About HackerTube

HackerTube collects the YouTube videos Hacker News commenters recommend to each other: talks, lectures, explainers and documentaries that keep coming up in threads, sometimes for more than a decade. It is for people who would rather watch something a thoughtful stranger vouched for than whatever a feed serves next.

How videos are chosen

Every HN comment from 2007 to 2026 that links a YouTube video was read and labelled: a strong recommendation, a recommendation, a neutral reference, a joke or criticism. A video is included once at least three different people mentioned it in three different months. That leaves 6,454 videos and 39,834 comments from 9,563 people who recommended something.

How they are ranked

A video scores one point for every separate month someone recommended it, plus half a point for every month with a strong recommendation. Steady, long-lived praise beats a single viral thread.

Credits

HackerTube.video is an independent project built on the open HackerTube dataset and the open-index/hacker-news archive, both released under ODC-By 1.0. Hacker News comments remain the work of their authors; video titles and channel names belong to their creators. It is not affiliated with Hacker News, Y Combinator, YouTube or hackertube.org. See data & method for details.