ClojureTV: the videos Hacker News recommends
Not the channel's most viewed videos: the ones HN commenters kept linking with real commentary. The top pick, "Maybe Not - Rich Hickey", hN commenters send people to it whenever nulls, Maybe/Option or static typing come up, as a thoughtful dissent from the type-system orthodoxy that changes how some people model data.
- talk recommended in 11 different months by 14 HN users, 2018–2025HN commenters send people to it whenever nulls, Maybe/Option or static typing come up, as a thoughtful dissent from the type-system orthodoxy that changes how some people model data.
- talk recommended in 10 different months by 10 HN users, 2017–2026HN's go-to link in typing debates and for talk lists, and several call it their favorite programming talk even for non-Clojure users.
- talk recommended in 9 different months by 10 HN users, 2014–2025HN repeatedly recommends it as the definitive explanation of why Java evolves cautiously and why compatibility matters in language design.
- talk recommended in 11 different months by 12 HN users, 2014–2024HN returns to it constantly as permission and method for thinking deeply before coding, and as an antidote to always-working anxiety.
- talk recommended in 10 different months by 9 HN users, 2014–2024HN repeatedly names it among the best programming talks, loved for its craftsmanship message that complex tooling can hide simpler solutions.
- talk recommended in 8 different months by 9 HN users, 2021–2026It is one of HN's most frequently recommended programming talks, cited whenever people debate complexity, simplicity and abstraction, and valued well beyond Clojure.
- talk recommended in 9 different months by 10 HN users, 2016–2024HN returns to it in every versioning and API stability debate as a challenging, contrarian talk worth watching.
- talk recommended in 9 different months by 10 HN users, 2013–2025HN recommends it as a key Hickey talk on system design that changes how people think about distributed state and interfaces.
- talk recommended in 8 different months by 7 HN users, 2017–2023HN commenters recommend it whenever someone asks how to read type-system or CS notation in papers.
- talk recommended in 7 different months by 5 HN users, 2016–2021HN repeatedly recommends it as the talk that made data-oriented, REPL-driven bottom-up design click.
- talk recommended in 6 different months by 6 HN users, 2013–2023HN repeatedly recommends it as a delightful talk that makes music theory click and introduces Clojure and Overtone.
- talk recommended in 6 different months by 5 HN users, 2013–2017HN commenters recommend it, alongside Rich Hickey's talk, for its precise definition of simple versus easy and its implications for code design.
- talk recommended in 5 different months by 5 HN users, 2013–2023Seen as the definitive explanation of why traditional concurrency is hard and how Clojure's model addresses it, with some commenters crediting it with changing their careers.
- talk recommended in 5 different months by 4 HN users, 2015–2022HN recommends it as a fascinating explanation of queues, flow control and overload that applies well beyond Clojure.
- talk recommended in 5 different months by 4 HN users, 2016–2023Recommended as a fantastic talk on code-driven CAD and custom keyboard design, linked in threads on OpenSCAD and keyboards.
- talk recommended in 4 different months by 4 HN users, 2015–2023HN recommends it as a talk that changed how people debug, worth rewatching periodically.
- talk recommended in 4 different months by 4 HN users, 2016–2026Recommended as the best introduction to property-based testing and cited for its examples of bugs found in the CAN standard.
- talk recommended in 3 different months by 3 HN users, 2015HN commenters recommend it as the lead ClojureScript developer's own account of Om's evolution, one-way data flow and single-state design.
- talk recommended in 3 different months by 4 HN users, 2015–2017Recommended to JavaScript skeptics as a persuasive case for ClojureScript, covering Closure Compiler optimizations and code-splitting.
- talk recommended in 3 different months by 3 HN users, 2017–2022HN people point to it as a very visual demonstration of what hot-reloading and interactive development can offer, and as an example of a great dev tool pitch.
- talk recommended in 2 different months by 2 HN users, 2013–2018HN recommends it as a mind-blowing and fun introduction to logic programming for working programmers.
- talk recommended in 2 different months by 2 HN users, 2015–2017Recommended as a great talk on live, functional-style game programming.
- talk recommended in 2 different months by 2 HN users, 2013–2022Recommended as a clear, well-paced introduction to Clojure and Lisp ideas like code as data and macros, straight from the language's creator.
- demo recommended in 2 different months by 2 HN users, 2018–2021Recommended as a must-watch Conj talk and as the intro for people who haven't seen REBL, often compared to Jupyter-style tooling.
- talk recommended in 2 different months by 3 HN users, 2017–2024HN people point to it as an amazing demonstration of relational programming and program synthesis that still looks exciting after LLM code generation.
- talk recommended in 2 different months by 2 HN users, 2014–2015Pointed to as a thought-provoking talk on structuring large systems, including outside Clojure.
- talk recommended in 2 different months by 2 HN users, 2019–2023Recommended as the best introduction to SICM and sicmutils and a showcase of what such symbolic systems can do.
- talk recommended in 2 different months by 2 HN users, 2019–2020Cited as a demonstration of the Pathom/graph approach to connecting APIs, as an alternative to GraphQL.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 1 HN user, 2015–2024HN cites it as Nubank's account of building a bank on Datomic and Clojure, and for what Datomic's temporal model enables.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 1 HN user, 2014–2017HN recommends it for its insight into Knuth's TeX algorithms and what changes when they are rewritten functionally.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 1 HN user, 2016–2026Cited alongside compiler-construction resources as the go-to talk on the nanopass approach used in Chez Scheme.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 1 HN user, 2016–2021Referenced in static versus dynamic typing debates, including his remark that Hindley-Milner doesn't really work.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 1 HN user, 2016–2018HN commenters point to it as the talk by the author of Neanderthal and the Clojure GPU libraries, including comparisons against the JVM and CPU.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 2 HN users, 2023–2024HN draws on it for practical decision-making and problem-framing techniques that apply well beyond Clojure.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 1 HN user, 2017–2019Referenced for Hickey's reasoning on design choices such as macros and not building on SBCL.
- talk recommended in 1 different month by 1 HN user, 2016–2022Clojure commenters cite it as the best overview of condition systems in Clojure and of the libraries that attempt them.
- talk cited on HN 3 times, 2017–2019HN cites it as a summary of known attempts at structural and Lisp editors.
- talk cited on HN 8 times, 2015–2018HN cites it as evidence of Clojure running real large-scale production systems at Walmart and as a behind-the-scenes talk from that team.
Questions
Which ClojureTV video does Hacker News recommend most?
Maybe Not - Rich Hickey: recommended in 11 different months by 14 HN users between 2018 and 2025.
Is this every ClojureTV 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.