GoKawiilDeveloper builds HackerTube, a YouTube alternative sourced from Hacker News comments
A developer used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 model to build HackerTube.org, a YouTube-style site populated only with videos that commenters recommended on Hacker News. The project scraped HN comments from 2007-2026, filtered roughly 40,000 video recommendations down to 6,454 videos across 150 topics using Claude Sonnet, then wrapped the results in a YouTube-like interface with custom recommendations stored locally rather than via user accounts.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The project illustrates how quickly AI coding assistants can let individuals build functional, niche alternatives to mainstream platforms—the creator says the whole build took about two hours. It also reflects a broader frustration some users have with algorithmic recommendation systems on major platforms, suggesting curated, community-sourced alternatives could become easier to spin up as AI tooling improves.
- HackerTube.org surfaces 6,454 YouTube videos recommended in Hacker News comments from 2007-2026.
- The site was built in about two hours using Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet to filter and classify roughly 40,000 comments.
- It offers a YouTube-like interface with local, account-free recommendations and an option to export the dataset for others to build their own version.
Source: karpathy.bearblog.dev, 2026-10-31
Published there as: “HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN”
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