Yes indeed, and it acts as great barrier fore me, even to comment here, but I am luck as those questions are asked again by other HN folks.
Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
71–80 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comment…
What makes you think you're talented? You say people have always told you you were a smart kid. Do you have any actual achievements to back this up? I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on…
Hilarious. So why are you reading let alone commenting? Maybe you're just as thick as the rest of us.
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#73You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas. If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. If you want to feel less ov…
I think HN has enough upvote/downvote data for all its users such that it could be feeding us articles based on our voting history and the voting history of people similar to us (non-trivial problem, of course). I think it's possible to build a news-site that feeds, say the OP, a news feed that he is 'comfortable with'. In a more general sense, news sites like HN that use up/down are 'dumb' in the sense that they mak…
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Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife has the occasional habit of cherry picking the best bits of all of our friends/acquaintances lives, combining them into one and using that as the yardstick as to how we are doing. She'd be the first to admit this btw:)
Has she purchased any Old Spice for you recently, by chance...?
Ha. Here we have the rarest of local species: a Reddit-style one-liner that merits an upvote here.
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#75The gapingvoid comic line comes to mind: Never compare your inside to someone else's outside.
I did a text search on this page to see if anyone had already posted this. Such an important truth, so well put.
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#76I used to think like that, especially when I hung out on LessWrong (http://lesswrong.com). Then I decided my aim in life is not to be the best at everything as an individual. My aim in life is to do great and useful things, on my own or with help from others.
Once I started seeing things in that way, it became really exciting to find so many people, much more intelligent and talented than me. I can learn from them, hire them, partner with them, work for them or even compete with them. I can leverage (for lack of a better word) their awesomeness in some way or the other for a goal higher than just personal achievements.
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#77For me, as a non-english-speaking reader, who wants to know trends in these information-overwhelming and daily-innovating tech society, HN gives valuable source of news, blogs, even sometimes kind of tech 101.
Sometimes I feel like I am an only alien in the middle of natives, but think about your school days. You didn't know everything you should know, if you had finished your grade.
I'm happy everday reading and learning any tiny bit of new things posted on HN. I hope someday I can comment more and even post my own writing.
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#78You can assume two things of insightful comments from successful HN members:
1) they are older than you, or put more time in than you, thereby had more time to learn success systems, gain experience and accomplish things.
2) they are acquiring wisdom and success in various aspects of their lives and leveraging those wins in the business arena.
Start moving in different directions and get some easy wins wherever you can find them. These wins may seen small to you but be an Everest for someone else. Also, recalibrate what success and talent mean to you. Explore different definitions of it. Your perception of yourself and the HN community may not be the most accurate one.
Most important of all, seek out wisdom. A lot of what you think is relevant is only relative and transitory.
I've personally explored the topic before and wrote Three Steps To Obtaining (More) Wisdom: http://zerotosuperhero.posterous.com/3-steps-to-obtaining-mo...
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#79Remember, it generally takes 10 years (of hard work) to master anything.
Re: Ask HN: Does reading HN ever make you feel like shit?
#80Being able to recognize areas you're motivated to improve upon is an incredibly valuable skill. Just in this post I see the following:
1) You have side projects and experiments that have interesting enough ideas behind them that you think they may be worth pursuing beyond 80%. 2) You think you should be familiar with more than Javascript, PHP, Java, and MySQL. 3) You are not completely happy only being comfortable in a Windows XP environment with whatever IDE you are using.
Each of these items has a clear next step. (1) Think about your projects, pick your favorite one, look at the code and do something minor. (2) Poke around and do some light research (if you haven't already) on other dev stacks, play around until you find yourself genuinely interested in one. (3) Install Ubuntu in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is free and works well) or dual boot. Google vim and emacs and pick one to start playing with.
If you feel like you are falling behind you can use that as an opportunity to figure out what you're unhappy with specifically and do simple things to take a small step forward. You can't do everything all at once, and the people here that are impressive to the point of it being intimidating got where they are by diligently making incremental progress over some time.