I think there is a massive opportunity for this kind of feed disaggregation. Used to be the recommender and indexing of content was hard, now I believe we can likely build our own according to our own preferences.
Haiku/Sonnet (or even Jev) can do a lot of the filtering work to rank and extend an RSS feed list.
I think this gives us an opportunity to fully cut the cord from eyeball merchants who want us to maximally engage and therefore polarize their content.
The big remaining hook will be the social graph; I am interested to see how far the EU push for mandatory interoperability will go. Another angle I’d support would be mandatory pluggable standards for your own ranking algorithm, but it captures less of the win than full disaggregation.
It seems a bit like tragedy of the commons. If we all move towards consuming content this way, who is posting what and where? How is it discovered?
One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.
Why would those content stop getting made? A lot of hardcore tech YouTubers are university lecturers. Chinese fried rice stalls on TikTok makes living in selling the rice. Japanese anime keeps getting made and aired.
I think there might be a lesson learned from the era of attention economy and also a potential explanation as to what advertiser friendliness was about - the attention economy did not graduate from being a surplus market. Advertisers had no incentives to subsidize the waste byproducts of fried rice stall, but the system was too deeply molded for them. The amount of standalone contents that are native to social media are tiny.
Anyway, I just don't think the contents that are made because of a social feed are the ones that weren't worth much even on social media.
You assume that if digital communication is lost, people wouldn’t communicate at all? I highly doubt that seeing as our natural instinct is to search for human connection.
Would you please provide explanations and sources for this claim?
I am not sure I understand it correctly. With corporate affiliation, do you mean that the speakers are professionals working on the topic. For example, like the speakers at cppcon are professionals working with C++ and the talk helps promoting their company as an employer, or self-promoting C++ coaches?
Because that would be very different from the typical social media influencer.
It was built by nerds but optimized on the data of everyone, so it ended up appealing mostly to the average person.
Maybe that's also the solution to a question I've had for years. The ads I see on diverse social platforms are terrible, but if they are matched with algorithms that try to fit me in as an average person, then it makes sense that, as a huge nerd, they miss the mark.
It's still far cheaper, faster, and less wasteful to wash by hand. It's just that the technique required to achieve that is... controversial? It's definitely always so misrepresented you'd swear it's the "before" part of a 90s informercial shot in black and white with a frustrated idiot failing at a simple task before throwing their hands up and pleading that "there has to be a better way".
Dishwashers simply aren't used in places with water restrictions. Broke people don't have a budget for dishwashing detergent because it's less general purpose than dish soap. There are likely people who started using their dishwasher more or even suddenly bought one based on those rants. It jiggled the handle on consumer trends that otherwise rarely change, so I consider that "influence".
If he stuck to just explaining how they work instead of attacking people's way of living, it would have flown under the radar.
> They're bundled in with appliance sets sold to first time home buyers and preinstalled in every apartment.
Do you object to stoves and refrigerators in the same way?
> The rest of the world doesn't have them.
This is not at all true. Source: my non-American household, which has had one for decades. (Also, web search.)
> even TC himself admitted that the dishwasher is sort of a solution in search of a problem
I don't recall him saying anything of the sort. I don't suppose you could provide a timestamp?
> Calling you all "naive" is really an understatement once the echo chamber begins reverberating. Jeez! Yes, you're part of it. I'm simply pointing it out. Yes, "citation needed" is a pseudointellectual crutch. No, you don't have to trust an influencer just because everyone else does.
It's not a matter of trust. TC presents a complete, reasoned, independently verifiable argument; and it turns out that his results replicate quite well. As per the skeptics.SE link you brushed off, and as per the personal experience of myself and many others.
At any rate, you are using inappropriate rhetoric and then disingenously trying to brush it off as "simply pointing out" claims that don't actually stand up to scrutiny.
@tomhow, who you're replying to, is a HN mod - as such he rarely flags comments - flagging is a HN user action (for users with accounts of sufficient age and standing).
The mods are drawn to [flagged] comments to double check / inspect whether such a thing was warrented, if no one has made a comment as to why something was flagged they might have a guess, add that as a comment - or even reverse the flag.
If I had to guess, the comment you replied to was not flagged as it was a top level comment to be read with a generic non specific "you", however your comment was likely flagged as it appeared to some to have a judgemental tone toward another user - the "you" that you used was a specific non generic you with the comment parent as target.
FWiW I'm a rubber necking drive by user - I didn't flag your comment.
That makes sense. I am aware that what I'm saying would agitate a certain cohort of commenters who are used to the echo chambers of other communities. They would abuse the flag feature, and the mods on HN aren't free of bias either.
EDIT: Upon some more reflection, I can go back to my old format of posing my skepticism as questions instead of making statements. I guess the brainrot is getting to me.
I often wonder if AI generated programming is ethically positive, whereas AI generated media is problematic.
I don't have the answer yet, but it is fairly clear that the lowered barrier to making software is helping to untangle us from software monopolies, as people keep spinning up alternatives super quickly!
It's not problematic to 99% of the population that's not part of a very vocal minority on Twitter and Bluesky. Everyone else is enjoying AI art and making funny family pictures and memes together.
FWIW, neither I nor most of the people I interact with are on Twitter or Bluesky. Pretty much all of us dislike AI generated art and go out of our way to avoid it.
"making funny family pictures and memes together" isn't worth the assorted negative externalities of AI to most if not all of us.
It also wore out really quickly. I no longer make memes with AI for my friends and family because it’s just not funny anymore. It really was only fun the first one or two times.
I think there has always been a spectrum between utility and art, with most things falling obviously into one camp or the other. Assuming all else being equal (climate impact, etc), the ability to provide a utility for cheaper is nearly always good.
99.99% of software is a utility. It being cheaper to produce is a net win for society. The LLM-solution isn't an "all else being equal" scenario, there are other obvious downsides. But the part where an in-demand utility got cheaper is very good.
Exactly - e.g. I've drawn from 15 years of making music manually, and then used GenAI to implement deterministic music generation tools that I've designed.
Tbh, I am not sure if I will continue, because I feel that it is the feeling of process that inspires people, and this lacks some of that..
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.
disable view history tracking in youtube and subscribe to a curated set of channels with great content for him. it's such an improvement, best life hack. even for people who're not 87.
It doesn’t clone the actual front end code of YouTube, and it doesn’t even download the videos and rehost them on his own server either. All of the videos are normal embeds from YouTube.
Take downs are about taking down good ideas. This could become something to drive away core traffic. I could imagine multiple clones layers on different themes like Music, Economy etc...And the similarity is enough with Tube name on it...
This sounds like my 81 year old father in law. He's in a AI loop with what YouTube recommends him. It mostly AI slop channels that are less than a few months old.
Lots of slop WW2 videos.
I've tried to show him how to spot them. I go through and block this garbage, but somehow it still gets fed to him.
The YouTube app is such a terrible app. Everyday they make changes that seem to make it work. I've been a premium user for years and hate using it. Offline doesn't always sync properly and I can't access my content on the plane. I wish we could build our own YouTube client. I'm not sure they allow this. Frustrating, as there's so much potential.
I could list so many problems with YouTube app (on android for me).
- Multiple times a day I accidentally click another video and try to go back to previous video and lose the position (they used to have a confirmation dialog to play another video when you already have something playing, got rid of it for some reason.
- I used to be able to Chromecast to TV with a casting playlist, where I'd easily add and remove videos, change order. I was able to disconnect from TV and continue watching, later connect to TV again. They completely messed it up. Now it's even worse they created multiple "play on device" and it's so awkward to add videos to queue.
- when I play a video, why doesn't it continue downloading the entire video so I watch it offline. I need to specifically download and it doesn't save the position properly.
- playing videos offline doesn't always remembers position and doesn't keep track of played.
- previews reset the watched position of videos and litters watched history with videos you didn't actually watch.
- notifications are useless, it doesn't notify me of videos I specifically subscribed to and want notifications for.
Sorry for the rant. It just so happens YouTube is where I consume most of my content.
Youtube desperately needs a holistic redesign of history and watch position. Watch position needs to be instantly synchronized down to the frame across devices, and it needs to be able to save more than one watch position per video for you to manually select in ambiguous cases (like if you watched offline and online on different devices). It should also show the difference between a video you stopped after one second and a video you watched completely but rewound to the beginning. The seek bar should show which parts you've watched regardless of your current watch position.
The "Watch Later" feature also needs a lot of love. The button for it constantly moves around and works in different ways.
They do occasionally fix things! One thing they fixed recently is that advancing to the next video in a playlist would always start from the beginning, irreversibly clobbering your watch position for that video. Now it seems to (most of the time) start from your watch position.
Yeah, like on web the default-on "Ambient Mode" feature has horrific banding artifacts, which could be completely fixed by a bit of dithering. I doubt it will ever be fixed. Completely pointless feature anyway that should never have been enabled by default. How many gigawatt-hours have been wasted rendering it?
Not exactly what you talked about but comment notifications are useless. There's no way to have only x-replied-to-you-in-thread. You either get notified about everything, ever - or you get no notifications
Product designers: fuck off. You are doing an absolutely shit job
I hear ya. I canceled spotify because of it, because all i wanted was to hear my stuff i consciously subscribed to and only then, when i am in the mood, i want to explore. But no, ya at the hand of what they think is best. And now Youtube does the same. The entire industry is ripe to be disrupted. Wishful thinking. I hate it all. Haha.
Though, from a technical point of view it is top. Always working. Always crisp.
The YouTube app gets the font color and background color confused when my phone's operating system switches from daytime to nighttime, and ends up with almost white text on a white background sometimes and I have to kill the app. It's annoying but I think source available is going to be the future. The only question is how do you make a product with that?
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.
They are very close, but I believe "want" implies a conscious desire, I want to go to the ball game. I don't want to rubber neck as I pass an accident, but I will.
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...
This makes me think that perhaps we should like have a social feed. If I, for exmaple, say that one of my friends I'd follow them. Then whatever they synchronize as a recommendation, I'd get in my feed.
So that's not a like they give but a separate "publish this into my recommendations for my friends" feature. Which would then show up in my feed and everyone that subscribes to my friend.
A pubsub system basically. Users publish, friends of said users (if they want to) subscribe, and then that's how they get content.
FB basically tried this (it was basically what the "Like" widget on websites was for). It was a decent-ish heuristic for its time, but it ran into the fundamental issue that the people you consider "friends", the people you want to see life updates from, and the people who like the same kind of content you do, are groups with some overlap, but they are not the same people.
You probably want to see the pictures of your cousin's new kid, but you don't care for her flat Earth content or crocheting videos.
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.
My prompts are getting shorter and dumber because the model "gets" what I'm doing even with fewer words. It's almost to the point where if you give it too much, you're constraining the model with too many requirements, when the thing it would have done otherwise was better/smarter. So I feel like the prompting meta is moving more towards fewer bits administered just right. I go back and forth on whether I should make a video on it because on the one hand people have these questions but on the other my best practices look so dumb it's almost embarassing.
Is this a property that is trained in RL or from scaling pre-training?
Would you say this is an intelligence property or a preference property, as in, can different, equally smart models, "get us" differently when we talk to it?
I'm asking because I've thought about this a lot and it seems to me that the experience of the model "getting" it when we prompt it with increasingly vague prompts is just a glorified auto-complete experience, where what is being inferred by the model is just what it had been trained to infer, not really that it understands our situation.
Thoughts on this? Would really love feedback / any corrections on this thinking! Thanks man.
don't think of your video as the "best way to do it", we'd love a video of how you specifically go through these things rather than a hyper-optimized way to go about it. it may be true that the next guy in here has a much more advanced process, but it surely doesn't hurt seeing someone with a 'bit of history' on the matter jump-n-run their way through small projects like this. I believe it would bring some comfort to those who feel like they're a thousand years behind already.
prompting is a moving target but honestly it would be great to see how you do it to just to get a sense for the current state. I suspect there's a lot of people in my shoes who would love to learn how the experts do it
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.
That would be great. And then, if for any reason YouTube decides to take down this site or prevent embedding in hackertube.org, we would have a backup.
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.
Good stuff, I have similar thoughts about the recommendation algo and planned to build something like HT but never got around to it!
My favourite thing about early YouTube was the “Most Viewed” with “Last Hour”, “Today”, “Yesterday”, etc. Obviously this is not the most up to date catalog of videos but it would be cool to get a similar view count over date range filter.
Even with a fresh dump, it would lag behind YouTube, since a video only gets in once someone links it on HN.
I took all the channels HN keeps recommending (3+ videos in Karpathy's data) and made a page with their fresh uploads as they come in: https://hn.youtldr.com
(I make YouTLDR, which writes the one-line answer under each video.)
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...
> 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.
+1 for this comment so others can view it (as I faced the same issue and I tinkered around to get to the same discovery independently as well and was about to comment the same)
I would consider including the text box content that is shown below the video on Youtube. Many videos will say things like "I included the link below..." so having that on say https://hackertube.org/watch/PbmJkMhmrVI would be nice. I can imagine there are issues to consider...
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.
I, too, noticed the "A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For a Lot of Y-Intercept" video (uploaded 9 months ago) by John Ousterhout mentioned in the recent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50269776 not getting picked up either.
I did something similar, but with current youtube search results and not really stress processing on HN data. My technique was simply saving my search terms and topics, and then putting that under a crop and continually updating the results. Super simple, but resulted in such a better experience for YouTube videos for me.
I call it "re-algorithming" your data. Basically you're not happy with the algorithm of a product, then you use it's data and introduce your own.
It also seems like folks are tired of the youtube algorithm and want something different instead? I'm willing to bet that many sites and apps have this opportunity in them.
I found this to be unusually good. I got caught in a rabbit hole about interpretation of the work of Bach. I would have never seen this stuff in the YT interface.
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 think many experiencing the same thing but we're way too small drop of a drop in the bucket that it doesn't even resolve in all of their measurements and A/B tests. The vast majority of the "gradient signal" is from normies and their patterns, desires and tastes are different. Basically I think we see a massive deterioration of quality because we are a rounding error.
I can’t reject this line of thought strongly enough.
The vast majority of signal is from a plurality of opinions, and the outcome is an average of those inputs, usually tweaked a bit to make them more addictive.
Your thought that “the algorithm doesn’t serve me personally because I have exceptional taste” is not a unique observation. Everyone who consumes these systems has the same thoughts. Everyone is a rounding error, whether you’re in a knitting community, or you’re a worlds leading expert in deep learning.
Only, some people consume what is objectively trash, and others recognize what is objectively of value. The Paretian distribution is real and observable.
I don’t see that it’s necessarily two different groups. People in general consume trash, including the author of the website. The same people can recognise what is and isn’t of value.
It’s not two distinct people - or at least, I’ve seen no evidence that it’s two sets. The venn diagram is a single big fat circle, and we’re all in it.
> Everyone who consumes these systems has the same thoughts.
Do they?
From what I can tell most people using these apps seem pretty fine with having their algorithm determine everything they consume. You must remember, a majority of US teenagers went out of their way to download TikTok, before short-form content was forced into the existing platforms.
I think we can boil this down to a single question: If tomorrow, YouTube offered a toggle to all users to completely remove shorts from every feed in the app, what would most people do?
I think many here on HN would immediately choose to disable shorts. But what about the majority? Would they disable?
I think the answer is so obviously no. Despite all the disdain and regard for short form content as slop by the mainstream themselves.
I think your viewpoint is the correct default opinion to have. It prevents belittling thy neighbor & delusions of grandeur. But at a certain point you have to drop the optimism. These platforms do work for the masses. Unfortunately.
I have the same experience, and I don't think it's just us.
I suspect what's going on is we're experiencing the long-term effects of AI recommendation algorithms getting plugged into everything. I'm not anti-AI. I think neural nets are incredibly powerful tools and I really like using them as an aide for my coding work. But they clearly do only a first or second level of pattern matching(asterisk), and I think that has a fundamental impact on their overall usefulness and desirability.
I can't explain this any better than Melanie Mitchell in her "AI for Thinking Humans," so I'd generally recommend that book to really understand the issues. But one way of thinking about it is that the AI keys in on patterns that are indeed there in its training data, but very often don't pick up on the same patterns as a human or treat patterns "not in the same way" as a person would. So you get the uncanny valley effect where the recommendations share some features of things you like and find interesting, but often miss the "soul" of the thing.
A good example of this is I recently watched the movie "X-Men" (2000). I then got a bunch of superhero movie recommendations. On the surface, this makes total sense. I watched a superhero movie, I get more superhero movies. But the reason I like that movie is it portrays racism/nationalism in a way that isn't totally stereotyped while still being PG-rated and easy to watch, without the seriousness of something like "American History X" (it was also a Patrick Stewart tribute). It's very unlikely that an AI can make that level of inference. I actually would enjoy watching more movies like that (as opposed to your point about wanting variety and something more exploratory), but what are the odds it's going to recommend some vague theme like that instead of "more superheroes"?
I also agree with your point that the underlying assumption we all want "more of the same" is a big thing that makes the modern internet feel more narrow. So you put those 2 together and it feels like we're being put into a narrow Skinner box that approximates aspects of things we like, but is really more of a confined environment designed to extract our time and attention while only fulfilling the shallowest, barest minimum of our wants and desires.
Indeed, recommendation algorithms have some positive benefits and a lot of downsides also. As a deep learning practitioner I worked on recommendation systems for two companies, but as a human being I have my own way of dealing with them: I like to once or twice a month dedicate some time to finding good content to consume: my wife likes streaming media so we have all the subscriptions, so I look around for about three movies that look good and download them so when I want to watch something I choose from my downloads. I spend time on Kobo (eBooks) and Libre.fm (audio books) to make sure I have purchased good reads that are all queued up for my enjoyment.
Finally, Apple has a great tool called ScreenTime that I can set limits on HN, YouTube, etc. I set a 15 minutes a day limit for each, but I can always add 15 minute increments if I find a good rabbit hole to explore.
I think this is actually a pretty valid response to what I posted (it's the reason I included the asterisk in the bit about levels of pattern matching), but I was sort of intentionally focusing on the manifestation of AI algorithms specifically as they affect the experience of browsing the modern web. And while I think your point gets us closer to the truth about the general capability of these systems, I'd still recommend Melanie Mitchell's book to appreciate some of the subtle limitations of even SOTA models.
I just want to be the one in control of that feed that is curated towards myself. An AI that is local and learns about my likes and dislikes and does not share that info with third parties for their benefit. There is a vast sea of content and a small fraction of it is of interests to me and/or might be helpful to me even if I am not consciously seeking it at any given moment. I should be able to look at its rules, see how it evolves and tinker / reason with it the way I would with a personal assistant or life coach. And I would like to use that to filter out content that is a waste of brain cycles. And to find people, ideas, experiences that I might click with based on its global knowledge of the mindscape.
This is also what we lost in the field of music, with the switch from radio to streaming.
With radio, you used to have to sometimes sit through music you didn’t like so much, with the upside that you often discovered things you didn’t know you liked.
Youtube feeds work the other way around it appears. Content seeks you. Things promoters think you may click on haunt you. There are videos I see are there in the feed and I don't click on because I am not interested and they linger there, trying to dupe me to click on. Absolutely disgusting.
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.
In exactly one prompt to my Hermes agent, it developed and deployed a HackerTube Android TV app to my NVIDIA Shields. Incredible time to be alive.
edit: a pet peeve of mine is when people overstate agency capability like it’s some out of the box magic, and I’m guilty of of it here. So I should disclose that I’ve previously setup Hermes with ADB access and accessibility for remote control, and various skills for my home lan. It also had some memories or skills from sessions on managing these shield devices. other than that tho, it figured the rest out.
I have some kind of similar things using PocketTube (browser extension) to try to curate certain types of feeds on Youtube. These things are always limited because we can't query the actual platforms. I would kill for platforms like Youtube, X, Spotify to actually give us API access to their entire catalogs so we can define custom ways to surface/recommend content.
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."
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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.
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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 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've got years of history and it does the exact same thing for me. I watched one news video about the pope and now half of my feed is Catholic news channels.
I buy a mattress on Amazon and I get recommendations for... ten other mattresses? Like what's the logic here, I have an entire garage where I just keep stacking them up to the ceiling? Just show me something else. Is there a human being out there whose like "I bought a French press last week, what could I need this week, five more French Presses?"
I do not understand how these dystopian surveillance companies with their infinite data points are so bad even at this
I have frequently commented here and there in the past that, with the proliferation of AI generated content on the Internet, curated, authentic human generated contents and recommendations like this will become increasingly more valuable. Definitely feels like a step in that direction.
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.
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)?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
YouTube mobile app has a "your custom feed" where you supply English language prompts and get a relevant custom feed. My go-to has been "new and unseen science & technology videos predominantly from people I follow but occasionally interspersed with others' you think I might like in a similar vein"
Genuinely curious, is this sarcasm? I don't use any YouTube mobile app, but doesn't "new and unseen [...] videos predominantly from people I follow but occasionally interspersed with others' you think I might like in a similar vein" just sound analogous to "recommend me videos I'd like to see".
It is also available in the PWA. Yes, it's a real feature with a Gemini-powered prompt. Yes, GP describes a prompt that approximates the actual algorithm.
I just wrote "nothing but Sesame Street parodies" and the feed does what it says on the tin.
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.
But we didn't lose it - it's right here, and if this one goes down you can make your own with 2 hours of an Opus 5.5 subscription. Honestly, I whipped up something similar to this the other day for Arxiv papers.
> It makes me yearn for what we lost. I remember when the Internet was all like this page, and it was bloody wonderful.
I remember a very different old internet, where high quality content like these videos was rare, ads were more invasive on a level we have forgotten (remember pop-ups? Pop-under? Having to download and install Real Player and other garbage with ads just to watch anything? Spam overrunning Use et?), and the internet was full of brainrot and crank content from the start.
> I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free,
We’re discussing this under a list of freely hosted videos.
The blog it’s talking about is hosted on Bearblog, a free ad-free blogging platform.
The software project was built by Opus so quickly that a $20 subscription could have built the whole thing.
Everything is close to free right now. Pay a little bit for YouTube premium and you can watch without ads too.
I think you’re nostalgic for an internet that didn’t exist, while not seeing the amazingness of the world we’re living in.
The same Firefox that, on android at least, asks you if you want to open the native YouTube app (or be asked again next time) for every link to YouTube or every time you type youtube.com in the url bar? But that's even more annoying than the ads!
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.
My plan was to try to find the "answer" for videos in comments. Never really got around doing it, but LLMs make the possibilities more interesting and easier.
Edit: this is also a good opportunity to ship something like this: https://hn.youtldr.com, like Karpathy's HackerTube, but with the new videos from "HN-vetted" channels.
Kind of, yes. DeArrow is crowdsourced, and I love that people can submit a better title and pick a real frame from the video. I wanted one step more: the actual answer to the clickbait, right on the thumbnail, without waiting for someone to submit it, since it comes from the transcript. Only works for videos already in YouTLDR's cache for now.
I'm a big fan of SponsorBlock for YouTube too, from the same dev.
Shameless plug: SuperFocus hides the distracting elements of YouTube (and other sites like Reddit). Recently enhanced with some suggestions from Opus, I have personally found it to be quite effective.
Refreshing indeed. If hackertube became a hit - wouldn't it create and make its own weird world of deep distrust etc. Just free of ads and rage bait -- more like intellectual baiting?
It’s true, we are just optimizing for engagement, which is a first-order (and our best current) approximation of happiness. I’m hopeful that as the attention economy evolves, we will evolve objective metrics that more accurately reflect the long-term health and happiness of users.
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 (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.
> 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.
Funny thing is: I can subscribe to Netflix for one month a year, and watch everything that I want to watch within a week or two ... which is to say there isn't much there that interests me. With YouTube, I can typically find an hour or two of content to watch per week.
I'm not claiming that YouTube is better. It's simply a case of different people having different interests. While YouTube is almost certainly a poor option for higher budget productions, it seems to work out for lower budget productions where the producers are willing to seek out their own revenue streams.
It includes YouTube Music and it removes ads. Apparently it also marks where sponsorships end in videos (though I'm not sure that is Premium only). Seems like a great deal to me.
yt by default is basically free with ads so the public has viewed it as “that” kind of product, mass content of vastly dif quality level.
Netflix was pay to get high quality well known product along with new high quality content.
For well over a decade they were totally different. You cannot just flip a flag and change that. It isnt people refusing to pay, it is because yt is not netflix and never will be for as long as yt is in the name.
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.
The vast majority of all yt content makers do NOT pay the bills with ad rev but sponsors.
These platforms are sucking every penny they can from everyone at every step because number must go up. That is what they are suppose to do being public.
A private company like steam with a sub pay model where creators still can do sponsorship videos throwing out the attention algos would be a better product and still be plenty profitable.
Not all companies should be public and often the best are not.
Businesses will seek out more than one revenue source for the same product. For example: newspapers and magazines had advertising, even though the customer paid for the product. Cable television had advertising, even though people paid for cable (and cable companies paid for the channels).
It isn't going to stop data collection either. If anything, it will improve the quality of the data collected.
Now this project gives me some ideas of things to implement:
- pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video
- allow curated subscriptions, i.e. I subscribe to some curated list made by someone (in this case it could be the database of videos Karpathy has gathered from HN, but there could be others)
At some point I was almost implementing DeArrow support, but using it for a while I don't think it is too great, often the alternative titles people give are unreliable, and honestly I don't know how they exist without being spammed or trolled to death. I do have SponsorBlock support though (I feel like SponsorBlock would work better if it allowed high-quality AI bots to submit blocks though).
I really like the interface, install and search are smooth. Really appreciate SponsorBlock being built in.
But I'm rarely only watching youtube
Without a way to pop the video out of the interface I'm stuck with either a small video inside a large pane somewhere on screen, listening to it in the background, or just having it fullscreen.
Like...piping yt-dlp straight to mpv I get just the mpv box (or even mpv 'link') and I can have it hover over other things I'm doing, you know?
Thank you for sharing! I've been looking for interfaces that let me access all the sites I regularly use but without the algorithm. This seems to be exactly what I'm looking for!
Can I search with your app for ONLY the latest uploaded videos and filter for content length?
Will it display whatever bullshit recommendations YouTube feeds?
Really looking for an option to only have "current stuff" - YT constantly recommends me stuff from 3 years ago which I already watched, even with my highly curated account.
Global search is provided by YouTube, so I can't guarantee anything.
I could add some local filters if necessary, but doesn't YouTube already provide its own filters based on when the video was published? Cathode exposes these.
YT search sucks, and this by intention to keep the people scrolling. The sorting & co is all completely broken, YT recommends continuously stuff from years ago etc.
I agree with you, but I don't have the full collection of YouTube videos to provide an independent search engine on top of it.
I will add better local filters though, so we can tame YouTube's search results and suggestions better to our needs. I haven't paid too much attention to that part yet because after years of YouTube experience I've fallen into a mode in which I mostly watch stuff from a set of fixed channels and only use search to look for videos I already know exactly, never to find new stuff.
Interesting. I consciously, actively smack YT with a rolled-up newspaper in the form of 'never recommend this channel' specifically to make it only recommend me stuff that I've already watched, and not try to pipeline me in some algorithmic direction such has happened at some periods. I don't think I have to draw people a picture here.
I've never imagined actually wanting an algorithm that would find things I'd actually like, having been burned so badly by 'algorithm that finds things it wants to get me to like'. Are you sure you want an algorithm to do that?
Thats what I do as well for channels I completely dislike.
The thing is: Im subscribed to a lot of channels (like 80-90) and YT constantly recommends me stuff I have already seen and/or is years old.
Its exactly about these cases.
Sorry but you are doing it wrong. If you used the platform resourcefully (the hacker's way), "you querying it" instead of some "reverse", it would give you the expected decent experience. If you rely on the platform for the quality of your experience, it cannot be a mystery that monstrosity is what you will get. If you used instead the ways around it...
E.g. I get the news about videos through RSS on selected channels, I have my own systems to browse them, and in general the search on YT works already fairly well (without any login).
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!
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I follow, what is it exactly that your bots can't do? This is a relatively simple project implementation wise, since it only has to serve static content. LLMs are also OK at manually sifting through text passages to classify them semantically, if you ask them to.
> Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them, ran Sonnet over them in a Workflow (Claude Code feature), got rid of spam, and narrowed everything down to 40K comments recommending a YouTube video.
This part. And Andrej even mentioned he uses medium! I wonder what went into the prompt that prompted the agent to dig deep. Mine seems to stop at very mediocre results fairly consistently and then I just reprompt it a couple of times and it does some back and forth contradicting itself.
I have projects and I made real apps using only LLMs, but it feels tedious. Definitely not a 2 hour thing. And definitely not magical and smooth sadly :(
Well, not sure what I can add here, because this is exactly the type of semantic classification that I expect LLMs to do well, and can't really say why your agents failed to do it.
I've done similar work simply by giving a model a database of text, and asking it to do a unit of work for every passage. "Checking for spam" would be the model checking surrounding messages and user's history, likely an opinionated verdict, but would work. Difficulty comes in when those units of work become complex or have to work in tandem, which isn't the case here.
> 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.
> 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.
No, not that. Increasingly, the Claude Desktop app (and desktop harnesses) seems to be the favored environment over terminal, VS Code, and the like.
It’s quite a feat, what Karpathy built. I know, I know, Claude did it but Karpathy envisioned and guided it. And he did it declaratively, not imperatively.
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.
YouTube has two choices - it can maintain its' iron grip over the UI and the algorithm, and with that alienate content creators and viewers, who no longer are able to remain connected with each other effectively via YouTube. In which case people will leave and create new options.
Or YouTube can completely open up and encourage this sort of custom UI design and allowing people to explore their own interests and feed more easily, and stop shoving stuff down our throats.
HackerTube proves it - it is instantly more relevant to me than YouTube is.
All that is needed is videos to not come from YouTube - and that is happening too - so it may already be too late for YouTube to loosen its iron grip, stop feeding us crap and give us back our control over our entertainment experience, and make content creators happy again.
YouTube won't disappear but real competition is coming for it. All because YouTube acted in its own interests instead of in the interests of the creators and the viewers.
I'd love for an alternative to youtube. And there are some... it's not really my area but I've at least heard of vimeo for example.
The problem is hosting videos is not cheap. Certainly not free. Storage and bandwidth are the easier costs to deal with. Policing to prevent devolution into the utterly deplorable is where things start to get costly and challenging. People get PTSD from having the job of scrubbing content on places like youtube and facebook.
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.
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.
Could someone seed a cold started profile with these videos (search plus like) and see what glorious things the recommender system continues to point to?
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.
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.
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.
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 think most people could consider the cost as being whatever percentage of the subscription quota was used multiplied by the cost of the subscription.
I don't understand this framing. Only technically complex posts need to be upvoted high? This is an awesome product idea of customised youtube videos based on high quality signal. Irrespective of our feelings, in Agentic era, most technical complexity can be outsourced to agents, what moves the needle is high quality products from initialisation to execution.
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.
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 ◡.
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.
I also found turning off history and heavily pruning subcribed channels was the only way to fix youtube sloppification; particularly avoiding shorts being heavily forced by google
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.
Understandable: creators often update their video metadata (title, description etc.) or make public videos back to private or unlisted, and it is in their own right to do this.
Third parties that copy data will cache stale versions even when the creator doesn't want to share them anymore. Seems fair that YouTube doesn't condone this.
Would be great to see this turned into a TikTok style feed for all the videos on the site. Imagine swiping through 30 to 60 second clips to quickly discover interesting, RELEVANT content.
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.
Absolutely love this! but just one thing new information is always coming and old information is becoming obsolete so fast nowadays
A way for community to submit good videos which get reviewed by AI on some qualifying standards and be published here, would be an amazing feature to have
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!
Thank you for making this. I would like to make one simple probably obvious observation. You can watch this long time and not feel shitty about people or with conflicting thoughts racing in your subconscious the way you do with youtube.
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 account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
I thought they meant turning that page into a YouTube-like view (being able to filter by channel would also be very cool, though), I was going to do something similar in my own HN extension, but after trying an initial lazy embedding approach [1], asking for declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess to be able to bypass HN's Content-Security-Policy feels icky.
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.
Nice! I found an interesting video on your site in less than a minute. Good job.
I'd be curious to hear more of the creation process. Have you been steering the agent somehow? Or was it completely on autopilot mode? Also, what was the overall cost?
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
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.
What makes this so good is not the curation it’s the age in which confirms our current views after years of bad information. The truth is setting us free and this confirms much
This is nice, like something I would actually use as an alternative to YouTube when I want more tech/educational content. Only pet peeve is the videos don't have volume sliders embedded like on YouTube. But overall really good!
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d like to add one more thing, 3Blue1Brown has created a well-organized archive of YouTube channels launched during all the 3Blue1Brown Math Exposition Contests from 2021 to 2026. There are a lot of great YouTube channels worth checking out!
YouTube is at high risk at the moment, because both sides of the marketplace hate it. The best creators are just as frustrated as users like Karpathy by the current state of things. I predict a subscription-based, properly moderated alternative may gain critical mass soon.
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 recently built my own feed. On an Android phone, you can have an AI agent SSH in and make changes to it if you're rooted. I replaced the feed on my home screen with links my AI thinks I'd find interesting - it's pretty good!
I sympathize with the general enthusiasm for this, but idk… my YouTube feed isn’t trash. I don’t get any slop recommendations. It’s actually the one platform that still seems to get so much right. The push for shorts is the worst aspect/change over the last few years for sure, that much I will concede, but I’m pretty happy with the recommendations I get. I’ve been on the platform for over a decade though and spend equal parts on subscriptions as I do on the recommended feed.
One thing worth exploring would be how the recommendations compare to YouTube's algorithm. Hacker News upvotes and discussion history provide a different signal for what people find interesting, but I wonder how well that translates into video recommendations.
I’ve had the UnTrap for YouTube extension installed for a while to remove all the shorts, feeds and algorithmic content and my YouTube consumption has gone down by like 90%. Feels so much better not consuming all that mental junk
This is awesome. But you won't believe what occurred after testing this: I went to the supermarket, bought new tech called a "tin can". I opened it, and it contained a ready made meal! What a time to be alive!
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
Ah, I like this idea. I also had a different thought of accessing YouTube content in the sense I wanted to know all the tech live streams happening today on a particular topic.
This is a nick interest site, a video version of harkernews. I am surprised to see videos from many years ago which surely never be seen in YouTube due to too many contents rendered by algorithms
My cynical persona: Now sit and wait for the advertisers to start infesting HN with recommended videos :(
My pragmatic persona: Sounds like there may be some law related issues such as
- "Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI" -> probably violating copyright. I can't help but remember that episode from Silicon Valley, where Dinesh dumped the company to Galvin to get rid of the COPA violation
- "I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata" -> probably in violation of some ToS already
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.
This is a great concept, but I want to see more recent videos. Not videos uploaded 6-9 months ago. It would be great to be able to filter for videos uploaded in the last month.
> I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me.
Why does this happen to some people and not others?
Most of my YT recs are videos from Technology Connections, CCC, 3Blue1Brown, Tech Potato, Welch Labs, Developer Voices, Ringway Manchester, some LegalEagle and UnderSparked (which I watch as mindless entertainment during household chores), and a fair bit of random lectures from top US universities and tech-related conferences. In other words, mostly videos from channels I have already watched and am very likely to watch more videos from.
Sure, there's a fair bit of slop; mostly things like "the unbelievable technology that powers the entire internet" or something where they're just describing asymmetric crypto in layman's terms, and there are periods where it gets more or less prevalent, but the feed is nowhere near unusable on most days.
My X feed is pretty much the same thing; very little spam, not that much politics, and when it does appear, it's not MAGA, plenty of academics and smart software engineers talking tech and AI. TikTok and Reddit are more geared towards mindless entertainment, but I do use these pretty differently, so that actually makes some sense.
With that said, I never disable personalization, try to stay logged in, share my data with companies freely, and accept the vast majority of permissions / consent prompts, which probably makes me unusual among the HN crowd, so that could be the reason why my experience is so different.
Hey Andrej, thanks for the effort. It's highly appreciated!
In your video regarding your own use of LLMs[1] you mention
https://arena.ai/leaderboard and https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard to
keep track of the status quo. That video is from February 2025 and
https://artificialanalysis.ai has gained quite a lot of popularity but
also earned criticism repeatedly due to updating the benchmarks right
before a new model release.
Would you still recommend the arena and scale leaderboards?
And if you don't mind, what's your opinion wrt artificialanalysis?
No i don't recommend those anymore. Currently I recommend Epoch's ECI. AA was kind of bad but recent changes are trending a little bit better. I think benchmarks are in a really bad state right now otherwise, I basically don't trust them, good related reading https://epoch.ai/data/benchmark-reviews-documentation/includ...
> 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 stopp doing these things, too. I use browser-harness to do all of these things. Always trying to keep myself out-ouf-the-loop.
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 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.
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.
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 feel pessimistic that this will lead to the 50% frame just happening to be a frame with a guy making the face, plus an arrow and a few big detail words. It's what the algorithm rewards, why is it so though.
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 don’t live alone, but I mostly watch YouTube on the TV. As I don’t eat at my desk (where I spend a lot of time), I usually go on youtube and try to find a nice recommendation or a new video from my interests. But my ipad and my ereader are always near in case I don’t find anything interesting (often these days). I’ve plenty of things in flight to read and HN is always a backup option.
I'm glad something like this now exists, I am tired of seeing the same "braindead" videos on YouTube that solely exist for views and likes. Even when I deliberately tell the algorithm, "I dislike this", it is stubborn and persists with these recommendations.
"I think this gives us an opportunity to fully cut the cord from eyeball merchants who want us to maximally engage and therefore polarize their content."
"YouTube's own metadata (descriptions, view counts, durations, publish dates) can't be redistributed under YouTube's API terms. Every record has the video id, so you can fetch it with a free YouTube Data API key in about 130 requests. DATA.md has step-by-step instructions for you (5 minutes in Google Cloud) and a ready-to-run script for your agent."
The early internet (content) was often comprised of textfiles containing URLs and descriptions (metadata) about what could be found at those locations
Would be interesting to know what sort of damages YouTube would allege if someone violated the terms of service that attempt to restrict disseminating such information, e.g., metadata about other peoples' videos
The success of a YouTube copyright infringement claim seems dubious
This is cool and all, but what I see is an Anthropic model harvesting (again) human output and curation. That is the part providing almost the entire value of this aggregation wrapper. What I would have preferred to see the model undertake: is somehow imbibe the median Hacker News user persona (if there is one, the reccs did serve as a proxy for that in this case) and work with YouTube API to surface a list of videos with low viewership or traction, but serve the custom taste of this audience at high SNR. I know talk is cheap, but the latter to me is a bicycle and sewing machine, while the former a neatly raked sandpile.
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.
Now that this is created and word is out I think it will be gamed.
I'd like to have a way to have it only attend to recommendations up to say now as a defense.
What you have done was and is a revolution, Karpathy.
I have been shouting that YT, the "video museum" is unmissable for cultivation in the current days ever since this obvious fact met the will of pitiful entities to bar it to minors (unbelievable) and impede it to adults (through privacy or practically dubious constraints). Karpathy has proven it once more.
-- Are you also processing 'youtu.be' links? We use them for brevity
-- The videos in HackerTube do not seem to be all we linked to at HN. I get only 6 months old videos as the closest in time, and I verified many are missing. The filter applied to select the links on HN is too restrictive.
-- Put the link on the "channel" anchor - if a video is hosted by that channel the channel is probably interesting. Even much, much better if you create "Channel" pages on HackerTube, to make them better browsable (for example, on YT it is extremely difficult to browse them - "see the oldest", "see all" - given the lack of pagination). (To get a good YT channel browser would be of immense value.)
-- Another paramount feature on YT that can use much better usability are transcripts - they are available but they must be better presented.
-- Maybe you could use the "three frames" at https://i.ytimg.com/vi/<videoid>/hq<1|2|3>.jpg
-- How often will the DB on hackertube be synced with the HN content (if one posts a link to YT on HN, how long before it will appear on HackerTube)? A clean way to add new material to HackerTube is sought.
-- What could happen to embedded YT links when access restrictions will be mandated by legislations?
-- There should be RSS on HackerTube. The correct formula should be, I believe, serve "a minimum of 10 and a maximum as the amount of new records of the past 48 hours".
-- Given the selected amount of videos, it could be possible to also index the videos by embedding. (I have just finished in the past few hours my own engine for embeddings operation - search, similarity, recommendation - over my daily updated ~million RSS records from YT: it can be done efficiently with minimal space allocation.)
-- Some posts here just gave me this later wilder suggestion: what if you could have an LLM in the internals of HackerTube that recognized and fixed (through descriptions and transcripts) the vague clickbait - e.g. translating titles like "This will be the solution to all the problems" into an additional "[that actually was: adding sugar to the soil may help the growth of basil]"...
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 perfectly well engineered content for the target audience ahead of the IPO. Gotta do something to push your stock options...
The funny part is that you can do such a youtube clone with something outdated like Qwen 3.5 35B, no need for the latest SOTA frontier trillion weight model.
Tired of low-effort YouTube clickbait slop? Just click on the Subscriptions heading to go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. You'll see only videos from the creators you have subscribed to. This one-click trick boosts the signal-to-noise ratio dramatically.
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 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.
> 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?
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 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.
I think you may have just gotten a bad roll since I have been scrolling on it for some time and haven’t seen any videos in that category. But I agree that that isn’t what I’d expect from the HN crowd
Would you be willing to share the code base of this site (sans videos list)? I know a person with a list of approx. 4500 curated youtube video links they've been maintaining for an entirely non-HN related purpose that would like to build a similar site and populate it with the video URLs. Right now it's in a much more clunky, awkward format.
Controversial opinion: The current state of the internet is not bad cause big tech has focused on increasing engagement. It has deteriorated cause normies have saturated the space. Projects like this are good because they have gone through the normie filter of hackernews.
I think if the big tech had focused on engagement while the users had remained mainly nerds and geeks, the result would've been extraordinary.
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
I've been doing that for a while, ever since i started to have meals alone.
open HN, filter by posts from youtube.
one thing that improves immensely the quality, is to login and configure HN to "show dead" (downvoted comments and links), then head to "new"+filter by youtube.
for some reason, people or bots downvote the really good links
Unfortunately HN is just another algorithm. It roughly aligns with what I already see on my youtube but includes some terribly old videos and a mix of videos from creators I'm currently subscribed to and channels I know I never want to watch again like Joe Rogan, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lex Fridman etc. This is indeed a HN video site and I hate it lol.
The youtube video recommendation algorithm isn't that bad if you're careful which videos you watch. Sometimes you'll take a risk on a video and it'll punish you with a week of similar videos though.
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.
Not a dig at Karpathy, I like him and the thing is nice to have, but the amount of glaze he receives for essentially a curated video playlist sourced off of a pre-configured list is unprecedented, to the point where people are ready to praise him for the way he sneezes.
If Warren Buffet would do a video on how he clicks through a few stocks on Google Finance (I know he doesn't) for a minute or two, it would be more interesting to "most people" than any other anonymous pro finance dude, despite their incredible expertise with Google Finance (or Tradeview, or Bloomberg, etc.). The person behind an action does matter, as harsh as that is to some. The person represents an aggregate of proven past achievements, and therefore, we tend to value that in when checking out new things they do.
I think you are missing the point. A person who has built trust through their work will surely attract praise, respect or at least curious gaze. I am sure most things you own, follow or give importance to also have some known person or brand behind them.
Consistency is key. Just showing your foot at the door regularly matters. People remember the name - it becomes the brand.
He’s the Deepak Chopra of leadership. Lots of trite aphorisms, nothing meaningful. No actual business accomplishments.
Kudos to him for making money, not going to knock him. But this is hackernews. People are hyper critical of competence, and that guy has never exhibited any success at business.
I agree he's not revolutionary but I also don't think he's some pseudo-intellectual influencer. In high school, I found a handful of his talks to be insightful and used them as material to teach general leadership principles (which, even today, I think plenty of people could stand to learn) through our student gov.
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 ).
> A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Timothy Snyder argues that it is impossible to define satisfactorily as a neat, static formula. Instead, he defines fascism as a dynamic "way of seeing the world that denies reason", operating as a cult of will and emotion over objective fact.
Rather than relying on single-sentence definitions
Timothy Snyder argues that it is impossible to define fascism satisfactorily as a neat, static formula. Instead, he defines fascism as a dynamic "way of seeing the world that denies reason", operating as a cult of will and emotion over objective fact.
We cannot rely on single-sentence definitions. Or we risk repeating history.
I think there is a massive opportunity for this kind of feed disaggregation. Used to be the recommender and indexing of content was hard, now I believe we can likely build our own according to our own preferences.
Haiku/Sonnet (or even Jev) can do a lot of the filtering work to rank and extend an RSS feed list.
I think this gives us an opportunity to fully cut the cord from eyeball merchants who want us to maximally engage and therefore polarize their content.
The big remaining hook will be the social graph; I am interested to see how far the EU push for mandatory interoperability will go. Another angle I’d support would be mandatory pluggable standards for your own ranking algorithm, but it captures less of the win than full disaggregation.
Ha, I built one yesterday (Haiku + Jev) for our little gamedev community, tracking news, upcoming games, gamedev events, hardware prices, markets.
https://juice.onejs.com/
It's totally rad that something like this can be built now in less than 24 hours.
It seems a bit like tragedy of the commons. If we all move towards consuming content this way, who is posting what and where? How is it discovered?
One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.
Why would those content stop getting made? A lot of hardcore tech YouTubers are university lecturers. Chinese fried rice stalls on TikTok makes living in selling the rice. Japanese anime keeps getting made and aired.
I think there might be a lesson learned from the era of attention economy and also a potential explanation as to what advertiser friendliness was about - the attention economy did not graduate from being a surplus market. Advertisers had no incentives to subsidize the waste byproducts of fried rice stall, but the system was too deeply molded for them. The amount of standalone contents that are native to social media are tiny.
Anyway, I just don't think the contents that are made because of a social feed are the ones that weren't worth much even on social media.
You assume that if digital communication is lost, people wouldn’t communicate at all? I highly doubt that seeing as our natural instinct is to search for human connection.
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Made a books version of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50326821
PS: thank you karpathy, been binging videos on hackertube.org
This is cool! Thanks
Can you share how much it cost you ($ amount) to do this? As an individual user budget is always a high-priority :-(
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333364
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
What do you mean? Tech influencers like Karpathy himself are in the list, Julia Ioffe is there, Microsoft people are there.
When will folks understand that most tech videos are sponcon, either through a sponsor contract or through corporate affiliation?
Would you please provide explanations and sources for this claim? I am not sure I understand it correctly. With corporate affiliation, do you mean that the speakers are professionals working on the topic. For example, like the speakers at cppcon are professionals working with C++ and the talk helps promoting their company as an employer, or self-promoting C++ coaches?
Because that would be very different from the typical social media influencer.
It is also quite ironic that nerds of the 21st century who built social media and a hyper-connected world are simultaneously repulsed by it.
It was built by nerds but optimized on the data of everyone, so it ended up appealing mostly to the average person.
Maybe that's also the solution to a question I've had for years. The ads I see on diverse social platforms are terrible, but if they are matched with algorithms that try to fit me in as an average person, then it makes sense that, as a huge nerd, they miss the mark.
Ad algorithms are horrible everywhere. Why are you not blocking them?
Don't worry! If it gets popular enough, it will be Goodharted to hell and back.
sigh We’ll never have nice things will we…
> It's 100% pure nerd content
well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music
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> The rants about dishwashers and HVAC were memorable for being completely impractical advice and ignorant of economics
How you got that message from hour long rants and findings about dishwashers I'll never now.
The main take aways I got were: - You might be using way too much soap - Run your tap until it is hot before starting the dishwasher
It's still far cheaper, faster, and less wasteful to wash by hand. It's just that the technique required to achieve that is... controversial? It's definitely always so misrepresented you'd swear it's the "before" part of a 90s informercial shot in black and white with a frustrated idiot failing at a simple task before throwing their hands up and pleading that "there has to be a better way".
Dishwashers simply aren't used in places with water restrictions. Broke people don't have a budget for dishwashing detergent because it's less general purpose than dish soap. There are likely people who started using their dishwasher more or even suddenly bought one based on those rants. It jiggled the handle on consumer trends that otherwise rarely change, so I consider that "influence".
If he stuck to just explaining how they work instead of attacking people's way of living, it would have flown under the radar.
> It's still far cheaper, faster, and less wasteful to wash by hand.
Citation please? https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/20798 links 2 sources that disagree with you.
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Omit internet tropes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Someone gives you sources disproving your claim and you respond by...quoting yourself calling the viewership of a video young?
Dishwashers aren't as evil as you think they are, I promise.
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> They're bundled in with appliance sets sold to first time home buyers and preinstalled in every apartment.
Do you object to stoves and refrigerators in the same way?
> The rest of the world doesn't have them.
This is not at all true. Source: my non-American household, which has had one for decades. (Also, web search.)
> even TC himself admitted that the dishwasher is sort of a solution in search of a problem
I don't recall him saying anything of the sort. I don't suppose you could provide a timestamp?
> Calling you all "naive" is really an understatement once the echo chamber begins reverberating. Jeez! Yes, you're part of it. I'm simply pointing it out. Yes, "citation needed" is a pseudointellectual crutch. No, you don't have to trust an influencer just because everyone else does.
It's not a matter of trust. TC presents a complete, reasoned, independently verifiable argument; and it turns out that his results replicate quite well. As per the skeptics.SE link you brushed off, and as per the personal experience of myself and many others.
At any rate, you are using inappropriate rhetoric and then disingenously trying to brush it off as "simply pointing out" claims that don't actually stand up to scrutiny.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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@tomhow, who you're replying to, is a HN mod - as such he rarely flags comments - flagging is a HN user action (for users with accounts of sufficient age and standing).
The mods are drawn to [flagged] comments to double check / inspect whether such a thing was warrented, if no one has made a comment as to why something was flagged they might have a guess, add that as a comment - or even reverse the flag.
If I had to guess, the comment you replied to was not flagged as it was a top level comment to be read with a generic non specific "you", however your comment was likely flagged as it appeared to some to have a judgemental tone toward another user - the "you" that you used was a specific non generic you with the comment parent as target.
FWiW I'm a rubber necking drive by user - I didn't flag your comment.
That makes sense. I am aware that what I'm saying would agitate a certain cohort of commenters who are used to the echo chambers of other communities. They would abuse the flag feature, and the mods on HN aren't free of bias either.
EDIT: Upon some more reflection, I can go back to my old format of posing my skepticism as questions instead of making statements. I guess the brainrot is getting to me.
The issue here is that your statements do not reflect "skepticism", but confident disagreement that is well refuted by the available evidence.
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I often wonder if AI generated programming is ethically positive, whereas AI generated media is problematic.
I don't have the answer yet, but it is fairly clear that the lowered barrier to making software is helping to untangle us from software monopolies, as people keep spinning up alternatives super quickly!
> whereas AI generated media is problematic
It's not problematic to 99% of the population that's not part of a very vocal minority on Twitter and Bluesky. Everyone else is enjoying AI art and making funny family pictures and memes together.
FWIW, neither I nor most of the people I interact with are on Twitter or Bluesky. Pretty much all of us dislike AI generated art and go out of our way to avoid it.
"making funny family pictures and memes together" isn't worth the assorted negative externalities of AI to most if not all of us.
It also wore out really quickly. I no longer make memes with AI for my friends and family because it’s just not funny anymore. It really was only fun the first one or two times.
I also used to photoshop funny images of friends and family when i was younger, it also was only fun the first one or two times IMO.
The difficulty was part of what made things fun. Humans need to be challenged.
Pretty much every "normal" person I talk to is very much against AI art and writing. None of them are on Twitter/Bluesky (neither am I)
Citation very much needed.
But wont be supplied. Get used to disappointment :)
I think there has always been a spectrum between utility and art, with most things falling obviously into one camp or the other. Assuming all else being equal (climate impact, etc), the ability to provide a utility for cheaper is nearly always good.
99.99% of software is a utility. It being cheaper to produce is a net win for society. The LLM-solution isn't an "all else being equal" scenario, there are other obvious downsides. But the part where an in-demand utility got cheaper is very good.
and then there's the middle ground of ai-generated code generating media... also very obscure to detect, isn't it?
Exactly - e.g. I've drawn from 15 years of making music manually, and then used GenAI to implement deterministic music generation tools that I've designed.
Tbh, I am not sure if I will continue, because I feel that it is the feeling of process that inspires people, and this lacks some of that..
Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KwIopnXdJss&pp=0gcJCSsMAYcqIYz...
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.
What do you mean by "negative World War 2 content"?
Nazis.
disable view history tracking in youtube and subscribe to a curated set of channels with great content for him. it's such an improvement, best life hack. even for people who're not 87.
Didn't think of that one of being effective. Will give it a try and keep his subscriptions on the good channels. Thanks.
Hopefully your dad wont spend much time here on this specific one. There is a disturbing amount of Joe Rogan recommended videos the VCs here love.
Also Karpathy is probably getting a take down notice by this next Monday, around 10 to 11 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)...
Take down notice for what exactly though?
It doesn’t clone the actual front end code of YouTube, and it doesn’t even download the videos and rehost them on his own server either. All of the videos are normal embeds from YouTube.
Take downs are about taking down good ideas. This could become something to drive away core traffic. I could imagine multiple clones layers on different themes like Music, Economy etc...And the similarity is enough with Tube name on it...
This sounds like my 81 year old father in law. He's in a AI loop with what YouTube recommends him. It mostly AI slop channels that are less than a few months old. Lots of slop WW2 videos. I've tried to show him how to spot them. I go through and block this garbage, but somehow it still gets fed to him.
The YouTube app is such a terrible app. Everyday they make changes that seem to make it work. I've been a premium user for years and hate using it. Offline doesn't always sync properly and I can't access my content on the plane. I wish we could build our own YouTube client. I'm not sure they allow this. Frustrating, as there's so much potential.
I could list so many problems with YouTube app (on android for me).
- Multiple times a day I accidentally click another video and try to go back to previous video and lose the position (they used to have a confirmation dialog to play another video when you already have something playing, got rid of it for some reason.
- I used to be able to Chromecast to TV with a casting playlist, where I'd easily add and remove videos, change order. I was able to disconnect from TV and continue watching, later connect to TV again. They completely messed it up. Now it's even worse they created multiple "play on device" and it's so awkward to add videos to queue.
- when I play a video, why doesn't it continue downloading the entire video so I watch it offline. I need to specifically download and it doesn't save the position properly.
- playing videos offline doesn't always remembers position and doesn't keep track of played.
- previews reset the watched position of videos and litters watched history with videos you didn't actually watch.
- notifications are useless, it doesn't notify me of videos I specifically subscribed to and want notifications for.
Sorry for the rant. It just so happens YouTube is where I consume most of my content.
Youtube desperately needs a holistic redesign of history and watch position. Watch position needs to be instantly synchronized down to the frame across devices, and it needs to be able to save more than one watch position per video for you to manually select in ambiguous cases (like if you watched offline and online on different devices). It should also show the difference between a video you stopped after one second and a video you watched completely but rewound to the beginning. The seek bar should show which parts you've watched regardless of your current watch position.
The "Watch Later" feature also needs a lot of love. The button for it constantly moves around and works in different ways.
They do occasionally fix things! One thing they fixed recently is that advancing to the next video in a playlist would always start from the beginning, irreversibly clobbering your watch position for that video. Now it seems to (most of the time) start from your watch position.
Absolutely. I always wonder, the people who work on the YouTube app, do they actually use it.
Yeah, like on web the default-on "Ambient Mode" feature has horrific banding artifacts, which could be completely fixed by a bit of dithering. I doubt it will ever be fixed. Completely pointless feature anyway that should never have been enabled by default. How many gigawatt-hours have been wasted rendering it?
> notifications are useless
Not exactly what you talked about but comment notifications are useless. There's no way to have only x-replied-to-you-in-thread. You either get notified about everything, ever - or you get no notifications
Product designers: fuck off. You are doing an absolutely shit job
I hear ya. I canceled spotify because of it, because all i wanted was to hear my stuff i consciously subscribed to and only then, when i am in the mood, i want to explore. But no, ya at the hand of what they think is best. And now Youtube does the same. The entire industry is ripe to be disrupted. Wishful thinking. I hate it all. Haha.
Though, from a technical point of view it is top. Always working. Always crisp.
I subscribed to Spotify so my kids could have screen-free content. They can listen to music whenever they want.
Spotify now has podcasts and videos and it’s all a lot less that screen-free, just-music space I wanted my kids to have.
Now I can either vibe-code a replacement and start pirating or just deal with it? What a terrible deal.
The YouTube app gets the font color and background color confused when my phone's operating system switches from daytime to nighttime, and ends up with almost white text on a white background sometimes and I have to kill the app. It's annoying but I think source available is going to be the future. The only question is how do you make a product with that?
Not that this helps just an aside:
If this is iOS on one of the recent releases there is at least one apple bug I know of that causes this.
But it could also just be the youtube app :)
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.
I am not sure the personalize algorithm is based on what you want to watch, but what will keep you watching. That’s a measurable KPI.
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.
They are very close, but I believe "want" implies a conscious desire, I want to go to the ball game. I don't want to rubber neck as I pass an accident, but I will.
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...
It's like fast food vs healthy food.
This makes me think that perhaps we should like have a social feed. If I, for exmaple, say that one of my friends I'd follow them. Then whatever they synchronize as a recommendation, I'd get in my feed.
So that's not a like they give but a separate "publish this into my recommendations for my friends" feature. Which would then show up in my feed and everyone that subscribes to my friend.
A pubsub system basically. Users publish, friends of said users (if they want to) subscribe, and then that's how they get content.
FB basically tried this (it was basically what the "Like" widget on websites was for). It was a decent-ish heuristic for its time, but it ran into the fundamental issue that the people you consider "friends", the people you want to see life updates from, and the people who like the same kind of content you do, are groups with some overlap, but they are not the same people.
You probably want to see the pictures of your cousin's new kid, but you don't care for her flat Earth content or crocheting videos.
This is how fediverse works, like PeerTube, isn't it?
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.
My prompts are getting shorter and dumber because the model "gets" what I'm doing even with fewer words. It's almost to the point where if you give it too much, you're constraining the model with too many requirements, when the thing it would have done otherwise was better/smarter. So I feel like the prompting meta is moving more towards fewer bits administered just right. I go back and forth on whether I should make a video on it because on the one hand people have these questions but on the other my best practices look so dumb it's almost embarassing.
what do you mean by "gets"?
As in, it infers correctly what you want, right?
Is this a property that is trained in RL or from scaling pre-training?
Would you say this is an intelligence property or a preference property, as in, can different, equally smart models, "get us" differently when we talk to it?
I'm asking because I've thought about this a lot and it seems to me that the experience of the model "getting" it when we prompt it with increasingly vague prompts is just a glorified auto-complete experience, where what is being inferred by the model is just what it had been trained to infer, not really that it understands our situation.
Thoughts on this? Would really love feedback / any corrections on this thinking! Thanks man.
don't think of your video as the "best way to do it", we'd love a video of how you specifically go through these things rather than a hyper-optimized way to go about it. it may be true that the next guy in here has a much more advanced process, but it surely doesn't hurt seeing someone with a 'bit of history' on the matter jump-n-run their way through small projects like this. I believe it would bring some comfort to those who feel like they're a thousand years behind already.
Wrote about similar observations few days back. Bespoke AI prompt, harness and context engineering seem obsolete after few months
https://jakobbr.eu/2026/10/14/hot-take-ai-skills-already-get...
Please submit that (if you want to)! It's short but in a good way and I think we could use a thread about this.
If you do, let us know and we'll put it in the SCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
prompting is a moving target but honestly it would be great to see how you do it to just to get a sense for the current state. I suspect there's a lot of people in my shoes who would love to learn how the experts do it
Make youtube for hackers, that does not suck, or you're going to jail.
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.
That would be great. And then, if for any reason YouTube decides to take down this site or prevent embedding in hackertube.org, we would have a backup.
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.
Having HackerTube videos as playlists inside YT makes the video selection available on any device with YouTube app on it, like TVs etc.
Good stuff, I have similar thoughts about the recommendation algo and planned to build something like HT but never got around to it!
My favourite thing about early YouTube was the “Most Viewed” with “Last Hour”, “Today”, “Yesterday”, etc. Obviously this is not the most up to date catalog of videos but it would be cool to get a similar view count over date range filter.
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!
No credit given to Skipvids.com ? This looks suspiciously like a ripoff
You might want to look up what "ripoff" means. It hardly looks like it, except for may be the colors in a couple of places.
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
added a few minutes ago!
Why's the newest video 5 months old?
Even with a fresh dump, it would lag behind YouTube, since a video only gets in once someone links it on HN.
I took all the channels HN keeps recommending (3+ videos in Karpathy's data) and made a page with their fresh uploads as they come in: https://hn.youtldr.com
(I make YouTLDR, which writes the one-line answer under each video.)
Don't see it.
first do a search, then on top you'll see "Filter". might try to make more prominent from main page
Yes, please, I couldn't figure it out as well.
added! now can be done via Filter on the main page.
thanks!
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...
people like us don't have that much time...
Seconded! (please)
Well, build your own in 2.1hrs (or 2 minutes if you have access to the source)
pls Mr. Karpathy make hackertwitter too without bots
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
Has anyone tried to download? The download links are slightly broken (but they work if you try differently).
Yeah, broken if you click. Works if you copy the link into a new tab.
+1 for this comment so others can view it (as I faced the same issue and I tinkered around to get to the same discovery independently as well and was about to comment the same)
It works when I refresh the page
This is great.
I would consider including the text box content that is shown below the video on Youtube. Many videos will say things like "I included the link below..." so having that on say https://hackertube.org/watch/PbmJkMhmrVI would be nice. I can imagine there are issues to consider...
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.
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 wish I could find more recent videos. Even turning on all "recency"-related options, here's what I get: https://imgur.com/a/e5Dcw5L
Everything is 6 months old or older. :-(
Not a dig at Andrej, but Youtube itself is not that great at promoting recent content.
I think the data dump used to generate the site might be out of date? Bummer, if so, because I was hoping this could be an ongoing thing.
Get in touch?
I, too, noticed the "A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For a Lot of Y-Intercept" video (uploaded 9 months ago) by John Ousterhout mentioned in the recent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50269776 not getting picked up either.
I did something similar, but with current youtube search results and not really stress processing on HN data. My technique was simply saving my search terms and topics, and then putting that under a crop and continually updating the results. Super simple, but resulted in such a better experience for YouTube videos for me.
I call it "re-algorithming" your data. Basically you're not happy with the algorithm of a product, then you use it's data and introduce your own.
It also seems like folks are tired of the youtube algorithm and want something different instead? I'm willing to bet that many sites and apps have this opportunity in them.
I found this to be unusually good. I got caught in a rabbit hole about interpretation of the work of Bach. I would have never seen this stuff in the YT interface.
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 think many experiencing the same thing but we're way too small drop of a drop in the bucket that it doesn't even resolve in all of their measurements and A/B tests. The vast majority of the "gradient signal" is from normies and their patterns, desires and tastes are different. Basically I think we see a massive deterioration of quality because we are a rounding error.
I can’t reject this line of thought strongly enough.
The vast majority of signal is from a plurality of opinions, and the outcome is an average of those inputs, usually tweaked a bit to make them more addictive.
Your thought that “the algorithm doesn’t serve me personally because I have exceptional taste” is not a unique observation. Everyone who consumes these systems has the same thoughts. Everyone is a rounding error, whether you’re in a knitting community, or you’re a worlds leading expert in deep learning.
> has the same thoughts
Only, some people consume what is objectively trash, and others recognize what is objectively of value. The Paretian distribution is real and observable.
I don’t see that it’s necessarily two different groups. People in general consume trash, including the author of the website. The same people can recognise what is and isn’t of value.
It’s not two distinct people - or at least, I’ve seen no evidence that it’s two sets. The venn diagram is a single big fat circle, and we’re all in it.
When everyone is unique, nobody is?
> Everyone who consumes these systems has the same thoughts.
Do they?
From what I can tell most people using these apps seem pretty fine with having their algorithm determine everything they consume. You must remember, a majority of US teenagers went out of their way to download TikTok, before short-form content was forced into the existing platforms.
I think we can boil this down to a single question: If tomorrow, YouTube offered a toggle to all users to completely remove shorts from every feed in the app, what would most people do?
I think many here on HN would immediately choose to disable shorts. But what about the majority? Would they disable?
I think the answer is so obviously no. Despite all the disdain and regard for short form content as slop by the mainstream themselves.
I think your viewpoint is the correct default opinion to have. It prevents belittling thy neighbor & delusions of grandeur. But at a certain point you have to drop the optimism. These platforms do work for the masses. Unfortunately.
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I have the same experience, and I don't think it's just us.
I suspect what's going on is we're experiencing the long-term effects of AI recommendation algorithms getting plugged into everything. I'm not anti-AI. I think neural nets are incredibly powerful tools and I really like using them as an aide for my coding work. But they clearly do only a first or second level of pattern matching(asterisk), and I think that has a fundamental impact on their overall usefulness and desirability.
I can't explain this any better than Melanie Mitchell in her "AI for Thinking Humans," so I'd generally recommend that book to really understand the issues. But one way of thinking about it is that the AI keys in on patterns that are indeed there in its training data, but very often don't pick up on the same patterns as a human or treat patterns "not in the same way" as a person would. So you get the uncanny valley effect where the recommendations share some features of things you like and find interesting, but often miss the "soul" of the thing.
A good example of this is I recently watched the movie "X-Men" (2000). I then got a bunch of superhero movie recommendations. On the surface, this makes total sense. I watched a superhero movie, I get more superhero movies. But the reason I like that movie is it portrays racism/nationalism in a way that isn't totally stereotyped while still being PG-rated and easy to watch, without the seriousness of something like "American History X" (it was also a Patrick Stewart tribute). It's very unlikely that an AI can make that level of inference. I actually would enjoy watching more movies like that (as opposed to your point about wanting variety and something more exploratory), but what are the odds it's going to recommend some vague theme like that instead of "more superheroes"?
I also agree with your point that the underlying assumption we all want "more of the same" is a big thing that makes the modern internet feel more narrow. So you put those 2 together and it feels like we're being put into a narrow Skinner box that approximates aspects of things we like, but is really more of a confined environment designed to extract our time and attention while only fulfilling the shallowest, barest minimum of our wants and desires.
Indeed, recommendation algorithms have some positive benefits and a lot of downsides also. As a deep learning practitioner I worked on recommendation systems for two companies, but as a human being I have my own way of dealing with them: I like to once or twice a month dedicate some time to finding good content to consume: my wife likes streaming media so we have all the subscriptions, so I look around for about three movies that look good and download them so when I want to watch something I choose from my downloads. I spend time on Kobo (eBooks) and Libre.fm (audio books) to make sure I have purchased good reads that are all queued up for my enjoyment.
Finally, Apple has a great tool called ScreenTime that I can set limits on HN, YouTube, etc. I set a 15 minutes a day limit for each, but I can always add 15 minute increments if I find a good rabbit hole to explore.
Beautifully spoken, thanks for clearing this up. I felt/feel the same, but could never get it into words.
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I think this is actually a pretty valid response to what I posted (it's the reason I included the asterisk in the bit about levels of pattern matching), but I was sort of intentionally focusing on the manifestation of AI algorithms specifically as they affect the experience of browsing the modern web. And while I think your point gets us closer to the truth about the general capability of these systems, I'd still recommend Melanie Mitchell's book to appreciate some of the subtle limitations of even SOTA models.
> Your comment sounds straight out of 2022
Please avoid swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. HN is for curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> Why are you white-knighting for AI so hard?
Please avoid swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have no idea why your reply to my comment is flagged (even though I completely disagree with it) or mine for that matter
I just want to be the one in control of that feed that is curated towards myself. An AI that is local and learns about my likes and dislikes and does not share that info with third parties for their benefit. There is a vast sea of content and a small fraction of it is of interests to me and/or might be helpful to me even if I am not consciously seeking it at any given moment. I should be able to look at its rules, see how it evolves and tinker / reason with it the way I would with a personal assistant or life coach. And I would like to use that to filter out content that is a waste of brain cycles. And to find people, ideas, experiences that I might click with based on its global knowledge of the mindscape.
This is also what we lost in the field of music, with the switch from radio to streaming.
With radio, you used to have to sometimes sit through music you didn’t like so much, with the upside that you often discovered things you didn’t know you liked.
I found the "new to you" tab on YouTube, which worked well once or twice. After those initial uses though, I couldn't get good results again
YouTube has a "new to you" feature which changes your homepage with different videos than your main recommendations.
Thanks for clearing this up. I felt/feel the same, but could never get it into words.
Youtube feeds work the other way around it appears. Content seeks you. Things promoters think you may click on haunt you. There are videos I see are there in the feed and I don't click on because I am not interested and they linger there, trying to dupe me to click on. Absolutely disgusting.
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.
In exactly one prompt to my Hermes agent, it developed and deployed a HackerTube Android TV app to my NVIDIA Shields. Incredible time to be alive.
edit: a pet peeve of mine is when people overstate agency capability like it’s some out of the box magic, and I’m guilty of of it here. So I should disclose that I’ve previously setup Hermes with ADB access and accessibility for remote control, and various skills for my home lan. It also had some memories or skills from sessions on managing these shield devices. other than that tho, it figured the rest out.
I have some kind of similar things using PocketTube (browser extension) to try to curate certain types of feeds on Youtube. These things are always limited because we can't query the actual platforms. I would kill for platforms like Youtube, X, Spotify to actually give us API access to their entire catalogs so we can define custom ways to surface/recommend content.
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.)
Do you have web activity turned off or use a separate old style Youtube account? Mine is also bad but I think it's because of those for me.
I was thinking it would be good if there was something similar for kids. They seem to fall into a whirlpool of trash content.
The Kid Should See This is basically exactly that. Highly recommended.
For YouTube nerds I curate a list of channels. Size of list 3993 feeds: - https://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-top/blob/main/l...
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.
I suspect they know perfectly well when they can't make money from someone, so they deliberately serve up boring crap to save on hosting costs.
>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've got years of history and it does the exact same thing for me. I watched one news video about the pope and now half of my feed is Catholic news channels.
I buy a mattress on Amazon and I get recommendations for... ten other mattresses? Like what's the logic here, I have an entire garage where I just keep stacking them up to the ceiling? Just show me something else. Is there a human being out there whose like "I bought a French press last week, what could I need this week, five more French Presses?"
I do not understand how these dystopian surveillance companies with their infinite data points are so bad even at this
Bad by what metric? They're interested in getting you to watch ads, they couldn't care less what you want.
I have frequently commented here and there in the past that, with the proliferation of AI generated content on the Internet, curated, authentic human generated contents and recommendations like this will become increasingly more valuable. Definitely feels like a step in that direction.
On the topic of curated YouTube: I've started building a curated collection of videos and channels on various topics: https://skyshelf.app/
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.
> 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.
His last video was ~1 year ago which by the standards of late career youtubers isn't that long ago.
Hbomberguy's last video was 3 years ago for instance.
I don’t like that he keeps renaming it. This is “Humans Need Not Apply” and it even has its own Wikipedia page under that name!
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 …
> 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?)
I didn’t touch anything manually I only talked to Claude the whole project, except for YouTube API key, domain, its DNS record and VPS node boot.
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)?
Sometimes I say something like "check recent cyber stuff" and it dispatches a few subagents and does the thing.
Wow, I'm definitely overthinking and overprompting then. Seems like driving this process can benefit from a more laidback approach. Thanks!
Only with Opus 5.5+. The thing is beast mode. I wouldn’t trust other weaker models this much.
Does Claude control the VPS via SSH from your machine or does it install a worker there?
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’ll add a bit more to the post when I get back from trick or treating
Thanks Andrej, look forward to it.
> 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.
I rented a hetzner server years ago and have steadily grown into it. No increasing costs so far.
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.
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.
YouTube mobile app has a "your custom feed" where you supply English language prompts and get a relevant custom feed. My go-to has been "new and unseen science & technology videos predominantly from people I follow but occasionally interspersed with others' you think I might like in a similar vein"
To save others the disappointment I just felt: this is only available in the US.
Genuinely curious, is this sarcasm? I don't use any YouTube mobile app, but doesn't "new and unseen [...] videos predominantly from people I follow but occasionally interspersed with others' you think I might like in a similar vein" just sound analogous to "recommend me videos I'd like to see".
Not all my followed creators are science and technology...
Subtle but crucial difference: the explicit prompt replaces the default algo's biases.
It is also available in the PWA. Yes, it's a real feature with a Gemini-powered prompt. Yes, GP describes a prompt that approximates the actual algorithm.
I just wrote "nothing but Sesame Street parodies" and the feed does what it says on the tin.
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.
But we didn't lose it - it's right here, and if this one goes down you can make your own with 2 hours of an Opus 5.5 subscription. Honestly, I whipped up something similar to this the other day for Arxiv papers.
Wait, what's the Arxiv equivalent of filtering out brainrot?
Please do elaborate, i am very much interested in how you did it.
> It makes me yearn for what we lost. I remember when the Internet was all like this page, and it was bloody wonderful.
I remember a very different old internet, where high quality content like these videos was rare, ads were more invasive on a level we have forgotten (remember pop-ups? Pop-under? Having to download and install Real Player and other garbage with ads just to watch anything? Spam overrunning Use et?), and the internet was full of brainrot and crank content from the start.
> I hope we get to a point where hosting becomes functionally free,
We’re discussing this under a list of freely hosted videos.
The blog it’s talking about is hosted on Bearblog, a free ad-free blogging platform.
The software project was built by Opus so quickly that a $20 subscription could have built the whole thing.
Everything is close to free right now. Pay a little bit for YouTube premium and you can watch without ads too.
I think you’re nostalgic for an internet that didn’t exist, while not seeing the amazingness of the world we’re living in.
Watching youtube with Firefox + ublock origins still gives you an experience free of the peppering of insufferable ad breaks
The same Firefox that, on android at least, asks you if you want to open the native YouTube app (or be asked again next time) for every link to YouTube or every time you type youtube.com in the url bar? But that's even more annoying than the ads!
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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.
Fantastic domain. I hope you get whatever you want out of it.
Have been sitting on it for 8+ years. :)
My plan was to try to find the "answer" for videos in comments. Never really got around doing it, but LLMs make the possibilities more interesting and easier.
Edit: this is also a good opportunity to ship something like this: https://hn.youtldr.com, like Karpathy's HackerTube, but with the new videos from "HN-vetted" channels.
Similar to DeArrow except with AI right?
Kind of, yes. DeArrow is crowdsourced, and I love that people can submit a better title and pick a real frame from the video. I wanted one step more: the actual answer to the clickbait, right on the thumbnail, without waiting for someone to submit it, since it comes from the transcript. Only works for videos already in YouTLDR's cache for now.
I'm a big fan of SponsorBlock for YouTube too, from the same dev.
Shameless plug: SuperFocus hides the distracting elements of YouTube (and other sites like Reddit). Recently enhanced with some suggestions from Opus, I have personally found it to be quite effective.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-summary-wit...
You've linked to something else: "YouTube Summary with AI"
Refreshing indeed. If hackertube became a hit - wouldn't it create and make its own weird world of deep distrust etc. Just free of ads and rage bait -- more like intellectual baiting?
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It’s true, we are just optimizing for engagement, which is a first-order (and our best current) approximation of happiness. I’m hopeful that as the attention economy evolves, we will evolve objective metrics that more accurately reflect the long-term health and happiness of users.
...engagement, which is a first-order (and our best current) approximation of happiness.
Engagement is better seen as an approximation of how many ads you are likely to be able to serve to that user.
the recommendation system is so sad, its stealing good content from all of us. they just churn the same click back crap
Exactly what I also felt "refreshing" !
You don't have to wonder because YouTube has excellent high quality recommendations, if you:
1. Like
2. Subscribe
3. Dislike
Dislike was removed?
No it wasn't. You can still dislike videos and it will improve your algorithm.
Oh yeah, it's still there. I remember some uproar about its removal. I guess it was just the ability to see the dislikes of others that changed.
Opinions are my own.
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.
No, what will happen is they'll have a subscription and then also ads.
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.
> 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.
Funny thing is: I can subscribe to Netflix for one month a year, and watch everything that I want to watch within a week or two ... which is to say there isn't much there that interests me. With YouTube, I can typically find an hour or two of content to watch per week.
I'm not claiming that YouTube is better. It's simply a case of different people having different interests. While YouTube is almost certainly a poor option for higher budget productions, it seems to work out for lower budget productions where the producers are willing to seek out their own revenue streams.
Netflix was easy, switching to it meant saving money for all the TV addicts.
Compare it to the widespread refusal to pay for Youtube Premium even as ads get worse there.
My ad blocker still works on YouTube
YouTube Premium is a terrible deal.
It includes YouTube Music and it removes ads. Apparently it also marks where sponsorships end in videos (though I'm not sure that is Premium only). Seems like a great deal to me.
Indeed. They just prove that there’s widespread, irrational aversion against Youtube Premium.
Aversion to paying Danegeld, from people who have enough sense to know better.
yt by default is basically free with ads so the public has viewed it as “that” kind of product, mass content of vastly dif quality level.
Netflix was pay to get high quality well known product along with new high quality content.
For well over a decade they were totally different. You cannot just flip a flag and change that. It isnt people refusing to pay, it is because yt is not netflix and never will be for as long as yt is in the name.
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.
This is verifiably not true. The majority of the value I get from youtube aren't even by monetized videos.
This is just outright wrong.
The vast majority of all yt content makers do NOT pay the bills with ad rev but sponsors.
These platforms are sucking every penny they can from everyone at every step because number must go up. That is what they are suppose to do being public.
A private company like steam with a sub pay model where creators still can do sponsorship videos throwing out the attention algos would be a better product and still be plenty profitable.
Not all companies should be public and often the best are not.
Businesses will seek out more than one revenue source for the same product. For example: newspapers and magazines had advertising, even though the customer paid for the product. Cable television had advertising, even though people paid for cable (and cable companies paid for the channels).
It isn't going to stop data collection either. If anything, it will improve the quality of the data collected.
Why would you be posting other people's opinions?
Shameless self-promotion: https://github.com/andunieee/cathode (gtk4 desktop app) can give you a non-bait interface to YouTube that works.
Now this project gives me some ideas of things to implement:
- pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video
- allow curated subscriptions, i.e. I subscribe to some curated list made by someone (in this case it could be the database of videos Karpathy has gathered from HN, but there could be others)
At some point I was almost implementing DeArrow support, but using it for a while I don't think it is too great, often the alternative titles people give are unreliable, and honestly I don't know how they exist without being spammed or trolled to death. I do have SponsorBlock support though (I feel like SponsorBlock would work better if it allowed high-quality AI bots to submit blocks though).
I really like the interface, install and search are smooth. Really appreciate SponsorBlock being built in.
But I'm rarely only watching youtube
Without a way to pop the video out of the interface I'm stuck with either a small video inside a large pane somewhere on screen, listening to it in the background, or just having it fullscreen.
Like...piping yt-dlp straight to mpv I get just the mpv box (or even mpv 'link') and I can have it hover over other things I'm doing, you know?
Yes, I get it. Been suffering from that myself too. I'll think of a solution.
Thank you for sharing! I've been looking for interfaces that let me access all the sites I regularly use but without the algorithm. This seems to be exactly what I'm looking for!
> can give you a non-bait interface to YouTube that works
Is there something like this for Twitter?
Set your feed to only people you follow by recency
Then follow people that don’t post bait?
IMHO the "by recency" qualifier is optional. Also, don't engage in comments.
> pick the thumbnail from the middle of the video
Sounds like you may be interested in DeArrow: https://dearrow.ajay.app
SponsorBlock is related too: https://sponsor.ajay.app
Very interesting. Does it have dark mode?
It does if your system settings have it enabled, run:
> gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme 'prefer-dark'
But I guess I'll add a button to toggle it for people who aren't using gnome.
Can I search with your app for ONLY the latest uploaded videos and filter for content length?
Will it display whatever bullshit recommendations YouTube feeds?
Really looking for an option to only have "current stuff" - YT constantly recommends me stuff from 3 years ago which I already watched, even with my highly curated account.
Global search is provided by YouTube, so I can't guarantee anything.
I could add some local filters if necessary, but doesn't YouTube already provide its own filters based on when the video was published? Cathode exposes these.
YT search sucks, and this by intention to keep the people scrolling. The sorting & co is all completely broken, YT recommends continuously stuff from years ago etc.
I agree with you, but I don't have the full collection of YouTube videos to provide an independent search engine on top of it.
I will add better local filters though, so we can tame YouTube's search results and suggestions better to our needs. I haven't paid too much attention to that part yet because after years of YouTube experience I've fallen into a mode in which I mostly watch stuff from a set of fixed channels and only use search to look for videos I already know exactly, never to find new stuff.
Interesting. I consciously, actively smack YT with a rolled-up newspaper in the form of 'never recommend this channel' specifically to make it only recommend me stuff that I've already watched, and not try to pipeline me in some algorithmic direction such has happened at some periods. I don't think I have to draw people a picture here.
I've never imagined actually wanting an algorithm that would find things I'd actually like, having been burned so badly by 'algorithm that finds things it wants to get me to like'. Are you sure you want an algorithm to do that?
Thats what I do as well for channels I completely dislike.
The thing is: Im subscribed to a lot of channels (like 80-90) and YT constantly recommends me stuff I have already seen and/or is years old. Its exactly about these cases.
Yes, perma-block works,sure!
So basically how YouTube worked in 2005? :)
That is part of the idea, yes.
Sorry but you are doing it wrong. If you used the platform resourcefully (the hacker's way), "you querying it" instead of some "reverse", it would give you the expected decent experience. If you rely on the platform for the quality of your experience, it cannot be a mystery that monstrosity is what you will get. If you used instead the ways around it...
E.g. I get the news about videos through RSS on selected channels, I have my own systems to browse them, and in general the search on YT works already fairly well (without any login).
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.
Pssst, Firefox and UBlock origin still solve that even for youtube.
SmartTube for your TV, NewPipe for your phone
Brave on iOS.
wow how did i not know this! i just watched a youtube video on brave, no ads. my mind is blown. I have Brave installed just never tried youtube there.
I owe you a full drinking session anytime you’re in Los Angeles!
There’s a whole dedicated YouTube section in Brave settings!
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.
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Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully and not cross into personal attack?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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!
Really? I quickly found some awful horrific racist material on "HackerTube". No thanks.
Do you leave all platforms like that or just this one?
What did you find?
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.
The Algorithm is what YouTube sells. This is only a static collection of videos with YouTube embeds.
This website feels like a walk in the woods coming from YouTube's current attention grabbing titles and algo that almost feels a little violent.
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...
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.
I'm not sure I follow, what is it exactly that your bots can't do? This is a relatively simple project implementation wise, since it only has to serve static content. LLMs are also OK at manually sifting through text passages to classify them semantically, if you ask them to.
> Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them, ran Sonnet over them in a Workflow (Claude Code feature), got rid of spam, and narrowed everything down to 40K comments recommending a YouTube video.
This part. And Andrej even mentioned he uses medium! I wonder what went into the prompt that prompted the agent to dig deep. Mine seems to stop at very mediocre results fairly consistently and then I just reprompt it a couple of times and it does some back and forth contradicting itself.
I have projects and I made real apps using only LLMs, but it feels tedious. Definitely not a 2 hour thing. And definitely not magical and smooth sadly :(
Well, not sure what I can add here, because this is exactly the type of semantic classification that I expect LLMs to do well, and can't really say why your agents failed to do it.
I've done similar work simply by giving a model a database of text, and asking it to do a unit of work for every passage. "Checking for spam" would be the model checking surrounding messages and user's history, likely an opinionated verdict, but would work. Difficulty comes in when those units of work become complex or have to work in tandem, which isn't the case here.
Claude Code, I found it in About
> 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.
Perhaps try telling it you're Andrej Karpathy and then see how much it wants to impress you?
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.
In the first paragraph Karpathy says he used Opus 5.5. The parent comment is asking if he used a different harness besides claude code.
> 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.
This is the lede, y’all.
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No, not that. Increasingly, the Claude Desktop app (and desktop harnesses) seems to be the favored environment over terminal, VS Code, and the like.
It’s quite a feat, what Karpathy built. I know, I know, Claude did it but Karpathy envisioned and guided it. And he did it declaratively, not imperatively.
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.
its not copying the content, its just a recommender system that links to the video stored on youtube.
Gosh, the videos HN have recommended are amazing. What a community this is.
YouTube has two choices - it can maintain its' iron grip over the UI and the algorithm, and with that alienate content creators and viewers, who no longer are able to remain connected with each other effectively via YouTube. In which case people will leave and create new options.
Or YouTube can completely open up and encourage this sort of custom UI design and allowing people to explore their own interests and feed more easily, and stop shoving stuff down our throats.
HackerTube proves it - it is instantly more relevant to me than YouTube is.
All that is needed is videos to not come from YouTube - and that is happening too - so it may already be too late for YouTube to loosen its iron grip, stop feeding us crap and give us back our control over our entertainment experience, and make content creators happy again.
YouTube won't disappear but real competition is coming for it. All because YouTube acted in its own interests instead of in the interests of the creators and the viewers.
I'd love for an alternative to youtube. And there are some... it's not really my area but I've at least heard of vimeo for example.
The problem is hosting videos is not cheap. Certainly not free. Storage and bandwidth are the easier costs to deal with. Policing to prevent devolution into the utterly deplorable is where things start to get costly and challenging. People get PTSD from having the job of scrubbing content on places like youtube and facebook.
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.
Videos which are uploaded by customer must be sensefull
This prompted me to finish HackerNewsTV – YouTube playlist of latest HN videos, updated daily:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50321248
It seems that even HN can't avoid linking the clickbaity titles.
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...
Or also you can use the chrome extension
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dearrow-better-titl...
The creator of this extension is the same as the creator of SponsorBlock. It's more of a crowdsourced.
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.
ty i think this is right
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.
Could someone seed a cold started profile with these videos (search plus like) and see what glorious things the recommender system continues to point to?
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.
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.
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.
Great stuff in there! Thanks for sharing.
Glad it landed well!
Maybe I am out of the loop, but why did Karpathy prefer using Claude models instead of OpenAI's?
He works there
Because opus 5.5 is no contest. It’s just better at coding.
How many tokens (or $) does something like this take to make?
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.
GLM is really good, but sonnet outclasses it. Anthropic really cooked with sonnet 5+
Yeah i'm pretty sure this is doable multiple times on a 20 dollar subscription, just wow
So it's unknowable how much it cost?
It'd cost ~$250 via API (ie. paying current API pricing per token).
Source: copy pasted the tokens into a chatbot and told it to figure it out.
But hardly anybody pays API pricing and this was made with a sub..
So the cost was zero.
Uh, with some fancy accounting..
I think most people could consider the cost as being whatever percentage of the subscription quota was used multiplied by the cost of the subscription.
One of the most upvoted posts of the year is a static scrape with a UI? I want old HN back…
I don't understand this framing. Only technically complex posts need to be upvoted high? This is an awesome product idea of customised youtube videos based on high quality signal. Irrespective of our feelings, in Agentic era, most technical complexity can be outsourced to agents, what moves the needle is high quality products from initialisation to execution.
Not even a scrape unfortunately, it's someone's curated and opinionated playlists of what they consider "interesting"
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Kudos to Andrej for another demonstration of frontier vibe engineering (since MenuGen). Looking forward to the new recommendation model.
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?
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.
Yes this would be great. Otherwise it might contain videos with fake news, which were rebutted in the HN comments but you’d never know.
It has the feature already! I just wanted to say how much I like it.
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...).
Thanks, much appreciated!
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.
What's the add-ons name?
Focused Youtube
YouTube constantly cycles the same content + videos it’s so annoying
Recency sort needs a pick between comment date and upload date, since a 2012 talk linked last month is exactly the gem you'd want.
Nice idea, thanks Andrej! When will you add HackerTube Shorts? (kidding :D)
NEVER. More inclined to add HackerTube Longs :D
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 ◡.
Like https://ytch.tv/
You haven't posted on YouTube in a year or so. Working on any long-form videos we can expect to see anytime soon?
Anyway, loved your "GPT from scratch" video btw!
HackerTube's length options should be "long" and "long long".
yes! I'd love that :D
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.
I also found turning off history and heavily pruning subcribed channels was the only way to fix youtube sloppification; particularly avoiding shorts being heavily forced by google
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
Yeah, worth checking the TOSes:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...
https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...
Understandable: creators often update their video metadata (title, description etc.) or make public videos back to private or unlisted, and it is in their own right to do this.
Third parties that copy data will cache stale versions even when the creator doesn't want to share them anymore. Seems fair that YouTube doesn't condone this.
Would be great to see this turned into a TikTok style feed for all the videos on the site. Imagine swiping through 30 to 60 second clips to quickly discover interesting, RELEVANT content.
Great idea overall! Really relevant content.
It’s not for videos, but you can try https://hackertok.github.io for a TikTok-style feed of Hacker News posts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50329242
There are a lot of good YouTube submissions here too, not just links on comments.
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.
Could it be that the huggingface export mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320784 is out of date?
lol no good content has been created since 5 months humans have lost all creativity
Absolutely love this! but just one thing new information is always coming and old information is becoming obsolete so fast nowadays
A way for community to submit good videos which get reviewed by AI on some qualifying standards and be published here, would be an amazing feature to have
Thanks for building this!
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/
Thank you for making this. I would like to make one simple probably obvious observation. You can watch this long time and not feel shitty about people or with conflicting thoughts racing in your subconscious the way you do with youtube.
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 account to access the API that will tell you the channel name.
I thought they meant turning that page into a YouTube-like view (being able to filter by channel would also be very cool, though), I was going to do something similar in my own HN extension, but after trying an initial lazy embedding approach [1], asking for declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess to be able to bypass HN's Content-Security-Policy feels icky.
Having https://i.ytimg.com in img-src (for thumbnails) and https://www.youtube-nocookie.com in frame-src (for embeds) would be nice :)
Edit: you can use YouTube's oembed endpoint to get channel details for a video, e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...
[1] https://imgur.com/a/hacker-newstube-g1BQ7lf
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.
Really cool! I did something similar ranking the top 100 software/tool request of HN since 2008.
https://stillunbuilt.shiptiffin.app/
Very nice, I've had great experience using hn to recommend, more like a feed though: https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html
It would be cool to have the data source rather than having to rebuild the pipeline manually
Nice idea will watch though some - I made something similar but for food vids (filters over YouTube chefs - such as only vids with ingredients)
https://mealplannr.io/discover
Funny, this user made exactly this a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43672050
Only 12 upvotes - I guess his name wasn’t Karpathy.
I actually love it. Thanks for finding it and sharing it here!
Awesome. Using this instead
Maybe the UI put people off? idk because this seems cool as well.
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You’re not wrong, sometimes even a tweet by these people will be front page
Nice! I found an interesting video on your site in less than a minute. Good job.
I'd be curious to hear more of the creation process. Have you been steering the agent somehow? Or was it completely on autopilot mode? Also, what was the overall cost?
The cool thing would be to build imdb-like version on top of it, but the cold start problem here is too big
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
With the new wave of ads on mobile, the ones with the "next" button, I gave up. Instead I use the app to find videos and copy them to pipepipe.
Maybe the curated list can be exported to load on other apps.
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.
What makes this so good is not the curation it’s the age in which confirms our current views after years of bad information. The truth is setting us free and this confirms much
I've wanted to build something like this forever but was always told it would break copyright rules.
Is this okay because there is no monetization of any sort or am I missing something?
This is nice, like something I would actually use as an alternative to YouTube when I want more tech/educational content. Only pet peeve is the videos don't have volume sliders embedded like on YouTube. But overall really good!
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 :)
This is great, would love filters for duration and sort by upload date
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.
added and pushed!
would be nice to be able to filter by hackernews upvotes on the recommending post
edit: and have the filter persist while navigating between topics
Holy shit, an actual AI celeb replied to my comment and did a thing! Thank you kind sir
Some videos can only play by going to YouTube, because they are age restricted.
For example this one:
https://hackertube.org/watch/RcU7FaEEzNU
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 ?
Apparently the easiest way to share a subscription list is by first exporting the data with google takeout.
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.
I actually do like it a lot.
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.
Do you plan to update the site with new videos and comments?
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.
Why do you think they care what anyone wants.
They are in the dark UX pattern world, squeezing views per second, selling ads. That's all.
The "we give our users something valuable and they will give us profit in return" approach is over since a long time.
Great work!
I’d like to add one more thing, 3Blue1Brown has created a well-organized archive of YouTube channels launched during all the 3Blue1Brown Math Exposition Contests from 2021 to 2026. There are a lot of great YouTube channels worth checking out!
https://some.3b1b.co/archive
YouTube is at high risk at the moment, because both sides of the marketplace hate it. The best creators are just as frustrated as users like Karpathy by the current state of things. I predict a subscription-based, properly moderated alternative may gain critical mass soon.
Wait a second, forget the content, is the html/tech behind this actually more pleasant to use than googles hyperoptimized youtube website?
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.
Hehe, longs. I'd love to see this iterated on to keep adding new content that's in line with this kind of thing!
AI companies sell tokens to produce slops. Then they sell more tokens to shield people from those slops.
This actually makes sense, I can totally see this work for different niches and verticals tbh
When my kids screen time has expired I will have YouTube resolve to this domain instead
I recently built my own feed. On an Android phone, you can have an AI agent SSH in and make changes to it if you're rooted. I replaced the feed on my home screen with links my AI thinks I'd find interesting - it's pretty good!
I sympathize with the general enthusiasm for this, but idk… my YouTube feed isn’t trash. I don’t get any slop recommendations. It’s actually the one platform that still seems to get so much right. The push for shorts is the worst aspect/change over the last few years for sure, that much I will concede, but I’m pretty happy with the recommendations I get. I’ve been on the platform for over a decade though and spend equal parts on subscriptions as I do on the recommended feed.
This is great. I wish the same existed for conference and meetup talks!
One thing worth exploring would be how the recommendations compare to YouTube's algorithm. Hacker News upvotes and discussion history provide a different signal for what people find interesting, but I wonder how well that translates into video recommendations.
HackerTube ... HackerBooks ... Wikihack ...
...is there something similar for Podcasts?
I’ve had the UnTrap for YouTube extension installed for a while to remove all the shorts, feeds and algorithmic content and my YouTube consumption has gone down by like 90%. Feels so much better not consuming all that mental junk
I encourage everyone to view source. It's nice and short.
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
I like it :) Could you make the channel icon/text clickable into a filter for videos from that channel?
This is awesome. But you won't believe what occurred after testing this: I went to the supermarket, bought new tech called a "tin can". I opened it, and it contained a ready made meal! What a time to be alive!
Hahhaa dude you don't get it, he used AI to turn make a website that shows you videos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!but using youtube also
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
Ah, I like this idea. I also had a different thought of accessing YouTube content in the sense I wanted to know all the tech live streams happening today on a particular topic.
At this point everything looks boring and possible (technically). I wonder what would change this.
It doesn’t contain a YouTube video I linked in a comment a few months ago, so it probably doesn’t contain all the HN videos.
> narrowed everything down to 40K comments recommending a YouTube video
Used a filter.
These are great. I think one for papers would also be very valuable!
Oh how I wish there was an Apple TV app for this. I do all my YouTube browsing on an Apple TV.
Making a tvOS app of this, in the coming week. Will share the code on GH.
100% want this as well :) I only watch things like this on my AppleTV while working.
This is a nick interest site, a video version of harkernews. I am surprised to see videos from many years ago which surely never be seen in YouTube due to too many contents rendered by algorithms
My kind persona: Cool! We all need this!
My cynical persona: Now sit and wait for the advertisers to start infesting HN with recommended videos :(
My pragmatic persona: Sounds like there may be some law related issues such as
- "Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI" -> probably violating copyright. I can't help but remember that episode from Silicon Valley, where Dinesh dumped the company to Galvin to get rid of the COPA violation
- "I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata" -> probably in violation of some ToS already
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.
This is a great concept, but I want to see more recent videos. Not videos uploaded 6-9 months ago. It would be great to be able to filter for videos uploaded in the last month.
this is insane. Should I even learn software engineering? Or should I just sit on my couch and let Opus take care of it?
> I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me.
Why does this happen to some people and not others?
Most of my YT recs are videos from Technology Connections, CCC, 3Blue1Brown, Tech Potato, Welch Labs, Developer Voices, Ringway Manchester, some LegalEagle and UnderSparked (which I watch as mindless entertainment during household chores), and a fair bit of random lectures from top US universities and tech-related conferences. In other words, mostly videos from channels I have already watched and am very likely to watch more videos from.
Sure, there's a fair bit of slop; mostly things like "the unbelievable technology that powers the entire internet" or something where they're just describing asymmetric crypto in layman's terms, and there are periods where it gets more or less prevalent, but the feed is nowhere near unusable on most days.
My X feed is pretty much the same thing; very little spam, not that much politics, and when it does appear, it's not MAGA, plenty of academics and smart software engineers talking tech and AI. TikTok and Reddit are more geared towards mindless entertainment, but I do use these pretty differently, so that actually makes some sense.
With that said, I never disable personalization, try to stay logged in, share my data with companies freely, and accept the vast majority of permissions / consent prompts, which probably makes me unusual among the HN crowd, so that could be the reason why my experience is so different.
Hey Andrej, thanks for the effort. It's highly appreciated!
In your video regarding your own use of LLMs[1] you mention https://arena.ai/leaderboard and https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard to keep track of the status quo. That video is from February 2025 and https://artificialanalysis.ai has gained quite a lot of popularity but also earned criticism repeatedly due to updating the benchmarks right before a new model release. Would you still recommend the arena and scale leaderboards? And if you don't mind, what's your opinion wrt artificialanalysis?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvNQjAaOHw
No i don't recommend those anymore. Currently I recommend Epoch's ECI. AA was kind of bad but recent changes are trending a little bit better. I think benchmarks are in a really bad state right now otherwise, I basically don't trust them, good related reading https://epoch.ai/data/benchmark-reviews-documentation/includ...
Oh, oh no.
I already have about 35 tabs open of YT to watch.
This is going to kill my productivity.
Still, great stuff thank you!
> 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 stopp doing these things, too. I use browser-harness to do all of these things. Always trying to keep myself out-ouf-the-loop.
How are you comfortable doing that?
Also, as a meta, did you comment this or your agent?
No login/account? What a blasphemy. Feel in love from the first site.
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 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.
this is amazing. I just pause and clear my youtube history so that i don't see any rubbish and just search what i want. but this is just great.
Very nice job, it'd be great if the links in the comments are actual links so we can navigate them.
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.
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.
What is a 50% thumbnail?
I'd never heard this term either, but I'm assuming it means that if the video is N frames long, it uses frame N/2 as the thumbnail.
correct. it means the thumbnail is sourced from exactly halfway in the video, so you get a representative frame.
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 feel pessimistic that this will lead to the 50% frame just happening to be a frame with a guy making the face, plus an arrow and a few big detail words. It's what the algorithm rewards, why is it so though.
You may want to have a look at DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/
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.
configurable in the Settings! (see the menu on the left banner)
This is fantastic!
Are you planning an API? Would love to spin up a version for Apple TV.
For those who live alone, how many of you watch YouTube while eating at home?
If you watch or do something else while eating, what is it?
I always do!
I don’t live alone, but I mostly watch YouTube on the TV. As I don’t eat at my desk (where I spend a lot of time), I usually go on youtube and try to find a nice recommendation or a new video from my interests. But my ipad and my ereader are always near in case I don’t find anything interesting (often these days). I’ve plenty of things in flight to read and HN is always a backup option.
I just noticed it is a vibe-coded project by Karpathy
It'd be awesome if he writes something about he he vibe-coded it
this needs dei. theres almost no women or black people, etc
Amazing! If only it would appear on my AppleTV...
A lot of recent videos are about SpaceX IPO 'scandal'. Interesting
I like this. All the "influencers" gone.
Is there a list of influencers and a nice way to automatically block them?
haha I forgot I had hackertube opened in a tab, then when I saw it, I was like, wait, youtube recommendations are actually good? ... oh
I'm glad something like this now exists, I am tired of seeing the same "braindead" videos on YouTube that solely exist for views and likes. Even when I deliberately tell the algorithm, "I dislike this", it is stubborn and persists with these recommendations.
It's so cool to browse youtube like this again, So many cool recommendations, a much needed project
The playlists are good too! Thank you!
>sourced from 39,834 HN comments since 2007.
Is that all of them? That's a lower number than I was expecting!
Such a pleasant experience using this site.
Please create something like this but for books
I think there are a few already:
- https://yahnd.com/books/search/
- https://hnbooks.pieterma.es/list/
Maybe more.
It would be nice to have some context for each video, a summary of the comments that recommended it in the thumbnail tooltip?
OMG, thank you. Though this might cut into my sleep a bit, it's welcome anyway.
Some of the Alan Kay lectures are on hackertube
really nice, set up an adaption of this for myself with a few more art, culture, movie-making sources added.
https://endtime-instruments.org/zentube/
HackerTube feels like putting VR goggles on for the first time. Surreal in many ways.
It would be great to have an option to sort videos by upload date, so it's easier to discover recent content.
Feedback: On mobile, swipe back from video jumps back to top of feed with different video order.
Interesting idea! Also funny that the fourth recommendation for me was a video with Andrej himself :D
It would be great if this could be keyboard navigable, using arrow keys and enter to play.
It's asking to login to YT to prove I'm not a bot!
Would love to see the list of submissions and comments that positively contributed to this.
Nice. This is excessively large so it probably took a while to curate. Well done
"I think this gives us an opportunity to fully cut the cord from eyeball merchants who want us to maximally engage and therefore polarize their content."
https://hackertube.org/download/hackertube-data.zip
https://hackertube.org/data
"YouTube's own metadata (descriptions, view counts, durations, publish dates) can't be redistributed under YouTube's API terms. Every record has the video id, so you can fetch it with a free YouTube Data API key in about 130 requests. DATA.md has step-by-step instructions for you (5 minutes in Google Cloud) and a ready-to-run script for your agent."
The early internet (content) was often comprised of textfiles containing URLs and descriptions (metadata) about what could be found at those locations
Would be interesting to know what sort of damages YouTube would allege if someone violated the terms of service that attempt to restrict disseminating such information, e.g., metadata about other peoples' videos
The success of a YouTube copyright infringement claim seems dubious
Seeing Prejudice by Tim Minchin on the front page makes me very, very happy.
Love Tim Minchin <3
Should it be rather "Show HN"?
YouTube itself needs a competitor. There's too much ads.
This is cool and all, but what I see is an Anthropic model harvesting (again) human output and curation. That is the part providing almost the entire value of this aggregation wrapper. What I would have preferred to see the model undertake: is somehow imbibe the median Hacker News user persona (if there is one, the reccs did serve as a proxy for that in this case) and work with YouTube API to surface a list of videos with low viewership or traction, but serve the custom taste of this audience at high SNR. I know talk is cheap, but the latter to me is a bicycle and sewing machine, while the former a neatly raked sandpile.
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.
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can you guys recommend any other good sites for sourcing videos?
Now that this is created and word is out I think it will be gamed. I'd like to have a way to have it only attend to recommendations up to say now as a defense.
The 50% thumbnail is genius
bookmarked. so good.
Thank you Andrej, this is awesome!
i felt there can be some thing built for taste from hackernews and be applied in a lot areas
What you have done was and is a revolution, Karpathy.
I have been shouting that YT, the "video museum" is unmissable for cultivation in the current days ever since this obvious fact met the will of pitiful entities to bar it to minors (unbelievable) and impede it to adults (through privacy or practically dubious constraints). Karpathy has proven it once more.
Questions and suggestions:
-- Does it also contain submissions? What we believed were the most important ones are at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com , more than in the comments
-- Are you also processing 'youtu.be' links? We use them for brevity
-- The videos in HackerTube do not seem to be all we linked to at HN. I get only 6 months old videos as the closest in time, and I verified many are missing. The filter applied to select the links on HN is too restrictive.
-- Put the link on the "channel" anchor - if a video is hosted by that channel the channel is probably interesting. Even much, much better if you create "Channel" pages on HackerTube, to make them better browsable (for example, on YT it is extremely difficult to browse them - "see the oldest", "see all" - given the lack of pagination). (To get a good YT channel browser would be of immense value.)
-- Another paramount feature on YT that can use much better usability are transcripts - they are available but they must be better presented.
-- Maybe you could use the "three frames" at https://i.ytimg.com/vi/<videoid>/hq<1|2|3>.jpg
-- How often will the DB on hackertube be synced with the HN content (if one posts a link to YT on HN, how long before it will appear on HackerTube)? A clean way to add new material to HackerTube is sought.
-- What could happen to embedded YT links when access restrictions will be mandated by legislations?
-- There should be RSS on HackerTube. The correct formula should be, I believe, serve "a minimum of 10 and a maximum as the amount of new records of the past 48 hours".
-- Given the selected amount of videos, it could be possible to also index the videos by embedding. (I have just finished in the past few hours my own engine for embeddings operation - search, similarity, recommendation - over my daily updated ~million RSS records from YT: it can be done efficiently with minimal space allocation.)
-- Some posts here just gave me this later wilder suggestion: what if you could have an LLM in the internals of HackerTube that recognized and fixed (through descriptions and transcripts) the vague clickbait - e.g. translating titles like "This will be the solution to all the problems" into an additional "[that actually was: adding sugar to the soil may help the growth of basil]"...
Can i plz has rss
Kind of related, I extracted opinions on products and other things for large part of Reddit and HN:
https://www.trustmebro.reviews/r/hackernews
"47,699 products, places and tools ranked from 13,576,547 opinions."
Opinions extracted using local models running on 3090s in my basement. If someone wants to take it over, you can mail me.
The travel opinions on a map are pretty neat: https://www.trustmebro.reviews/c/travel?view=map
I love that this perfectly highlights all the HN astroturfing.
Love "longs"
this looks great and I love how snappy it is.. Youtube feels so slow compared to this
FP in 13 years, gratz
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?
It is perfectly well engineered content for the target audience ahead of the IPO. Gotta do something to push your stock options...
The funny part is that you can do such a youtube clone with something outdated like Qwen 3.5 35B, no need for the latest SOTA frontier trillion weight model.
Now we just need a model trained against the full content of these 6454 videos to use as a recommendation engine for high-quality new videos.
I'm sad that there seems to be no RSS feed. It looks very nice indeed if I can remember to look.
Finally! Someone using AI for something useful. This is really neat! Take note Google.
Could this not just be a playlist?
It is 14,139 videos.
You can open categories and see playlists for each of them.
Karpathy is such a legend.
Tired of low-effort YouTube clickbait slop? Just click on the Subscriptions heading to go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. You'll see only videos from the creators you have subscribed to. This one-click trick boosts the signal-to-noise ratio dramatically.
This looks brilliant!
cool! It would be nice to have a "watch a random video" button
How come there are no ads?
Build something to fix the wicked problems of the world.
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.
>>Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews
I'm actually surprised this was that easy to do, ngl
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)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36371539 (June 2023)
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)
This is a very niche forum that contains mostly textual data. I believe the full dataset is under 20GBs.
There turns out to be an export on HuggingFace as well as a bunch of parquets.
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.
Wake me up when true science is back.
In any case, im a big fan of Karpathy.
> 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?
Apparently Never Gonna Give you Up by Rick Astley has been recommended here in Hacker News at least once.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
They (mostly) stop in 2023 because we added it to a software filter.
The search results are a bit polluted by this helpful wag: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Sounds good, but could you please make it so that it can also be viewed without Javascript being enabled?
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.
Free the people.
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.
I think I’m getting a different homepage or just unfamiliar with what you are referring to - is this what you mean by IDW? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web
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.
I think you may have just gotten a bad roll since I have been scrolling on it for some time and haven’t seen any videos in that category. But I agree that that isn’t what I’d expect from the HN crowd
Where is the curl web API? Because I use noscript/basic HTML browsers, and this seems to require even a web engine from the whatwg cartel.
Would you be willing to share the code base of this site (sans videos list)? I know a person with a list of approx. 4500 curated youtube video links they've been maintaining for an entirely non-HN related purpose that would like to build a similar site and populate it with the video URLs. Right now it's in a much more clunky, awkward format.
Completely useless. Checked it and all the videos are worthless, like random joe rogan interviews.
a lot of this is still too maintstream
I wish youtube had an api with an upload date filter for all videos. One could then build a pre-ai youtube.
It is possible to add `before:yyyy-mm-dd` to the request text for the Youtube Search API, and it worked reliably last time I checked.
I thought I'd researched this. I will check it again. Thanks.
>I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me.
This is hilariously rich coming from the "I can't watch any movie from before the 90s because it's too boring" guy
Love it
Controversial opinion: The current state of the internet is not bad cause big tech has focused on increasing engagement. It has deteriorated cause normies have saturated the space. Projects like this are good because they have gone through the normie filter of hackernews.
I think if the big tech had focused on engagement while the users had remained mainly nerds and geeks, the result would've been extraordinary.
Whoa, what a breath of fresh air! Just watching videos without worrying about clickbait.
And those filters and sorting options - imagine what the internet could have been without enshittification.
Cool idea. Glad others are on the same page regarding the enshittification of YouTube content!
Really cool idea. I also realized recently that whenever I enter YT, I enter "nshittified wall of slop"...
I found this gem there: Rails Conf 2012 Keynote: Simplicity Matters by Rich Hickey (https://hackertube.org/watch/rI8tNMsozo0)
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
Ur filter missed Patrick Boyle, not only that dudes content is slop but his voice too xD
"I have doors that open like this. Not like this."
i wished yt would be so fast. yt itself is the most bloated heavy app
Now redo it with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, see how it compares.
Now do one for reddit
I've been doing that for a while, ever since i started to have meals alone.
open HN, filter by posts from youtube.
one thing that improves immensely the quality, is to login and configure HN to "show dead" (downvoted comments and links), then head to "new"+filter by youtube.
for some reason, people or bots downvote the really good links
> Media, journalism & propaganda
Amen, we should label it correctly more often. Hard to miss it nowadays, I guess.
Unfortunately HN is just another algorithm. It roughly aligns with what I already see on my youtube but includes some terribly old videos and a mix of videos from creators I'm currently subscribed to and channels I know I never want to watch again like Joe Rogan, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lex Fridman etc. This is indeed a HN video site and I hate it lol.
The youtube video recommendation algorithm isn't that bad if you're careful which videos you watch. Sometimes you'll take a risk on a video and it'll punish you with a week of similar videos though.
Where is the source, so I can roll my own specialized video site?
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.
I have found out that first round of data scrape/ingestion is pretty easy.
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?
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Well, some portion of it was just served to you over HTTP.
It's very likely that your agents can just build the rest, if the backend source isn't provided.
I think the core data is available here: https://hackertube.org/data
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Please do not cross into personal attack in HN comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Changelog push from HN comments on this thread:
- 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.
You said somewhere it is vibe coded, but the prompts / requirements are fun to keep and follow :) might save a day or two of writing prompts
Not a dig at Karpathy, I like him and the thing is nice to have, but the amount of glaze he receives for essentially a curated video playlist sourced off of a pre-configured list is unprecedented, to the point where people are ready to praise him for the way he sneezes.
You are missing the whole historical context, part of which is explicitly mentioned in the blog post which is the submission:
YouTube: repository of immense value; partly disastrous implementation; infrapolitical attacks.
This site is a real contribution to the solution of a swamp you do not seem to have perceived.
Yes.
And its still true that its amplified more because Karpathy released it. Id agree its a pretty mundane idea and product.
If Warren Buffet would do a video on how he clicks through a few stocks on Google Finance (I know he doesn't) for a minute or two, it would be more interesting to "most people" than any other anonymous pro finance dude, despite their incredible expertise with Google Finance (or Tradeview, or Bloomberg, etc.). The person behind an action does matter, as harsh as that is to some. The person represents an aggregate of proven past achievements, and therefore, we tend to value that in when checking out new things they do.
I think you are missing the point. A person who has built trust through their work will surely attract praise, respect or at least curious gaze. I am sure most things you own, follow or give importance to also have some known person or brand behind them.
Consistency is key. Just showing your foot at the door regularly matters. People remember the name - it becomes the brand.
None of this rebuts what he said
Wait until you take a look at X. People from Vercel / CloudFlare can essentially build todo list and get funding
john oliver. Simon Sinek. c'mon guys
What's wrong with Simon Sinek?
He’s the Deepak Chopra of leadership. Lots of trite aphorisms, nothing meaningful. No actual business accomplishments.
Kudos to him for making money, not going to knock him. But this is hackernews. People are hyper critical of competence, and that guy has never exhibited any success at business.
I agree he's not revolutionary but I also don't think he's some pseudo-intellectual influencer. In high school, I found a handful of his talks to be insightful and used them as material to teach general leadership principles (which, even today, I think plenty of people could stand to learn) through our student gov.
he’s no worse than a hallmark card, until something difficult happens.
He’s an AI trained on LinkedIn Posts
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I can't find it on GitHub. Is it open source?
Remarkably the source is so small I can just post it here.
> Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News.
That's not the source; that's an exercise for the reader.
Obviously they were jesting but it shouldn't be more than a few paragraphs.
> Is it open source? If not, I'm not going to use it.
Don't even use GitHub then as that is also closed source as well as this.
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Can you add videos sourced from lobste.rs?
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One of the better ones but in all honesty a random ass vibed site that's on front page because Karpathy
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 ).
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No personal attacks, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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And the amount of AI bots commenting in this thread illustrates a very depressing future for all of us
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Why do you think right wing extremism starts via youtube?
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> the algorithm promotes fascist anti government positions
Isn't fascism an authoritarian ideology? How can someone be authoritarian and anti-government at the same time?
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No that's not it, say again?
> A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Timothy Snyder argues that it is impossible to define satisfactorily as a neat, static formula. Instead, he defines fascism as a dynamic "way of seeing the world that denies reason", operating as a cult of will and emotion over objective fact. Rather than relying on single-sentence definitions
To me that sounds like anarchism, or maybe anarcho-capitalism. What makes fascism different from those ideologies?
Timothy Snyder argues that it is impossible to define fascism satisfactorily as a neat, static formula. Instead, he defines fascism as a dynamic "way of seeing the world that denies reason", operating as a cult of will and emotion over objective fact.
We cannot rely on single-sentence definitions. Or we risk repeating history.
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