HackerTube

About HackerTube and Andrej Karpathy’s original project

An independent recreation of HackerTube, inspired by the idea that years of human recommendations can make good work easier to find.

Where this project comes from

This website, hacker-tube.org, is an independently operated recreation of the original HackerTube. Credit for the original project goes to Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) and the Claude-based work described on its About page. We did not create the original collection or its underlying research.

The original About page describes HackerTube as built with Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and prompted into existence by Karpathy. It credits Claude Sonnet 5.5 with the comment labels, video cards and topic taxonomy. We preserve that distinction: Karpathy initiated the original project; the original page credits Claude with implementing its pipeline and website.

The idea we want to continue

People have spent years sharing talks, lessons and explanations with one another in community discussions. Those links carry context: who shared a video, what problem it helped with, and whether people returned to it over time. This site makes a collection of those conversations easier to browse alongside the videos themselves.

The principle is to start with people’s recommendations, then use software and AI to organize and classify them. A link alone is not an endorsement. The source data distinguishes recommendations from references, jokes and criticism, and the video pages retain those labels and links to the original Hacker News comments.

What is available today

This edition starts with HackerTube’s October 31, 2026 export: 6,454 videos, 39,834 labeled comments, 150 topics and 16 areas. The source archive spans Hacker News discussions from 2007 to 2026. According to its documentation, a video entered the collection after at least three people mentioned it in at least three different months, with substantive accompanying comments.

You can explore topic categories, follow curated playlists, search the collection, and read the source comments on individual video pages. A video’s presence in the archive does not mean everyone recommended it: some were only cited. AI-generated labels and summaries can also be wrong or omit context.

This recreation uses its own browsing, text-search and recommendation implementation. It does not reproduce the original site’s private search and ranking backend, and it does not claim that Karpathy personally selected or recommends every item. Video details and comments are a historical snapshot rather than a continuously updated record.

What we hope to explore next

We want to extend the same idea to other kinds of useful work: books recommended by identifiable experts, GitHub projects shared by people who use them, and recommendations from additional communities such as Reddit. The aim is to retain the source and context of a recommendation while making it easier to discover.

These are future directions, not features already available. Books and GitHub currently have reserved entrances only. No book collection, GitHub collection or Reddit feed has been added. New sources will need workable access, clear attribution and a way to distinguish an actual recommendation from a passing mention.

Credits and source material

  • Andrej Karpathy: the original project’s initiator, as credited by HackerTube. Visit @karpathy on X.
  • Original HackerTube: the source collection, original interface and project documentation. Visit hackertube.org or read its About page.
  • Claude: the original implementation and AI-generated annotations described by the source project. These credits describe the original project, not a human review of every record.
  • open-index/hacker-news: the public archive underlying the collection. View the dataset.
  • Hacker News contributors: their names and comment links appear on video pages. Their comments remain their own work and are not statements made by this website.
  • Video creators and uploaders: each video page displays its source title and channel and links to YouTube. Their work remains theirs; Karpathy and this site are not presented as its authors.

The exported dataset is credited under Open Data Commons Attribution License 1.0. This is not a claim that the dataset license grants ownership of the videos, images, trademarks or every third-party field. See the data information and original documentation for scope.

Disclaimer and independence

hacker-tube.org is not the original hackertube.org and is not operated, sponsored, approved or endorsed by Andrej Karpathy, Anthropic, YouTube, Google, Hacker News or Y Combinator. Names and links are used for attribution and identification. We do not imply an official relationship or transfer the original project’s reputation to this independent recreation.

We do not host the video files. Playback is provided by YouTube, which controls availability, regional restrictions, sign-in requirements and removal. Links, recommendations and AI summaries are provided for discovery and context, not as a guarantee of accuracy, quality, safety or suitability. Statements about health, finance, law or other consequential subjects should be checked against appropriate primary sources and qualified advice.

Privacy and playback

This site uses Google Analytics (GA4) to measure visits and usage. Google’s tag sends analytics requests from your browser and may use cookies, subject to browser settings. See Google’s Privacy Policy.

There is no account system. Likes, watch history, Saved and display preferences are stored in this browser. Thumbnail images are requested directly from YouTube’s image service, and embedded playback connects to YouTube through its privacy-enhanced player. These third-party services receive requests from your browser and apply their own policies; “privacy-enhanced” does not mean that playback makes no external requests.

About this edition: November 2, 2026. Source export: October 31, 2026.