Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?

"Don't ever let "Well, someone else is doing this..." stop you."

I take this as confirmation that my idea has some merit. It someone else is building it, it must be a real problem/pain point in people's lives.

I independently thought of a semi-decent concept (IMO) and googled similar terms, to discover that there were startups out there with near identical ideas, and already well along the path of execution. I console myself that at one stage Google was taking on Yahoo! and Microsoft when everyone thought search was done (i.e. an unsexy, overlooked field).

Do you ever watch Formula One? You know that guy who always finishes at the end of pack that everyone laughs at? He's the (~)20th fastest driver on this planet. Imagine how he feels.

EDIT: People are getting hung up on the specifics here, so let me expand a bit: If you are, say, the 20th best at anything then how you feel about yourself depends on where you look. If you only look forward you'll be thinking "good greif, there are NINETEEN people in front of me, I suck!". If you only look behind you'll think you're the greatest. Just look at all the billions behind you.

I think the key is a healthy combination of looking forward for motivation ("Just 19 more to go!") and behind for perspective.

I fear that what you're feeling is a dark side of the net's otherwise positive aspects. (It's not just HN.)

The net lets us see all the great output from the most talented writers, thinkers, doers of their fields -- including people who we could imagine to be our peer group. But what we see is not an accurate sample -- it's dominated by the most remarkable, outliers by both skill and luck. (That is, there's massive survivorship bias; see Taleb's Fooled by Randomness.) Still, if we choose to look, it's in our face every hour of every day, in our news feeds, our Twitter streams, our Facebook statuses.

(Compare also: the quality of social networks whereby for almost everyone, your friends will have more friends than you [1]; the Matthew Effect, whereby small changes in initial endowment of power/fame/success can compound [2]; and how viewing top athletes can actually decrease someone's coordination in following challenges [3].)

In the plant and insect world, sometimes as one organism thrives, it sends off chemical signals that suppress the growth of its siblings/peers/neighbors, in an effect called allelopathy.

Information about others' great works and successes, transmitted by the net, may sometimes serve as a sort of memetic negative allelopathy. The message is: this territory is taken; you can't reach the sunshine here; try another place/strategy (or even just wither so your distant relatives can thrive). This can be be the subtext even if that's not the conscious intent of those relaying the information. Indeed, the reports may be intended as motivational, and sometimes be, while at other times being discouraging.

What to do? Not yet certain, but awareness that this mechanism is in play may help. You can recognize that what you're reading is not representative, and that comparing yourself against prominent outliers -- or even worse, vague composites of outliers who are each the best in one dimension -- is unrealistic and mentally unhealthy.

Actual progress for yourself may require detaching from the firehose a bit, picking a narrower focus. (HN's eclectic topic matter can be inherently defocusing.)

And remind yourself that despite various reptilian-hindbrain impulses, most interesting creative activity today is far from zero-sum. The outliers can win, and you can win too (even if you don't achieve outlier-sized success). Their success can expand your options, and they may wind up being your collaborators (formally or informally by simply participating in a mutual superstructure) moreso than your 'competitors'.

[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

[3] Can't find the reference at the moment, but the study I recall showed people video of a top soccer player, and subsequently they performed worse on tasks requiring physical coordination.

MathOverflow's explicit purpose is to discuss research-level mathematics. First sentence of the FAQ: "MathOverflow's primary goal is for users to ask and answer research level math questions, the sorts of questions you come across when you're writing or reading articles or graduate level books." The discussion is really geared towards people doing research, or trying to. I'm a math grad student, and I find much of it hard to follow. It isn't really the place to go to learn math.

If you continue though at some point you will encounter math at a lower level and now seem like an expert at that much more than before because you pushed yourself to understand more of the boundaries of human math understanding.