Guide

How to build your own HackerTube with Claude Code

Karpathy built HackerTube in about two hours by talking to Claude Code. The data is open, so you can fork it the same way. Here is the whole path, including what it costs.

1. Get the data

Download the zip from hackertube.org/data. It holds every video card, about 40,000 labelled HN comments, a topic tree, a "people also recommend" graph and search embeddings. It ships with a DATA.md written for coding agents. The licence is ODC-By 1.0: use it for anything and credit HackerTube.

2. Get a YouTube Data API key

View counts, durations and publish dates aren't in the zip because YouTube's terms forbid redistributing them. In Google Cloud, create a project, enable YouTube Data API v3, create an API key and restrict it to that API. Fetching all videos takes about 130 requests, well inside the free 10,000-unit daily quota.

3. Tell your agent what to build

Unzip the folder, open Claude Code inside it and describe the site you want. For example:

Read DATA.md. Build a web app from this data: a home feed that mixes HN classics,
hidden gems and recent favourites, topic pages, semantic search using the included
embeddings, and a page per video showing the HN comments. Fetch YouTube metadata
with the key in YOUTUBE_API_KEY and hide deleted videos.

4. Host it

The whole catalogue fits in memory, so any small server works: a $5 VPS like Karpathy's, or a container on Cloud Run or Fly. Search runs on the included 384-dimension vectors with a small CPU embedding model, no GPU needed.

What it costs

Or skip the build

HackerTube AI is this, already running, plus Google sign-in, YouTube connect and a personal feed. Pro is $5, once.