HackerTV

HackerTV turns the YouTube videos Hacker News has kept recommending for 19 years into a retro TV that never stops broadcasting. Its author, dsalzman, posted it to Hacker News on November 3, 2026, built it with Claude Code in a few hours, and the post picked up 485 points; the channel lineup comes from Karpathy's HackerTube, and the videos themselves still play on YouTube.

Every topic is a channel: DEVTV for developers, SOLDER for hardware, RETRO for retro computing, ORBIT for space, plus HN Prime with the top 400 overall, a music channel, and Late Night on channel 99, which only broadcasts from 11pm to 5am your local time and shows color bars the rest of the day. Everyone sees the same thing at the same time, just like real TV — no picking, no algorithm pushing you around.

It works like an old TV: arrow keys change channels, number keys tune directly, G opens the guide, F adjusts the picture, M mutes, C turns on captions, I shows info, T switches to theater mode, and double-clicking goes fullscreen. The lineup updates itself once a week: it searches Hacker News for new comments, filters out video links, and has Claude tag and sort them.

It's free and needs no account. Two things to know: videos play as YouTube embeds, so a video with incomplete metadata can occasionally show a standby screen or fall out of sync when switching channels; and the lineup only covers what Hacker News recommends — videos outside that world aren't here.