HN Tube field note
What is HackerTube?
How HackerTube turned recurring video links in Hacker News discussions into a browsable catalog, and how HN Tube uses that public export.
HackerTube is a video discovery project built from YouTube links that appeared repeatedly in Hacker News comments. Its October 31, 2026 export contains 6,454 distinct YouTube video IDs and 39,834 comment–video mention records spanning discussions from 2007 to 2026.
How the list was formed
A video entered the source dataset after at least three different people linked it in at least three different months, with meaningful surrounding text. An AI labeling step then classified each retained mention as a recommendation, strong recommendation, neutral reference, joke or criticism.
That distinction matters. Repeated discussion is not automatically endorsement: roughly one quarter of the exported videos have no positive recommendation label among their retained mentions. HN Tube excludes those records from its initial indexable pages.
What HN Tube adds
HN Tube is an independent, unofficial project built on the public export. It adds server-rendered topic pages, dedicated video reference pages, transparent ranking notes and direct links back to the original Hacker News context. It does not host or redistribute the videos themselves.
The original project remains the source of the dataset. Visit HackerTube for its interactive experience, or read our methodology for the exact publication rules used here.