# HackerTV HackerTV (https://hackertv.org) turns the videos [[Hacker News]] commenters keep recommending into always-on TV channels. Danny Salzman (dsalzman on HN) built it in a few hours with [[Claude Code]] after seeing [[HackerTube]], and credits [[Andrej Karpathy]]'s site for the data. The tagline says it well: "The videos Hacker News keeps telling each other to watch." HackerTube gives you a catalog. HackerTV takes the choice away: the site is "Broadcasting 24/7", and "Everyone sees the same thing." ## How it works - **Catalog.** It starts from HackerTube's catalog (ODC-By licensed), itself built on the open-index Hacker News archive. Unlike HackerTube's frozen snapshot, it's updated weekly: new HN comments come in through the HN Search API, code filters them, and Claude labels the videos - **Channels.** One channel per topic (DEVTV, SOLDER, RETRO, ORBIT...), plus HN Prime (the top 400), a music channel (24), and Late Night on channel 99, which airs from 11pm to 5am local time and shows color bars the rest of the day - **A TV, not a website.** Channel up and down, number keys to tune in, a program guide with "Now" and "Next", picture settings, captions, theater mode. `G` opens the guide, `P` is the power button - **Playback through YouTube.** Videos are YouTube embeds. Durations are estimates until YouTube's metadata loads, so some programs end early or get cut off ## What Hacker News said The Show HN (487 points, 83 comments) was mostly delight, with a few useful threads: - **Surfing beats picking.** Several people said flipping channels was more fun than choosing a video, one said the only problem is that it's "so entertaining and diverting", and many mentioned the nostalgia of old TV - **Share the prompt.** The longest subthread was about vibe-coded apps. Someone wrapped HackerTV in an Android TV app with Claude Sonnet 5.5, someone else made a Roku app for HackerTube from one prompt, and people proposed publishing prompts with the code (one suggested `/.well-known/prompt.md`). The counterpoint: sharing the generated source is more useful, because others can build on it instead of regenerating it - **Credit.** The info overlay credits "HN, [year]" instead of the person who recommended the video. For a site built entirely on other people's recommendations, that's worth fixing - **Why no ads?** Because the embeds already feed YouTube's ad business - **Shelf life.** One commenter predicted these vibe-coded HN sites would be abandoned within months. Another said apps are becoming disposable content - **Prior art.** Hacker News TV (2019), spelunkr.tv (Internet Archive videos) and ytch.tv do similar things. One commenter built a [[Jellyfin]] plugin that brings the same channel surfing to your own media library ## My take HackerTV solves the problem HackerTube left open. Even a filtered catalog of 6,454 videos asks you to choose, and choosing is work ([[Decision fatigue]], [[The Paradox of choice]]). Linear TV removes the choice. You land on something a person vouched for, then you watch or you flip. That's [[Engineer serendipity|serendipity by design]]. And since everyone sees the same program at the same time, it's closer to a shared experience than to a personal feed: the exact opposite of [[Algorithmic Curation]]. It also shows how [[Software for One]] spreads now. Karpathy published a dataset and a recipe. Within days, someone else built a different product on top of it, in a few hours, with the same kind of agent. The prompt-versus-code debate is interesting, but I side with the code: it carries hundreds of small decisions a prompt doesn't capture, and a model will never regenerate the same app twice. The shelf-life prediction is probably right. Most of these sites will disappear when their author moves on. That's fine for software you build for yourself. It's less fine once other people start relying on it. ## References - Site: https://hackertv.org - Show HN: "HackerTV – HN's most-recommended Youtube videos as 24/7 TV channels": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50346755 ## Related - [[HackerTube]] - [[Hacker News]] - [[Andrej Karpathy]] - [[Algorithmic Curation]] - [[Engineer serendipity]] - [[Decision fatigue]] - [[The Paradox of choice]] - [[Attention Economy]] - [[Software for One]] - [[Vibe Coding]] - [[Claude Code]] - [[Jellyfin]]