Show HN: HackerTV – HN's most-recommended Youtube videos as 24/7 TV channels

447•dsalzman•1d ago

I saw HackerTube (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319510) a few days ago, the YouTube videos HN keeps recommending, pulled from 19 years of comments. It made me want to flip through them instead of picking, so I built a TV for it. I have Algo fatigue.

Each topic area is a channel (DEVTV, SOLDER, RETRO, ORBIT, ...), plus HN Prime (the top 400), a music channel, and Late Night on ch 99, which only broadcasts 11pm-5am your local time and shows color bars otherwise.

Similar to HackerTube it was built with Claude Code in a few hours.

All credit for the data goes to HackerTube. Happy to hear channel ideas.

Comments

smokel•23h ago

Is someone working on HackerTldr? Three sentences that describe the target page would save me a lot of time.

Edit: HackerTV looks great, well worth the click :)

freedomben•23h ago

I'm looking forward to hacker games personally. I'd love to see what games are commented on here, other than factorio

smokel•23h ago

I can highly recommend the board game, not the programming language, Go.

dreambigwrkhard•23h ago

Someone made that already...... Was on Show HN last month.

duck•22h ago

Here is one version someone already made: https://hnarcade.com/

nomilk•21h ago

This is cool. It would be better if it linked to the hn comment/s and showed some gameplay on hover (also the splash page is unnecessary, ideally https://hnarcade.com/games/category/games should be the home page)

duck•19h ago

Speaking of... I should of linked to the actual Show HN page instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793693

iltk•3h ago

This sent me down a rabbit hole which led to 3 in-game days spent as a peon wageslave.

https://cauldron.itch.io/wageslave

LelouBil•20h ago

All Zachtronics games

wmchen•23h ago

HackerSentiment, which tracks current sentiment of the frontpage of HN, coming soon, which will show total ambivalence to AI.

pwython•22h ago

I've had the idea for years for a browser extension that showed positive/negative sentiment scores next to each post, based on comments. Mostly because often the top comment on posts are "ackchyually..."

jdthedisciple•21h ago

you don't need an app for that anymore

your dot or muse will happily do it for you and in fact even send you a notification about it right on your phone

Barbing•13h ago

Five of them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50347818

iAMkenough•23h ago

Now we need HackerRadio to run in the background.

frangonf•23h ago

It's on channel 24.

iAMkenough•22h ago

I was expecting talk radio, but I'm enjoying the music too!

thefourthchime•23h ago

Hah, nice

TuxedoBuddy•22h ago

No channel ⁶ ⁷ highly disappointed

joaobotelho423•22h ago

I found it a very cool concept

i_love_retros•22h ago

I guarantee all these vibe coded hacker* sites will be abandoned in a few months. Easy to make, easy to get bored of maintaining and paying for.

Gonna be a wasteland of vibe coded shit that meant nothing.

mesh•22h ago

Apps are just becoming content. Get your 15 seconds of engagement, and then move on to the next thing.

MarchApril•16h ago

No doubt. I just checked my bookmarks and removed tons of bloat.

minimaxa•22h ago

Love it, you missed a real opportunity with channel 42?

We did a combo books/video HN remix a few days ago: https://vektormemory.com/blog/v2-0-4-hacker-news-books-video...

jimmiles•22h ago

This one is the best of the bunch so far (I loved the books one, too, though!). This one has potential! May it never be vibe-abandoned!

sebastianconcpt•22h ago

I love the skeumorphism you put on it!

nomilk•22h ago

A version of this that's only live videos would be cool.

imzadi•22h ago

Now turn the comments into an MST3K style overlay

unquietwiki•22h ago

This reminds me of https://spelunkr.tv/, except without the 90s channel guide. That effort is using Internet Archive videos to populate channels.

indigodaddy•21h ago

This is amazing!

boltzmann64•13h ago

https://ytch.tv/

reminds me of

cpan22•21h ago

now we just need this on Google TV!

entropie•21h ago

Very well done.

redbell•20h ago

Well done, love it. It, somehow, reminded me of this Show HN from two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023

krat0sprakhar•20h ago

Haha this is so well done! Love it!

flanked-evergl•20h ago

History channel (ch11) has Joe Rogan. Must be some kind of joke, but it's not a funny one.

101rakibulhasan•20h ago

Finally a competitor

ks2048•20h ago

Does Youtube try to block third-party front-ends, or no?

gavmor•20h ago

Yup, exactly what I wanted as soon as I saw Hackertube

surya_waters•19h ago

Love it ! Thank you for creating this. I am in the process of minimizing my digital consumption and was looking for something like this to live like if it's the 70s. Shameless plug: i have two chrome plugins to reduce digital distractions if anyone is interested. Sanctum : https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sanctum-its-time-to...

FlowTube : https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flowtube-%E2%80%93-...

ajairaj•18h ago

now i need a apple tv app for this

roguemonkey1976•17h ago

Oh my god yes please! YouTube is a bad time waster for me. That would at least ensure a level of quality

low_tech_punk•18h ago

I'm wondering how come there is no ads? Why would YouTube allow this type of embedded player?

freakynit•17h ago

Google runs on ads. Ads need data. Embeds give data.

dsalzman•18h ago

Creator here - thankful and appreciative of all the positive comments. I hope people enjoy!

richardw•17h ago

Very cool! I love the effort to give it a personality.

dsalzman•16h ago

Thanks!

oever•12h ago

I think it's weird to limit the chosen content by publication site instead of by content type: video.

My personal HackerTV is media.ccc.de and I always appreciate when good content is hosted with simple <video/> tags or peertube.

richardw•17h ago

Love the multitude of ideas! Upvoted. I did repo’s a couple days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50342272

It has some cool stuff if you click around some. Feedback very welcome!

5555watch•17h ago

Oh damn this is much cooler than I expected! For some reason skimming through channels is more enjoyable than click a video I'd probably wouldn't click on

kreelman•14h ago

Indeed... Only problem is that it's so entertaining and diverting.

the_sleaze_•17h ago

I would like to get this up and running on my Roku, does anyone know how I could manage that?

thechairman12•17h ago

Okay, this is the best one I have seen. Thank you.

spditner•16h ago

What I would like to see for vibe coded novelty apps that are not realistically going to see updates are the prompts-as-source. For instance, I one-shotted a Roku app to play the HackerTube listings, and it works good enough:

  Build a sideloadable Roku channel/app for browsing and playing videos from
  https://hackertube.org/. Inspect HackerTube's API or video pages and use Roku
  BrightScript/SceneGraph. Deliver a complete zipped Roku channel with source,
  setup instructions, and any necessary metadata/proxy details. Aim for Roku
  Developer Mode sideloading.

mh-•13h ago

It'd be neat if (for web stuff) people put them at like /.well-known/prompt.md.

invaliduser•13h ago

Yes. Open prompts.

ozim•12h ago

I would rather have it the other way around.

Source for one-shotted apps so LLM gives you repo back and template to build on instead of burning electricity on ideations from scratch.

I imagine 90% of stuff could be just that.

But I also imagine people just cloning repo don’t feel it truly belongs to them, but when agent slops out code for them somehow they feel like they did the work themselves.

TomGarden•11h ago

Agreed! We desperately need an OSS framework of basic modular building blocks for the new generation of vibecoders, if nothing else just to stop the massive waste of resources of having all the models build the same thing hundreds of thousands of times.

tudorw•16h ago

can you add a Micheal Levin channel, no 42 :)

asimjalis•15h ago

Nice. I like this. One minor usability issue I saw. In the guide, the channels start with the lowest on top and then go down to the higher ones. But the up and down arrows work the opposite way. For example, the down arrow moves me to a lower channel, which is the opposite direction of the guide. Maybe there is no elegant solution to this.

vavooom•15h ago

This did scratch a nostalgic itch honestly! Great execution of interluding into the middle of episodes as well to feel organic and live.

thoughtpeddler•15h ago

I kept flipping channels until I got to a clip of Zuck in 2005 saying:

> "We're trying to figure out what to do with Apple. We're obviously sensitive to people's privacy."

Wow.

looksjjhg•14h ago

I appreciate the little sound when you change the channel.

tesnorindian•13h ago

Looks really cool. Got me back to my old TV days.

flavius37•12h ago

Here comes the hacker of hackers of hackers... : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50362372

letmeindude•12h ago

Nice. I like this.

sourcecodeplz•11h ago

how come i dont get youtube ads?

nunclieh•11h ago

Maybe I didn't see it, but have you published the source code? If so, where can I find it?

Amazing idea btw.

cs02rm0•10h ago

I'm tempted to leave a TV on with this for my kids. Force them to learn a thing or two. :)

sportsracersss•6h ago

This is great! Can you get it onto the LG App Store? I'd actually tune in.

s_dev•6h ago

Oh I built something recently like this as well. I was inspired by this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023 so made it in to a Jellyfin plugin.

https://xn--teilifssen-04a4l.ie/

Channel surfing your own Jellyfin library.

pentakkusu•4h ago

Installing it rn

ciex•6h ago

Oh that's nice, would like to have that as a webOS app without the TV chrome around it.

heysrb•4h ago

This is cooler than Karpathy's!

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