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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
behind the blog post.
https://karpathy.ai/lexicap/0007-large.html#00:30:37.800
Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So ideas, right.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So I think you gotta have the concept
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
that there's so many interesting things in the world.
https://karpathy.ai/lexicap/0007-large.html#00:30:43.300
Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like, I mean, my God, the world is amazing, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like you can never write about everything that's going on
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
because it's so incredible.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
But if you can't come up with like,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
let's say one interesting thing per day to talk about,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
then you're not trying hard enough
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
because the world is full of just super interesting stuff.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And one great way to like mine stuff
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
is go back to old books
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
cause they bring up old stuff that's still super relevant.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And I did that a lot
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
cause I was like reading classic programming books
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and a lot of the early blog posts were like,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
oh, I was reading this programming book
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and they brought this really cool concept
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and I wanna talk about it some more.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And you get the, I mean,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
you're not claiming credit for the idea
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
but it gives you something interesting to talk about
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
that's kind of evergreen, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like you don't have to go, what should I talk about?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So we'll just go dig up some old classic programming books
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and find something that, oh, wow, that's interesting.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Or how does that apply today?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Or what about X and Y or compare these two concepts.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So pull a couple of sentences from that book
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and then sort of play off of it,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
almost agree or disagree.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So in 2007, you wrote that you were offered
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
a significant amount of money to sell the blog.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You chose not to.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
What were all the elements you were thinking about?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Cause I'd like to take you back.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
It seems like there's a lot of nonlinear decisions
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
you made through life.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So what was that decision like?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Right, so one of the things I love
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
is the Choose Your Own Adventure books,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
which I loved as a kid
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and I feel like they're early programmer books
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
cause they're all about if then statements, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
If this, then this.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And they're also very, very unforgiving.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like there's all these sites that map
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and how many outcomes are bad, a lot of bad outcomes.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So part of the game is like, oh, I got a bad outcome.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Go back one step, go back one further step.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
It's like, how did I get here, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like it's a sequence of decisions.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And this is true of life, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like every decision is a sequence, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Individually, any individual decision
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
is not necessarily right or wrong,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
but they lead you down a path, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So I do think there's some truth to that.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So this particular decision,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
the blog had gotten fairly popular.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
There's a lot of RSS readers that I had discovered.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And this guy contacted me out of the blue
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
from this like bug tracking company.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
He's like, oh, I really wanna buy your blog
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
for like, I think it was around,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
it was $100,000, it might have been like 80,000,
https://karpathy.ai/lexicap/0007-large.html#00:32:46.040
Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
but it was a lot, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like, and that's, you know, at the time,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
like I would have a year's worth of salary all at once.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So I didn't really think about like, well, you know,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and I remember talking to people at the time,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I was like, wow, that's a lot of money.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
But then I'm like, I really like my blog, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Like, do I wanna sell my blog?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Cause it wouldn't really belong to me anymore at that point.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And one of the guidelines that I like to,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I don't like to give advice to people a lot,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
but one of the pieces of advice I do give,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
cause I do think it's really true and it's generally helpful
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
is whenever you're looking at a set of decisions,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
like, oh gosh, should I do A, B or C,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
you gotta pick the thing that's a little scarier
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
in that list because not, you know,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
not like jump off a cliff scary,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
but the thing that makes you nervous.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Cause if you pick the safe choice,
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
it's usually, you're not really pushing.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You're not pushing yourself.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
You're not choosing the thing that's gonna help you grow.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
So for me, the scarier choice was to say no.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I was like, well, no, let's just see where this is going.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Because then I own it.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
I mean, it belongs to me.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
It's my thing.
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
And I can just take it
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
and tell some other logical conclusion, right?
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Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror | Lex Fridman Podcast #7
Because imagine how different the world would have been
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