DesignerTube

The YouTube videos that Hacker News keeps telling designers to watch.

Why

YouTube's recommendations are tuned for watch time. They're very good at finding the next thing you'll click, and not so good at finding the talk that changes how you design.

Hacker News is not a design forum, but for almost two decades its readers, many of them people who build interfaces for a living, have been pointing each other at exactly those videos: the HCI demo that still looks like the future, the typography lecture that finally made it click, the Dieter Rams documentary, the game-feel talk every UI designer should see. Those recommendations are scattered across millions of comments. DesignerTube collects the design ones in one place and makes them browsable, searchable and personal.

How it was built

1. Read all of Hacker News. Every comment and submission from 2007 to 2026 that links YouTube was pulled from the public HN search API and scanned for video links.
2. Find the design videos. Every video linked by at least two people in two different months is a candidate. Claude read each candidate's title, channel and the HN threads it was shared in, and judged which ones are about design: UX, interaction, service design, visual design, typography, design systems, industrial design, architecture, data visualization, game design and more.
3. Read each comment with an AI model. A link isn't always a recommendation. Claude read every comment linking a design video, with the title of the thread it was posted under, and judged what the commenter was doing: recommending it, citing it, joking or criticizing. It also picked out a short quote.
4. Keep the ones HN keeps coming back to. A video makes the cut if at least two different people recommended it, in at least two different months. (HackerTube uses three and three; design is a smaller slice of HN, so the bar is a little lower.)
5. Write a card for every video. From everything HN said about it, Claude wrote a short summary, why HN people like it, what kind of video it is, and whether it has aged well, then filed it under the topic list.
6. Rank by lasting recommendations. A video's standing comes from how many separate months people recommended it in. Being recommended again and again over the years counts for more than one viral spike.

What you can do

Home mixes HN classics, hidden gems that a few people love, recent favorites, topics you haven't explored yet and, once you like a few videos, things similar to them and things the same HN people also recommended. Hover a video to see why it's there.

Search understands topics, not just keywords. Browse by topic on Categories, or start with one of the Playlists. Every video page shows what Hacker News actually said about it, with links back to the threads.

Keyboard shortcuts: press ? to see them all, e.g. / to search and j/k to move through videos.

Fork it

Everything behind this site is yours to reuse. Give the zip to your AI agent (Claude Code or similar) and tell it what you want: a different interface, a weekly email of talks on your topics, an analysis. The zip includes a DATA.md written for agents.

Download the data (4.0 MB) → Released under ODC-By 1.0, like the Hacker News archive it comes from.

Privacy

There are no accounts. Your likes, history and Watch later list are stored only in this browser. Videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed.

Credits

Inspired by HackerTube by @karpathy, and built the same way: by Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, with comment labels and video cards written by teams of Claude Sonnet agents. Not affiliated with YouTube, Google, Hacker News or Y Combinator.