Andrej Karpathy: the videos Hacker News recommends
Not the channel's most viewed videos: the ones HN commenters kept linking with real commentary. The top pick, "The spelled-out intro to neural networks and backpropagation: building micrograd", hN treats it as the best starting point for really understanding backprop and neural nets, because Karpathy explains the why with intuition and builds everything in code.
- 17 HN recommenders 16 months 2022–2025lectureHN treats it as the best starting point for really understanding backprop and neural nets, because Karpathy explains the why with intuition and builds everything in code.
- 10 HN recommenders 8 months 2025–2026lectureHN's most frequent recommendation for a clear, approachable foundation in how LLMs work without heavy math.
- 14 HN recommenders 8 months 2023–2025tutorialIt is the go-to recommendation for learning how transformers and LLMs actually work, praised for its clarity and Karpathy's teaching.
- 9 HN recommenders 6 months 2023–2026talkHN recommends it as the dense, approachable starting point for understanding LLMs and often cites it for specific claims about scaling and training.
- 5 HN recommenders 5 months 2024–2025lectureRecommended as the best deep dive on tokenizers, worth the two hours for anyone working with LLMs.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2024tutorialHN recommends it as a long but worthwhile way to demystify how language models work technically.
- 2 HN recommenders 1 months 2016–2023courseHN lists it as a free, brilliant introduction to deep learning and computer vision, often within ML self-study plans.
Questions
Which Andrej Karpathy video does Hacker News recommend most?
The spelled-out intro to neural networks and backpropagation: building micrograd: recommended in 16 different months by 17 HN users between 2022 and 2025.
Is this every Andrej Karpathy video?
No. Only videos that at least three different HN users linked, in at least three different months, with at least a sentence of their own commentary. That filter is what makes the list useful.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.