The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.
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.
97 comments
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)
We're not using Opus 5.5 btw, as it would be too expensive. Our goals is to eventually get the cost down to 1 cent for a 1 minute video, and with 1 second delay from submit to playback. For that, we need dirt cheap and lightning fast models.
To test it I tried "Who Killed Paulina Borsook's Career?" The summary is correct I did not hear any errors. https://www.wired.com/story/paulina-borsook-profile/ https://hn.watch/?item=49866903
It did do what I expected from such a system: - It removed the fun parts of the article and the way it is written. - Stated some interpretations as fact without naming the source Article '"That gunshot prematurely aged my brain,” she said' Summary 'The impact prematurely aged her brain'
One surprise is did not like: The sharpest concrete thing was a .45 caliber bullet. Feels like some sort of attempt to add original humor and I do not like it.
This is the worst kind of article for this kind of summary and I feel like it really shows the most and least impressive parts of the system.
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!
I hate all of this - OpenAI, Claude, Cursor, Windsurf etc
It screams detached Silicon Valley tech company to me, and I will never watch a single of them
1. I loathe video with the white-hot glow of a thousand angry suns, and loathe LLM slop-digests of things more still.
2. I spend tremendous amounts of time in situations where I can listen but not read, whether driving or on my bike, and this is a legitimately useful way to catch up on HN in those situations.
This should not be judged as a way to read hn, where users reading, it's more of a demo for technical users of their core startup tech.
I still don't like it, I feel it's a very small script with like ffmpeg and an LLM HTTP call, but that same thing was said about dropbox. It's also like 2 years late, so the timing is off.
I'm often negative in the comments of people launching their startup ideas, but I think that's fair, I don't like the atmospheres where we are supposed to pep talk each other and tell ourselves that it's really cool.. and then their project dies while everyone pats them in the back, I think yc is explicitly about that type of nuanced feedback, this needs a pivot as-is.
What Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS is doing with generative voice design in this area super interesting.
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.
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.
This is pretty crazy. It's not hard to imagine something like Reddit deploying this as a first party feature.