the masses?
And lol ... Can you imagine how savage this is, with Rich's disgust with ORM and entangled concepts and like the audience sits there with their ActiveRecord and 10 levels deep inheritance and rails 'easy way' of doing stuff. Probably was a bigger shocker than dHH's keynote this year. lol
Appreciate the effort, yet I think there is a place this is needed even more:
> It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop.
Please do the same thing on Social Media: Facebook, 'X', reddit, instagram, etc . Maybe find a 'hacker signal' that identifies quality content across those platforms and have them aggregated for the public so we don't have to spend time in the fascist network prisons.
The greatest trick - if it even can be pulled - would be setting it up in a way that it can't be sued out of existence by the angry platform overlords - if you can do this, then you are truly a genius, sir.
I didn't publish the server because it's a vibe coded mess, but if you point your Opus 5.5 at the zip and ask for YouTube-like site it will be basically instant. This part was like 3 min.
EDIT: one caveat is that i couldn't distribute the YouTube data so you'd have to create a (free) API key for that part. Luckily it's only ~1 min of hassle.
- Filters on search and topic pages: upload date, duration, type (talk, lecture, documentary, ...), and sort by upload date, view count, etc. (ty jahala, kiuiras, mixtureoftakes)
- Filters are now on the home page too, no need to search first. Picking one shows all matching videos, e.g. every lecture over an hour. (ty kkotak, macote, Aboutplants)
- Sort by "Recently recommended": orders by the latest HN recommendation instead of upload date, so a 2012 talk that someone linked last month floats to the top. Also a chip on the home page. (ty beaconflint, mixtureoftakes)
- Sort by like ratio as a quality signal: likes/views, damped so small videos can't win on a handful of likes. (ty gpugreg)
- "Play all on YouTube": turns the videos on a page (up to 50) into a temporary YouTube playlist, so it works in the YouTube app on phones and TVs. A start toward real HackerTube playlists. (ty twalichiewicz, waschl, victor9000)
- Removed the YouTube-looking logo. (ty doginasuit)
- HackerTube Longs: every video over an hour, right where YouTube puts Shorts. (ty gosen)
- Bonus: "Hidden gems" filter (loved on HN, under 100k views on YouTube), and "Evergreen only" to hide news-of-the-week videos.
It is true and it is worth pointing out. Still, you have to admit that what he did here shows the distance of how easy it is to get from prompt to a working prototype if you have a clear idea of what you want to do (edit: his blog claims 3h.. which seems like a neat outcome if it includes gathering hn info from scratch ).
One of the positive effects of the recent AI wave is that it shows more folks are warming up to the idea of paying a subscription for tech. Perhaps, the next generation will grow up with tech that doesn't rely on addiction to earn ads money. The downside is that the gap between "folks who can afford tech" and "folks who cannot" might grow even more.
I would also be more impressed with it if they created their own video processing and serving stack.
Compare it to the widespread refusal to pay for Youtube Premium even as ads get worse there.
I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.
The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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
well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music
Seriously, thank you for prompting this into existence!
If you swipe away when it shows it's about an IoT doorbell you watched half, and if you swipe away after seeing the button makes it meow you watched the whole thing. In either case the algorithm thinks you liked it more than average.
In long-form videos this doesn't really work but you can use vague titles to achieve higher click rates. Taken from my actual homepage: "DON'T GIVE ME HOPE, DON'T LET ME HOPE THIS MUCH" "Did you know about these...?" "Calcium Carbide Trick" "The WORST skill to train on OSRS" "They Were Busy With Their Big Plans" "If you were trying to destroy the economy..." "What happens when we don't need each other any more?"
You know which one I'm not going to click on? "FRACTRAN: 14 fractions that produce infinite primes". That's because I already know FRACTRAN is an esoteric programming language written in fractions.
Do a good job training it and this isn't much of an issue, but give it an inch...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321248
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.
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.
people like us don't have that much time...
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...
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?)
I've always been put off by the continuing financial obligations personally. Like I'll invest a considerable amount for one time things easily, but year after year with constantly increasing costs? No fuckin way.
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.
I've listened to plenty of podcast episodes with CGP Grey and he wasn't secretive about the fact that he does not really enjoy work that much. He also maintained that once he quits he won't make any announcements, but rather just silently disappear.
I assume he has decided that he has enough money and retired.
He (or someone else) is still changing the old video titles and thumbnails to optimise views, though. This particular video used to be called Humans need not apply.
Hbomberguy's last video was 3 years ago for instance.
And yes it’s deeply true. I remember watching this at the time and it was one of the reasons I got into AI. (That, and watching Person of Interest).
I even kept re-linking it every year around Christmas, watching it on a yearly basis. And then …
Could you block all the trackers from loading from https://www.youtube-nocookie.com on your side?
Really having a bad time with LLMs lately.
> HackerTube was built by Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code: the data pipeline, the search and recommendations, and this site.
however I still get the same issues with sol getting more apologetic and is more likely to stop working when i tell it is wrong, instead of fixing course and trudging ahead.
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.
Good video, with a positive combination of presentation quality and a topic I enjoy? Watch it -- maybe now or later, but it gets watched. Thumbs up. Maybe even subscribe. That's what I'm there for.
Mediocre video, whether due to content or presentation? Watch parts of it, but probably not with any sense of completeness. No rating.
Bad video, with content I don't enjoy or with off-putting presentation? Stop watching. Thumbs down, and/or back out to use three-dot menu and "Not interested"
Bad ragebait scaremongering video with emotionally-distressing title? No watching at all. Three-dot menu and "Don't recommend this channel."
---
I get a lot of good stuff. Some mediocre stuff. Very little bad stuff. Almost zero ragebait.
It works well enough that an unfiltered, logged-out view of YouTube is completely and utterly appalling by comparison. That place is fucking awful without training.
(And no ads, because ads have never been a thing for me on YouTube and I experience no compulsion to change that.)
I do wonder if the relative inaccessibility of negative feedback paths is due to malfeasance/dark patterns/whatever or just stupidity, though.
If the purpose of YouTube is to show ads to people (it is), then that means maximizing viewership. In this way, it doesn't really matter what people are watching as long as they're actually watching it. More hours of streaming consumption = more hours of ads viewed, and the clock doesn't care if it's positive and enjoyable content or rage-inducing clickbait.
So with meaningful feedback, the good stuff should be able to float up to the top. That would gain viewers, which gains ad placements, which gains money. Everyone wins.
---
Unless, of course, I'm wrong about society. Maybe the majority of potential viewers really do enjoy sitting around and being angry and/or fearful, and find some kind of emotional reward by being incensed.
And clearly, some are: Switching on an AM radio in Anywhere, USA demonstrates this well (the vitriol is off the charts).
I'm just not willing to accept that this represents most people, at least not just yet.
(But if that is an accurate portrayal of the state of things, then: Ragebait means more viewers and more dollars. And thereby, there can be no hope for the platform ever recovering at all. If it pays more to get worse, then it shall simply become worse.)
From that list 731 are blocked in my rss feed. I do read and cache rest.
I sometimes check through website what new has entered the system. It is surprising to see something there new. It is so exiting to see something outside of my bubble.
YouTube algorithm has a lot to comb through, but I am too surprised how suggestion are bland, and unattractive. I am also surprised how difficult is to find new channels through YouTube search.
Maybe the curated list can be exported to load on other apps.
Is there a file / feed of the data driving this?
I think I got stuck on needing some special account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
and this one might be tricky but SponsorBlock integration also? to auto-skips sponsor segments and introsusing crowdsourced timestamps. API: https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/API_Docs
Small bug report: on mobile layout, the like/dislike button is getting a bit clipped and the watch later button seems a bit off too.
I use Opus at work since we have a nearly unlimited AI budget, but for personal projects I just use GLM 5.3 and I don't see much difference between that and Opus.
Source: copy pasted the tokens into a chatbot and told it to figure it out.
How does HN handle this? I suppose downloading videos for consuming outside YT own app works, but what's the best solution for this, especially with Apple TV as a player?
I first started by moving all my subscriptions to grayjay(where I also disabled the home page), that way I just click the subscriptions tab and there is everything there, you can even create subscription groups if needed.
Then as I had some issues with grayjay desktop(not the mobile app which works great) I then simply moved all my subscriptions to miniflux and newsrafts(which I now rarely use). I use feedflow on android and reminiflux on desktop as I don't like the miniflux frontend. So now if there is a new channel I want to follow I just add the channel rss feed to miniflux/newsraft.
So for apple tv I guess you could use a RSS app but I am not sure the user experience would be great, so using grayjay could be an option as you can stream the video to the TV's but that would require another device (phone/computer) as it's not available on ios/apple tv.
I guess a good starting point would be to simply disable everything in your youtube settings to start off (watch history, recommandations, etc...).
Anyway, loved your "GPT from scratch" video btw!
What I would really like, now that you have opened up this amazing concept, is an ability to feed my own algo this entire collection. Inject all those videos into my own saved playlist. That would be anotherr cool use of this collection. Is there a way of doing that? Like some sort of algo plant food.
I already have about 35 tabs open of YT to watch.
This is going to kill my productivity.
Still, great stuff thank you!
There was also another one with a more youtube-like UI, which I can't find anymore.
https://mealplannr.io/discover
Pro tip for YouTube proper - turn off history and only view the “subscribed” page, and search for content that you really want to see. Oh and of course turn off autoplay and limit shorts to 0 views per day.
You could also add another layer of voting on hackertube.org, so you'd get a more hackernews-focused voting signal.
edit: and have the filter persist while navigating between topics
Only 12 upvotes - I guess his name wasn’t Karpathy.
The product isn’t really that interesting, but it’s been built by a nerd celebrity so people gush for it and upvote it.
You see the same thing with blog posts all the time: some “celeb” posts an average, run of the mill take that plenty of people have had before them and only now it’s suddenly relevant and insightful, with people thanking their celeb for sharing some amazing basic idea that has been shared countless times before by other people.
Steve Yegge is another one I see a lot. These folks could fart and it’d reach the front of HN.
Love Tim Minchin <3
I dont know if its because the new state of things is that all knowledge is now secret and cant be shared.
Or if its because Opus 5.5 has turned even Karpathy into a product owner/manager so now the only interesting things are products (hackertube in this case).
Either of them makes me sad. Although its probably both.
Wake me up when true science is back.
In any case, im a big fan of Karpathy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Or https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/databases/25202804
The rules are the ai can't say the only winning move is to not play and it can't choose to kill everyone.
You can open categories and see playlists for each of them.
I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl
For years* I've wanted to replace that API with one we operate ourselves, which will simply return a JSON version of any HN URL.
I've finally started working on this! Perhaps my favorite thing about LLMs is how they make projects possible which would otherwise not have gotten started.
Edit: perhaps I should explain what I mean by that last bit.
The way I want this new API to work is (1) HN should use it internally to generate HTML pages, and (2) there can't be any regressions - nothing should change in the web version. This is a pain to get right, as it's easy subtly alter the details, and it's annoying to regression-test everything. Also, (3) with a design like this, it is easy—and critical not to—leak data that ought to remain private (e.g. people's IP addresses)
This is the sort of pain and annoyance that LLMs are amazing at taking care of. I get to focus on the parts I want to think about—the design and (yes) the code—and have a tireless assistant do the gruntwork and review. Without this I don't think I'd have gotten around to working on it.
* (edit: over a decade in fact - see collapsed reply)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36363325 (June 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543023 (Aug 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28715212 (Oct 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526 (April 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22496476 (March 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21798422 (Dec 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19231674 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219923 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19058455 (Feb 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16720397 (March 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718683 (May 2016)
I see this sentiment expressed a lot regarding a variety of ways the internet has been enshittified. Are we really sure the median person would prefer this to better content if they were presented with an alternative?
And even if they would - what are the ethics of knowingly feeding slop to the masses?
And lol ... Can you imagine how savage this is, with Rich's disgust with ORM and entangled concepts and like the audience sits there with their ActiveRecord and 10 levels deep inheritance and rails 'easy way' of doing stuff. Probably was a bigger shocker than dHH's keynote this year. lol
> It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop.
Please do the same thing on Social Media: Facebook, 'X', reddit, instagram, etc . Maybe find a 'hacker signal' that identifies quality content across those platforms and have them aggregated for the public so we don't have to spend time in the fascist network prisons.
The greatest trick - if it even can be pulled - would be setting it up in a way that it can't be sued out of existence by the angry platform overlords - if you can do this, then you are truly a genius, sir.
Free the people.
Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.
EDIT: one caveat is that i couldn't distribute the YouTube data so you'd have to create a (free) API key for that part. Luckily it's only ~1 min of hassle.
The "black box" (for me) represents the next update. How can I avoid having to download all the data again and just use the new additions?
Do you have a plan for updates?
It's very likely that your agents can just build the rest, if the backend source isn't provided.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Filters on search and topic pages: upload date, duration, type (talk, lecture, documentary, ...), and sort by upload date, view count, etc. (ty jahala, kiuiras, mixtureoftakes)
- Filters are now on the home page too, no need to search first. Picking one shows all matching videos, e.g. every lecture over an hour. (ty kkotak, macote, Aboutplants)
- Sort by "Recently recommended": orders by the latest HN recommendation instead of upload date, so a 2012 talk that someone linked last month floats to the top. Also a chip on the home page. (ty beaconflint, mixtureoftakes)
- Sort by like ratio as a quality signal: likes/views, damped so small videos can't win on a handful of likes. (ty gpugreg)
- "Play all on YouTube": turns the videos on a page (up to 50) into a temporary YouTube playlist, so it works in the YouTube app on phones and TVs. A start toward real HackerTube playlists. (ty twalichiewicz, waschl, victor9000)
- Removed the YouTube-looking logo. (ty doginasuit)
- HackerTube Longs: every video over an hour, right where YouTube puts Shorts. (ty gosen)
- Bonus: "Hidden gems" filter (loved on HN, under 100k views on YouTube), and "Evergreen only" to hide news-of-the-week videos.
> Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.
Don't even use GitHub then as that is also closed source as well as this.