Andrej Karpathy says 6,454 Hacker News picks beat YouTube's algorithm for him – Startup Fortune

Andrej Karpathy says 6,454 Hacker News picks beat YouTube’s algorithm for him  Startup Fortune

Andrej Karpathy used Claude to build HackerTube from 43M Hacker News comments, arguing curated human picks beat YouTube Claude's Opus 5.5 built the extraction pipeline and Sonnet filtered the pile into about 150 topics, while Karpathy spent roughly two hours on setup. HackerTube has no login, uses midpoint thumbnails, keeps session state in the browser, and the full dataset is exported for anyone to rebuild. Karpathy didn't ask YouTube to fix its recommendations. He had Claude build him a replacement in a weekend, and the thing that made it work wasn't the model, it was twenty years of human taste. In an October 31 blog post, Andrej Karpathy described building HackerTube, a video site assembled entirely from links Hacker News commenters have recommended since 2007.

He called YouTube's homepage an "enshittified wall of slop." The algorithm might work fine for the median user, he said, but it doesn't work for him. So he skipped the fix and built an alternative, using Claude to do essentially all of it. The scale of the input is the whole story. Karpathy had Claude pull roughly 43 million Hacker News comments spanning 2007 to 2026 and hunt for links to YouTube videos that kept getting recommended across threads, year after year, by different people with no coordination between them. Opus 5.5 built the extraction