# Karpathy's HackerTube curates videos from 20 years of Hacker News comments

> Original title: 2 hours with Opus 5.5 on Medium effort. Not even High.

- Source: Rohan Paul
- Published: 2026-11-01T19:59:35.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/gj9tqfu0ce4fhcwhzcvx2b5og
- Original: https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/2116983513425883148

## Summary

Rohan Paul relays Andrej Karpathy's account of HackerTube, a site he built in about two hours with Claude Code and Opus 5.5 on Medium effort. Claude filtered 43 million Hacker News comments over 20 years down to 6,454 recommended videos. The author says he only supplied a Google Cloud API key, a VPS and a domain name, and that the site is available at hackertube.org.

## Why it matters

The post shows how a developer built a working site with Claude Code and Opus 5.5, offering a concrete workflow for reproducing similar projects.

## Post

2 hours with Opus 5.5 on Medium effort. Not even High.

Karpathy didn’t like YouTube’s recommendations, so he used the videos engineers kept recommending to each other in Hacker News comments over 20 years instead. 

Claude scanned 43 million comments, found 6,454 such videos, and built and launched a website to browse them, all in about two hours.

![](https://badinfluence.news/api/img-proxy?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FHWEJHWDa0AAIkfe.jpg&mode=thumb&exp=1793836800&sig=ad84c1987443de68)

## Quoted post @karpathy

> Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5:
> https://hackertube.org/
> 
> - Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session)
> - Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads
> - Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version
> - HackerTube Longs ✊
> 
> A bit more on the process:
> I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 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 for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.
> 
> Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/2116957135661945283