Build a curated video site from 20 years of Hacker News comments

Karpathy wanted a list of the videos that Hacker News readers keep pointing each other to, as an alternative to YouTube's own recommendations. Over a weekend he had Claude Code, running Opus 5.5, work through about 43 million comments posted on the site across 20 years and pull out the videos that come up again and again. Claude Code also did the data analysis and set up the server for the resulting site, HackerTube. Karpathy says his own part was getting a Google Cloud API key, renting a server and buying the domain. Afterwards he pointed Claude Code at a list of YouTube channels compiled by Tristan Hume and had it build a second site, TristanTube, from that list.

HackerTube came out with 6,454 videos. It needs no login, shows one frame from the middle of each video in place of a thumbnail, and keeps the viewer's state in the browser. Karpathy calls it a far better way to watch than YouTube's recommendations. TristanTube, with 47,000 videos, took about 3 minutes in one attempt by his account. He says work that used to take weeks now fits into a few hours.

This comes from a news write-up of Karpathy's posts on X, so the details are his own claims and there are no cost or token figures. The manual steps he kept, an API key, a server and a domain, are the ones that need a person's account or payment.