Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts
To demo this technology for Hacker News, we built HN.watch. It’s like HN, but with explainer videos instead of articles. We create them on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link.
While there are obvious visual drawbacks of using HTML instead of diffusion models, there are three big benefits: - Speed: Much faster to generate than pixel-based videos (just a few seconds from click to playback) - Cost: Our cost per video is ~$0.04. (Excluding image generation, which some videos utilize. Quickly blows up the cost) - Easy editing: the above benefits also make AI-assisted editing cheap & fast
Our hypothesis is that if video creation goes from “dollars and minutes” to “cents and seconds”, a bunch of new use cases will be unlocked. Here are some we see already: - A video explanation of every single Pull Request (we do this internally) - Give every page in your internal/extrernal docs a video - Turn a complex article into a video in ~4 seconds (via our Chrome extension) - Course creators can quickly draft lessons before recording the real thing - People also create a lot of personal stuff stories for their kids, wedding invitations, birthdays, etc
The stack is based on an open-source programming language (Imba) created by our CTO, Sindre Aarsæther. It compiles to JavaScript, so it interoperates fully with the npm + node ecosystem. You can learn more here: https://imba.io/
We’ve also built our own sync engine (OP), and a context management system for agents (Q). We feared this would make the LLMs struggle when writing code for us, as neither is in their training data (there’s very little Imba in there too). However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that LLMs actually are really good at our stack. This is probably because the stack is extremely dense. Imba is compact, and so is OP, where a single declaration sets storage, sync, permissions, UI, and what the AI sees. This means there’s no translations between frontend, API, db and JSON where the model can get confused and get things wrong.
Simply said, instead of using React.js, Express, Supabase, and LangChain, we built it all from scratch. Definitely suffering from the “not invented here” syndrome, lol! As for the models, we use Gemini, GPTs, Inworld, ElevenLabs, and a few others.
If you want to try it out, just take your pick: - The Web UI (scrimba.com/explain) - MCP (add it to your coding agent) - ChatGPT Plugin - Chrome Extension
You can find a link to all of the above in our docs: https://docs.scrimba.com/explain/introduction
And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs
Would love to hear your feedback and if anyone has ideas for other use cases.
PS: I expect quite a bit of pushback from HN for this launch, given how fan of text the HN crowd is. This kind of tool is not for everyone. But there are a lot of people today who prefer videos over text, especially in the younger generations.
Discussion 39 comments
This will work for young readers too, illiterates and foreigners. All three!!
I wonder what the challenge would be of making these videos more interactive would be? Also I do wonder if there is any research happening in making AI explainers more trustable.
The article: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-spanning-tree-video
The tool built by Claude to make the video: https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/tree/2808...
This is pretty crazy. It's not hard to imagine something like Reddit deploying this as a first party feature.
I made an OSS framework for these for when you want to go beyond one-shoting it: https://github.com/scosman/videowright
- Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and timestamp a real voiceover
- can reorder scenes both in code, and using ffmpeg for audio.
- interactive controls during authoring, can ask for micro edits or re-builds
- MP4 export/encoder
- Generates a video from a prompt (obvs)
Like Marquise Brownlee just has opinions I care about and I watch his videos for this reason.
If a video just explains something I could just read all I’m getting is a layer of obfuscation.
I think this is exactly the opposite of what AI should be used for. It is going to make people dumb.
Watching a video instead of engaging your own brain makes you feel like you learned something without actually trying and I would bet it works much less well.
If someone is there adding something beyond what is already there - ie someone like Maruqise. Then it makes sense for them to be there.
If not it is just brain rot.
People already have issues with concentration. Allowing them to further allow that muscle to atrophy will not be good.
But given how good a job this seemed to do at giving me more than just headlines, I'd love to have maybe even just an audio podcast feed of the top 10 stories like this compiled a few times a day. I would listen while I'm doing things when reading isn't practical.
tl;dr agree that we don't need this to replace reading, but I see that it can be a useful tool.
I’m still basically against this though. I consider it slop.
I'm going to be looking to reproduce this.
I have to say, if HN were to add an AI generated paragraph summary about each link at the top of each comments page, it would probably go a long way to improving
But I'm skeptical that people would embrace it. It's more about the optics, and it also relates to the old principle of "Read the article -- don't start opining based only on the headline." Many would probably say that you shouldn't offer an opinion if you've only read an AI distillation.
It could be wrong - or more likely, the article acknowledges likely objections and refutes them well, but that part didn't make it into the summary, so everyone starts raising very un-insightful points as though the author was oblivious to them.
"a compressor uses three main organs" @ 2:97
I don't dislike that it's video (because I know people who won't read can't be "made to read" by there not being "nice enough explainer videos"), but this is the kind of stuff that bothers me in both video and text, and greatly. I don't want to rant about it here because it's not specific to your product at all, it's not even specific to LLM, the internet and especially youtube is full of stuff that neither speakers/authors nor audience seem to ever parse. And if you're just downstream of big models you probably can't really influence that. But since you are NIH enjoyers, maybe you could train your own at some point? I don't want to consume such videos, but I do want those who do to have nicer ones, because that'd be good for me, too.
Thanks!
Kidding, I already sent it to a friend with ADHD who has been struggling to remain anchored to the tech world in any way besides Shorts.
But, culturally, I definitely hate the trend it implies!
Neat. Thank you for sharing.
I watched the videos and confirmed they are worse than brainrot.
1. I hate everything about this because I vastly prefer text over video for the same content, especially AI generated video
2. There are a lot of people for whom video is their preferred medium and so this will be valuable to them.
It's a technically cool project and your cost-per-video is impressively low. Best of luck!