HackerTube

The YouTube videos that Hacker News keeps telling each other to watch.

Why?

YouTube's recommendations are tuned for watch time. They're very good at finding the next thing you'll click, and not so good at finding the talk you'll still be thinking about next year.

Meanwhile, for nearly two decades, Hacker News commenters have been pointing each other at exactly those videos: the conference talk that changed how someone writes software, the lecture series that finally made a subject click, the documentary nobody else seems to know about. Those recommendations are scattered across millions of comments. HackerTube collects them in one place and makes them browsable, searchable and personal.

How it was built:

1. Read all of Hacker News. Every comment from 2007 to 2026 (from a public dataset of the full HN archive) was scanned for YouTube links. That turns up well over a hundred thousand different videos.
2. Keep the videos HN keeps coming back to. A video makes the cut if at least three different people linked it with some real commentary, in at least three different months. One-off links and pure drive-bys fall away, leaving roughly 7,000 videos.
3. Read each comment with an AI model. A link isn't always a recommendation. Claude read each comment, along with the title of the HN story it was posted under, and judged what the commenter was doing: recommending the video, citing it as a source, using it as a joke, or criticizing it. It also picked out a short quote and a few topics.
4. Write a card for every video. Using the video's YouTube details and everything HN said about it, Claude wrote a short summary, why HN people like it, what kind of video it is, and whether it has aged well. Videos are then sorted into a shared list of topics.
5. Rank by lasting recommendations. A video's standing comes from how many separate months people recommended it in. Being linked again and again over the years counts for more than one viral spike.

What you can do:

• Home mixes several kinds of picks: HN classics, hidden gems that HN loves but few people have watched, recent favorites, topics you haven't explored yet, and, once you like a few videos, things similar to them and things that the same HN people also recommended. Hover a video to see why it's there.
• Search understands topics, not just keywords. Searching "distributed systems" finds talks that never use those words.
• Browse by topic on the Categories page, or start with one of the Playlists.
• Every video page shows what Hacker News actually said about it: the real comments, with links back to the threads.
• Like, Watch later and History work like you'd expect. Likes steer your Home feed.
• Keyboard shortcuts: press ? to see them all, e.g. / to search and j/k to move through videos.