On 1 Nov, Andrej Karpathy shared HackerTube (https://hackertube.org/). He had Claude filter 43M Hacker News comments from 20 years down to 6,454 recommended videos, and he said the site took about 2 hours with Opus 5.5 in Claude Code. He also published the data as a public zip.

As a Lead SWE, my first question was whether I could pull off the same trick with a different topic and a different tool. I picked books, because HN comment threads are basically one long reading list. I picked Cursor, because that's the tool I use every day.

The result is HackerShelf: https://ishankdev.github.io/hackershelf/ (code: https://github.com/IshankDev/hackershelf).

How Karpathy's pipeline works

His DATA.md lays out the method, and I copied it:

Scan every HN comment from 2007 to 2026 in the open-index/hacker-news dataset for YouTube links.…