How videos get in

Hallway is a library of 8,620 software and computing videos: 8,054 recommended by 9,252 people, and 566 of the most-watched talks and lectures from conference and university channels. Nobody at Hallway picks individual videos. People recommended each one on Hacker News, Lobsters, Reddit, Stack Overflow or in a curated list, or a listed channel published it, and a published rule decides what is in and in what order. The idea comes from Andrej Karpathy's HackerTube, which does the same for videos recommended on Hacker News.

The inclusion rule

A video is in Hallway if one of these holds:

• At least 2 different people recommended it in the sources below.
• One person recommended it and their community agreed: a Reddit comment reached a score of 10, a Reddit post 25, a Lobsters story 10, or a Stack Exchange answer 5. Reddit posts need more because self-promotion usually arrives as a post.
• It was recommended on Hacker News, where HackerTube already required at least three people in three different months.
• A listed conference or university channel uploaded it, it is a talk, lecture, tutorial, explainer or panel of at least 10 minutes, it is among that channel's 30 most-watched long uploads, and it does not sell a product.

A video is left out if:

• more people disputed it than recommended it (33 in the current build),
• it is shorter than 60 seconds, or its uploader does not allow it to play outside YouTube,
• it is not about software, computing, data, AI, security, hardware or the work of building software,
• or it only matters around one release, launch or outage (84 in the current build).

A curated list on GitHub counts as one recommendation, but never gets a video in alone: anyone can open a pull request, and long lists collect links nobody checks again.

A link counts as a recommendation when the person points others to it: "watch this", "this talk changed how I write code", a video given as the answer to a question, or a list that includes it. Submitting the video itself as a Reddit link post or a Lobsters story counts too, and its score decides whether that alone is enough. A text post that only mentions a video is judged like a comment. Asking whether a video is right, sharing it as news and criticizing it do not count. An uploader linking their own video never counts, and Lobsters stories their submitter marked as their own work are left out of the count.

Ranking

Each person who recommended a video adds 1 plus log₂(1 + the score of their best comment, story or answer about it). Ten upvotes adds about 3.5, a hundred about 6.7, so one popular comment cannot outweigh several people. Hacker News comments count as 3 votes, or 10 when HackerTube labeled them a strong recommendation, and a list entry counts as 5.

Where a recommendation comes from changes its weight: 1.25× from practitioner communities, Hacker News and Lobsters, 1× from Stack Exchange and curated lists, and 0.75× from learner communities, where recommendations are plentiful but less tested.

Lasting recommendations count for more than one burst of attention: each further calendar month in which someone recommended a video adds 10% to its score, up to 100%. People who disputed it subtract half of the same weight. A video people kept recommending across 4 or more calendar years is marked a classic. Conference and university uploads nobody has recommended yet rank below every community pick.

The home page is a weighted shuffle, new on every visit: each video's chance of coming first is proportional to its score raised to the power 1.5, so the most recommended videos lead often but not every time, and videos further down get seen. Scrolling and chips keep one visit's order. Area, topic and channel pages, "Most recommended" in search and the Recently recommended filter keep the ranked order.

Feeds never put two videos from the same channel within four places, so one prolific channel cannot fill a screen.

Sources

Choosing these sources and their tiers, and choosing the channels below, are the editorial decisions in Hallway. The rule decides the rest.

Still being read: r/programming, r/ExperiencedDevs, r/compsci (comments), r/ProgrammingLanguages (comments), r/functionalprogramming (comments), r/rust, r/golang, r/cpp, r/C_Programming (comments), r/Python, r/javascript, r/typescript (comments), r/java, r/Kotlin (comments), r/csharp, r/dotnet (comments), r/haskell (comments), r/elixir (comments), r/Clojure (comments), r/ocaml (comments), r/scala (comments), r/Zig (comments), r/webdev, r/reactjs, r/Frontend (comments), r/node (comments), r/iOSProgramming, r/swift (comments), r/androiddev, r/FlutterDev (comments), r/gamedev, r/gameenginedevs (comments), r/GraphicsProgramming (comments), r/Compilers (comments), r/osdev (comments), r/embedded (comments), r/FPGA (comments), r/PostgreSQL (comments), r/Database (comments), r/databasedevelopment (comments), r/dataengineering (comments), r/devops, r/kubernetes (comments), r/aws, r/sre (comments), r/systemdesign (comments), r/MachineLearning, r/LocalLLaMA, r/netsec (comments), r/ReverseEngineering (comments), r/emacs (comments), r/vim (comments), r/learnprogramming, r/cscareerquestions, r/csMajors, r/learnpython, r/learnjavascript, r/learnmachinelearning, r/leetcode, r/AskComputerScience (comments). A community's posts and its comments each count once their whole history is read, so a half-read history never tilts the ranking toward the years read first.

Stack Exchange sites: Stack Overflow, Software Engineering Stack Exchange, Computer Science Stack Exchange, Database Administrators Stack Exchange, Game Development Stack Exchange, Information Security Stack Exchange, Data Science Stack Exchange and Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange.

Curated lists: programming-talks, awesome-talks, Coding Interview University, awesome-scalability, awesome-distributed-systems, cs-video-courses, every-programmer-should-know and awesome-database-learning.

Conference and university channels: GOTO Conferences, Strange Loop, NDC Conferences, InfoQ, CppCon, C++Now, ACCU Conference, Meeting C++, Rust, PyCon US, EuroPython, Confreaks, CNCF, USENIX, Linux Plumbers Conference, media.ccc.de, DEF CON, Black Hat, GDC, Devoxx, Papers We Love, CMU Database Group, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford Online, CS50 and Simons Institute. Vendor channels are not on the list; their uploads get in only when people recommend them, and watch pages mark videos the vendor made.

Reddit history comes from the Arctic Shift archive, Hacker News from HackerTube's dataset (ODC-By 1.0, built from the open-index/hacker-news archive), and Lobsters, Stack Exchange and GitHub from their public APIs. The newest recommendation considered is from Nov 2, 2026. Video details come from the YouTube Data API.

What the model labels

A language model (Gemini Flash) reads each video's title and description and the comments that link it. It labels the area, topics, technologies, format, level and shelf life; names the presenter only as the video describes them; marks videos the vendor made and videos that argue one side of a contested question; writes the one-line summary and a plain title; and marks each comment as a recommendation, a mention, a dispute or self-promotion. Hacker News stances come from HackerTube's own labels.

The rule above, not the model, decides what gets in. The model does not watch videos or check their claims, so labels describe what a video and its description say, not whether it is right. The comments themselves are on every watch page under "Why it's here", so you can check every label.

Counted, not labeled: the source code, slides and papers linked in a description, chapters, and the moments people linked to.

Limits

• Popular is not the same as correct. Disputes are shown and opinions are labeled, but a well-liked talk can still be wrong.
• Hacker News and Lobsters lean toward systems, languages and history. Mobile, game development and cloud certifications get fewer recommendations there, which is why the Reddit communities are listed by field.
• Old videos may show old versions of tools. Watch pages mark uploads that may be out of date.
• Recent videos have had less time to collect recommendations, so they rank lower at first. The Recently recommended filter helps.
• Forums outside these sources, podcasts without YouTube versions and paid courses are not included.

Download the dataset

The full ranking is free to download: every video id with its labels, recommendation counts, score and the links to the comments behind it. YouTube's terms do not allow redistributing titles and other video details, so the file has video ids only. There is also an RSS feed of the most recently recommended videos.

Download dataset.jsonBuilt Nov 2, 2026

Privacy

Hallway has no accounts and no analytics. Your history, likes, Watch later and playlists stay in this browser's storage and never reach a server. Videos play through YouTube's privacy-enhanced player (youtube-nocookie.com), which YouTube says does not store viewing information until you play a video. Clearing site data removes everything.

Hallway is not affiliated with YouTube, Google, Hacker News, Y Combinator, Lobsters, Reddit, Stack Exchange or any channel listed here. Videos remain on YouTube under their uploaders' terms. Back to videos