HackerTube — tech videos the Hacker News community actually watches
1,235 videos · 2,801 mentions · never view countsFeatured
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Categories
tech only · non-tech kept separatelyArtificial Intelligence
PAGE264Programming
PAGE196Computer Science
PAGE45Security
PAGE61Startups & Products
SOON56Data & Infrastructure
SOON48Hardware & Engineering
PAGE366Science & Math
PAGE187Why HackerTube is different
HackerTube is a discovery layer for tech videos, built on one rule: a video belongs here only if the Hacker News community actually shared and discussed it. The HackerTube index covers 1,235 tech videos across 2,801 mentions, each traceable to the HN thread that surfaced it — no trending imports, no algorithmic filler, no paid placement.
YouTube's own recommendations optimize for watch time. Hacker News optimizes for what working practitioners consider worth an hour of attention — conference talks, engineering deep dives, explainers that still hold up a year later. HackerTube turns those thread-level judgments into a rankable, explainable index of tech videos.
How HackerTube ranks tech videos
Every video carries a community score computed only from Hacker News signals. Nothing about the video itself — views, likes, subscriber counts — enters the ranking.
- Independent threads. A video discussed in three separate HN threads ranks higher than one reposted link, because three independent communities had to care about it at different times.
- Distinct members. Sharers are counted as distinct HN accounts, so a single user re-posting a link adds nothing to a video's score.
- Sorts, not a feed. Most Discussed favors proven discussion depth, Community Picks ranks by score, and Recently Found surfaces the newest mentions — you always know why a video is in front of you.
Why trust discussions over view counts
View counts measure distribution; discussions measure judgment. A video can accumulate millions of views inside a recommendation loop while saying nothing new, while the same video posted to Hacker News gets interrogated in public by people who work in the field. When an HN thread settles on "worth watching", that verdict is worth more than any counter. That is the entire premise of HackerTube.
What gets indexed
Only videos a human classified as tech make HackerTube's default index, grouped into AI & ML, programming, hardware & engineering, science & math, security and computer science. Non-tech videos stay in a separate lane, dead links are checked against YouTube and flagged rather than silently dropped, and the whole pipeline refreshes daily from the HN Algolia API.
Freshness and availability
The index grows every day through an incremental ingest that watches new HN threads for video links, resolves them through YouTube, and backfills the parent story behind each comment mention. Videos that later disappear from YouTube are marked unavailable instead of being deleted, so a discussion you remember stays findable. Nothing is inferred — every classification decision can be traced back to a labeled record, and the scoring rules run in plain SQL you could audit yourself.
Using HackerTube
Search the full index from the bar above, or start from a category. Every watch page shows which HN threads discussed the video, who shared it, and the top comments around it — the context YouTube deliberately hides. If a video is here, you can always find the exact conversation that put it here, which is the whole point of HackerTube.
HackerTube FAQ
Is HackerTube affiliated with Hacker News or YouTube?
No. HackerTube is an independent index built from public APIs — HN Algolia for discussions, YouTube oEmbed for metadata. Videos play through YouTube's official embed player and are never rehosted.
How is HackerTube different from YouTube search?
YouTube search ranks by relevance and watch signals inside its own platform. Here, a video ranks because independent HN threads and distinct members shared it — and you can open those threads to see the reasoning, not just the result.
How often does the index update?
An incremental job runs daily, picking up new threads and comment mentions, resolving fresh video links, and re-checking availability. Historical backfills extend the index in labeled, auditable batches.
Does the ranking use view counts anywhere?
Never. View counts are not fetched, stored, or displayed anywhere on the site — the premise is that discussion depth predicts value better than distribution does.