This Week in Startups
01:05:50 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:05:50] S1: Over one time had a real smelly Uber situation. That's [01:05:54] S0: really not I have two versions of this. One, the perfume things they put everywhere, I'm very sensitive to, so I start sneezing. So I just have to ask the guys. And you know what? The black cars have that more than anybody. They put like three of They them on every [01:06:06] S1: want it to smell nice. Yeah. [01:06:08] S0: And they put that in the blower. So you put air conditioning on, it's blowing it. So now you're basically got a wind blowing machine with peppermint or lemon scent blowing in my face. Literally so sensitive to it. My eyes can tear and I start sneezing. They should have scents. I prefer no scents, etcetera. So they should put that at the front of it. Because it's very easy to actually get rid of the scent. You just put those things away. [01:06:35] S1: So Anthropics' Andrej Karpathy got fed up with YouTube's recommendations. Over the weekend, he built his own YouTube. It is called HackerTube. He had Claude go through 43,000,000 hacker news comments going all the way back to 2,007. He pulled out the YouTube videos people kept recommending year after year, so the result is a customized library of 6,454 videos across a 150 topics. No login, no algorithm chasing your clicks. Said it took about two hours of Claude code with Opus 5.5 to build it, and he calls it a significantly better viewing experience. Have you have you tried out HackerTube, Jason?
01:06:35 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:06:35] S1: So Anthropics' Andrej Karpathy got fed up with YouTube's recommendations. Over the weekend, he built his own YouTube. It is called HackerTube. He had Claude go through 43,000,000 hacker news comments going all the way back to 2,007. He pulled out the YouTube videos people kept recommending year after year, so the result is a customized library of 6,454 videos across a 150 topics. No login, no algorithm chasing your clicks. Said it took about two hours of Claude code with Opus 5.5 to build it, and he calls it a significantly better viewing experience. Have you have you tried out HackerTube, Jason? [01:07:15] S0: I I pulled it up. It's it's awesome. It's just great to make new interfaces for datasets. YouTube should be thrilled because if you click on these, it's going to still have the ads embedded in it. What you've done is you've removed the cruft. And I think this is going to be a very interesting moment in time. Anybody could have built this in sixty days with two developers and a designer, but nobody would take the time to do it. I did something similar this same past week. I've talked before about my frustration on Amazon in just trying to get to a product to buy. [01:07:55] S1: The real product below all the ads and sponsored whatever whatever. Yeah.
01:07:55 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:07:55] S1: The real product below all the ads and sponsored whatever whatever. Yeah. [01:08:00] S0: So I... In... While we were on the pod last week, we were talking about Yeah. Shopping or whatever, and I just wrote, like, two sentences. I gave it a simple prompt, and then I forgot I did it. And then I got back to my desktop, there was an alert in Claude. And take a look at this tweet I sent you. You pull it up there. I made my own unsponsored. And if you click on the thing on the left, the image on the left, it made all this. And I didn't give it any instructions other than I just want to get rid of these with a Chrome extension. [01:08:35] S1: Said,
01:08:36 · Jason Calacanis
[01:08:36] S0: Okay, I'm going to build five different things you could turn off. Sponsored products, brand banners and videos, sponsored carousels, display ads, and Amazon brand promos. And it, by default, click four of them off. And then it said removed listings are hidden, dimmed, or outlined. And then it keeps a log of it, it keeps track of how many do. I didn't ask it to do any of that kind of stuff, but it did it anyway. Made this beautiful branding name and hit the right arrow key there. Here's just an example of the red bar around it. I'm going down through, I just put it in best coffee machine. It's like, I'm going to get slapped with this like, vegan French coffee makers. I don't want this in my feed. Just want to know the best ones and start removing it. This is going to increase my usage of Amazon. Now, is this illegal or not for the terms of service against it? I would never publish this and give it to other people because I think that would be against the terms of service. But what you do on your local machine is up to you and how you view stuff. There's an exception for this typically. So if you own The New York Times and you wanna cut it up and make a montage or you wanna take a web page and edit it, you could do whatever you want on your local machine. It's when you publish it or give it to another person and you subvert their ability to make money that this becomes an issue. It's not an issue when you do it locally, but I would never have hired anybody to write this, but I can certainly tell it in two seconds. And that's... This custom software and custom view of the world is coming soon, folks.
01:10:06 · Lon Harris
[01:10:06] S1: You have to treat... Retrain your brain. As a nondeveloper, I think you have to re... Because for me, I don't think about, like, new products, like... Because I never had the ability to build them. So I have to, like Right. I have to retrain myself to, like, if something's not working, maybe you can fix. Maybe you and Claude can fix it. Like, just tell Claude what you want. And, like, I don't even have those ideas, but now I have to start because everybody can be a hacker and a developer now. You just have a a friend who can just do it for you.
01:10:39 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[01:10:39] S0: I did another thing. I went through my entire d... I had d... I have DMs open on x. I said, and I never go through them. I said, tell me who, you know, the most followed people are who have DMed me that I missed. Oh, yeah. And then anybody who's a founder, tell them you can apply to our programs here, here, and here. So it brings me up the list. And then like a very famous basketball player, a DM me in August and said, hey. I'm in Austin. Want to get a cup of coffee. I didn't see it. Oh, man. So I just DM'd them and said, like, yeah, Nick's in five, and here's my phone number so you have it. And, yeah, let me know next time you're in town. Sorry. Missed this. And then it sent 500 people from the last couple of months a DM that said, hey, this is Jason's bot. I always have it do that. Here, you can apply to Founder University, Launch Accelerator, or here if you want to engage with our firm. And then half the people were like, No, no, I want to talk directly to you about this. All of them started talking to my bot. They're like, Tell Jason I have this incredible thing. Tell Jason I want him to come speak at my vet. It didn't exactly get the response, I was like, better they get something [01:11:42] S1: than neuro. Exactly.