There seems to be a new trend brewing on X: turning almost twenty years of Hacker News comments into useful services.
First, Andrej Karpathy (AI researcher, former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder) got sick of YouTube's recommendations and spent about two hours with Claude Opus 5.5 building HackerTube — a catalog of 6,454 videos that have been regularly recommended in Hacker News comments. It's not his first quick experiment with Claude: he previously built a Lord of the Rings world for $10 to stress-test a model. Instead of clickbait thumbnails, it shows "frames from roughly the middle of each video" (not totally sure why that's better than normal thumbnails, but sure! Karpathy's tweet about HackerTube already has 40,000 likes).
Right after, developer roansh built an equivalent for books — Hacker Books. Claude wrote almost all of it, from data processing to the site itself; the author steered the process and made the calls.
Top 3 videos on HackerTube:
1. Vectors — 3Blue1Brown
Vectors and linear algebra through visual animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk_zzaMoSs
2. Y Not — Jim Weirich
Functional programming and lambda calculus in Ruby.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs
3. Indistinguishable From Magic
How computer chips are made — and why it's basically magic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
Top 3 books on Hacker Books:
1. "The Art of Computer Programming" — Donald Knuth
The foundational work on algorithms.
https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL257263W
2. "Gödel, Escher, Bach" — Douglas Hofstadter
Math, music, self-reference, and the nature of thought.
https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL716850W
3. "Snow Crash" — Neal Stephenson
Cyberpunk with a metaverse long before Zuckerberg.
https://hackerbooks.org/#/book/OL38501W
Funny enough, negative mentions count toward the ranking too — "a must-read" and "complete garbage" can end up feeding the same stats.