
Joel Spolsky is doing an IAmA on reddit - chrisboesing
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gulpx/iama_cofounder_of_stack_exchange_and_fog_creek/
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chrisaycock
_Every time you feel like you've made the world better by upvoting a story
about injustice, you're just making yourself feel smug. Forget the upvotes...
go work on making the world a better place._

He was writing about how stories of social injustice get a ton of upvotes, but
nobody actually goes out and does anything to fix the situation. I'm sure
there's a lesson here for HN.

~~~
pclark
Can anyone argue that the time spent upvoting a reddit story of injustice
provides negative net value to the world?

~~~
tomjen3
I can, I think:

When you upvote a story on reddit about some issue you deeply care about, that
tricks your brain into thinking that you have done something about it.

It is the same problem that announcing your goals makes you less likely to
achieve them, because you already see yourself as a person who has
accomplished that.

~~~
DavidChouinard
Related:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...](http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself.html)
(one of Derek Sivers' TED talks)

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euroclydon
I really want to learn C, like he says. I get plenty done without knowing it,
and I have few doubts I can continue to find decent work without knowing it,
but I haven't been able to gain any traction when I try to learn it.

I've got the books sitting front of me, and I've written some trivial
visualizations of sorting algorithms using terminal output, but damn if I can
find a way to use C as a web developer. If there were just some use case where
C would help me get something done, I'd be all over it.

~~~
leon_
> but damn if I can find a way to use C as a web developer

Write a web app in C? ;)

But yeah, in most cases C won't improve your productivity as a web developer.
But it will certainly make you understand the computer better.

So maybe start a recreational project in C? A command line utility, a demon, a
music streaming server - something not really web-dev related.

~~~
euroclydon
Listening to you, I'm thinking about just reading the C books and nothing
more. If C's usefulness to non-C-programmers is simply that it gives them
greater understanding of how computers work, then reading might suffice.

~~~
tedunangst
I don't think sufficient understanding of how computers work can come from
just reading a book. If it could, you should read a book about how computers
work, instead of trying to glean that through the lens of C programming.
Understanding comes from doing.

~~~
jswinghammer
If you have read the K&R C book I am not sure you would say that. It's great
no matter what you do with it.

~~~
tedunangst
That's a bizarre thing to say. Do you think the K&R book is a great way to
learn French?

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jswinghammer
No offense but are you just being obtuse? Clearly I meant something other than
what you are suggesting.

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ceejayoz
A dedicated ama.stackexchange.com could be an interesting experiment.

~~~
gecko
I'm not really convinced that StackExchange is the best system for that. You'd
really want one StackExchange per person; otherwise, the one-answer-per-
question nature of StackExchange, with voting for "correct" results, which
result in bizarre gaming behavior and impossible-to-follow discussions.

~~~
chrisboesing
You could use the tag system. The questions would be at
ama.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/Joel+Spolsky. The person who posted the
question just had to accept the answer of the person who he had asked.

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Apocryphon
He mentions how functional programming is valuable, something that many
graduates are lacking in. Does JavaScript count as a functional language?

~~~
jrockway
Do Javascript programmers program in terms of function applications, or do
they program in terms of sequences of state-changing operations?

If they do the first, then Javascript is a functional language. But without
even a function composition or application operator (or function), it's
obvious tht Javascript is not intended to be functional. It's an imperative/OO
language with lambdas, like Common Lisp.

