HN.watch

HN.watch is Hacker News with a short video explainer for every story. Click a title to watch. Videos are generated on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link, using HTML instead of diffusion models. While there are visual drawbacks of using HTML instead of pixel-based video, there are three big benefits: speed, cost, and easy editing. Speed: much faster to generate than pixel-based videos, just a few seconds from click to playback. Cost: around 0.04 dollars per video excluding image generation which some videos use and quickly blows up cost. Easy editing: the speed and cost benefits also make AI-assisted editing cheap and fast. The hypothesis is that if video generation goes from dollars and minutes to cents and seconds, a bunch of new use cases will be unlocked. Some already seen: video explanation of every single Pull Request done internally, give every page in internal or external docs a video, turn complex article into a video in seconds via Chrome extension, course creators can quickly draft lessons before recording the real thing, and people generate stories for kids, wedding invitations, birthdays. Try it via the web UI at scrimba.com/explain, MCP add it to your coding agent, ChatGPT Plugin, or Chrome Extension. Built by Scrimba, YC S20, which spent the last decade teaching coding with an HTML-based video format.