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.
- 14 HN recommenders 11 months 2018–2025talkHN 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.
- 10 HN recommenders 10 months 2017–2026talkHN's go-to link in typing debates and for talk lists, and several call it their favorite programming talk even for non-Clojure users.
- 10 HN recommenders 9 months 2014–2025talkHN repeatedly recommends it as the definitive explanation of why Java evolves cautiously and why compatibility matters in language design.
- 12 HN recommenders 11 months 2014–2024talkHN returns to it constantly as permission and method for thinking deeply before coding, and as an antidote to always-working anxiety.
- 9 HN recommenders 10 months 2014–2024talkHN repeatedly names it among the best programming talks, loved for its craftsmanship message that complex tooling can hide simpler solutions.
- 9 HN recommenders 8 months 2021–2026talkIt is one of HN's most frequently recommended programming talks, cited whenever people debate complexity, simplicity and abstraction, and valued well beyond Clojure.
- 10 HN recommenders 9 months 2016–2024talkHN returns to it in every versioning and API stability debate as a challenging, contrarian talk worth watching.
- 10 HN recommenders 9 months 2013–2025talkHN recommends it as a key Hickey talk on system design that changes how people think about distributed state and interfaces.
- 7 HN recommenders 8 months 2017–2023talkHN commenters recommend it whenever someone asks how to read type-system or CS notation in papers.
- 5 HN recommenders 7 months 2016–2021talkHN repeatedly recommends it as the talk that made data-oriented, REPL-driven bottom-up design click.
- 6 HN recommenders 6 months 2013–2023talkHN repeatedly recommends it as a delightful talk that makes music theory click and introduces Clojure and Overtone.
- 5 HN recommenders 6 months 2013–2017talkHN commenters recommend it, alongside Rich Hickey's talk, for its precise definition of simple versus easy and its implications for code design.
- 5 HN recommenders 5 months 2013–2023talkSeen 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.
- 4 HN recommenders 5 months 2015–2022talkHN recommends it as a fascinating explanation of queues, flow control and overload that applies well beyond Clojure.
- 4 HN recommenders 5 months 2016–2023talkRecommended as a fantastic talk on code-driven CAD and custom keyboard design, linked in threads on OpenSCAD and keyboards.
- 4 HN recommenders 4 months 2015–2023talkHN recommends it as a talk that changed how people debug, worth rewatching periodically.
- 4 HN recommenders 4 months 2016–2026talkRecommended as the best introduction to property-based testing and cited for its examples of bugs found in the CAN standard.
- 3 HN recommenders 3 months 2015talkHN commenters recommend it as the lead ClojureScript developer's own account of Om's evolution, one-way data flow and single-state design.
- 4 HN recommenders 3 months 2015–2017talkRecommended to JavaScript skeptics as a persuasive case for ClojureScript, covering Closure Compiler optimizations and code-splitting.
- 3 HN recommenders 3 months 2017–2022talkHN 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.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2013–2018talkHN recommends it as a mind-blowing and fun introduction to logic programming for working programmers.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2015–2017talkRecommended as a great talk on live, functional-style game programming.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2013–2022talkRecommended as a clear, well-paced introduction to Clojure and Lisp ideas like code as data and macros, straight from the language's creator.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2018–2021demoRecommended as a must-watch Conj talk and as the intro for people who haven't seen REBL, often compared to Jupyter-style tooling.
- 3 HN recommenders 2 months 2017–2024talkHN people point to it as an amazing demonstration of relational programming and program synthesis that still looks exciting after LLM code generation.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2014–2015talkPointed to as a thought-provoking talk on structuring large systems, including outside Clojure.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2019–2023talkRecommended as the best introduction to SICM and sicmutils and a showcase of what such symbolic systems can do.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2019–2020talkCited as a demonstration of the Pathom/graph approach to connecting APIs, as an alternative to GraphQL.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2015–2024talkHN cites it as Nubank's account of building a bank on Datomic and Clojure, and for what Datomic's temporal model enables.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2014–2017talkHN recommends it for its insight into Knuth's TeX algorithms and what changes when they are rewritten functionally.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2016–2026talkCited alongside compiler-construction resources as the go-to talk on the nanopass approach used in Chez Scheme.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2016–2021talkReferenced in static versus dynamic typing debates, including his remark that Hindley-Milner doesn't really work.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2016–2018talkHN commenters point to it as the talk by the author of Neanderthal and the Clojure GPU libraries, including comparisons against the JVM and CPU.
- 2 HN recommenders 1 months 2023–2024talkHN draws on it for practical decision-making and problem-framing techniques that apply well beyond Clojure.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2017–2019talkReferenced for Hickey's reasoning on design choices such as macros and not building on SBCL.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2016–2022talkClojure commenters cite it as the best overview of condition systems in Clojure and of the libraries that attempt them.
- cited 3× 0 months 2017–2019talkHN cites it as a summary of known attempts at structural and Lisp editors.
- cited 8× 0 months 2015–2018talkHN 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.
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.