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Show HN: HackerTV – HN's most-recommended Youtube videos as 24/7 TV channels (hackertv.org)
318 points by dsalzman 1 day ago | 65 comments
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.

View on Hacker News


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.

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.


I'm thinking that if somehow we could force temperature to 0, it could even be "prompt as compressed source". In the sense that you know if you run a given prompt through a given model version you would get the exact same results. This could have some space applications. You send a powerful model to space, iterate with the same model on earth and once the results are good only send the prompt to the remote model... Well, now that I'm typing it, I guess if the model is good enough you don't even need that and only give it a goal before leaving.

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

Yes. Open prompts.

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

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

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!


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

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.

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.


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

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

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 :)


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

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

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)

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

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

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

All Zachtronics games

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

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

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..."

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


how come i dont get youtube ads?

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

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-...


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

Nice. I like this.

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

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

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

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.


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

Thanks!

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

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

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

https://ytch.tv/

reminds me of


This is amazing!

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

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

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!

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

I appreciate the little sound when you change the channel.

Haha this is so well done! Love it!

I love the skeumorphism you put on it!

I found it a very cool concept

Finally a competitor

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...


Very well done.

Hah, nice

Now turn the comments into an MST3K style overlay

Now we need HackerRadio to run in the background.

It's on channel 24.

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

No channel ⁶ ⁷ highly disappointed

now i need a apple tv app for this

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

now we just need this on Google TV!

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

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.


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

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

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