Title: Sometimes when I start reading HN comments I get the overwhelming feeling that I am not even a tiny drop in the giant ocean of talent, knowledge, drive, determination, skill, and genius that collectively contributes to this site.  I have my own ideas that I love dearly and work on, the first of which will be released for you all to play around with and break at the end of the week, but I <i>never</i> leave HN without feeling that no matter what I do, it will never be as good as what I've just read about.  I have my own skills, I got a BS degree from a decent school in Comp Sci a few years ago, and still I barely work with anything other than LAMP and frontend stuff and frequently find myself having no clue as to what some of the submissions and discussions on this site are about.<p>It affects me on a more personal level than I'd like to admit, but I'll do anyway as a way to get it out of my system and see what you all think.  I'm a lone "founder" of several websites that I finished up to 80%, then left to collect dust, and am now tidying up to display on a resume since I'm essentially out of money.  Whenever I come here and read the articles and discussions I feel like my ideas, and myself by extension are absolute shit for several reasons.<p>1) So many talented people here.  I don't know the slightest thing about any other language besides Javascript, PHP, Java (from school), and MySQL.  I'm 25.  I work on a Windows XP box and use an IDE because I like the code completion.  I consider myself damn good at the languages I listed, but I get the impression that people here are damn good at way more than this.<p>2) HN shows me all these people and ideas that are succeeding.  It used to be inspirational, but now it's frightening.  I've always been told I'm a smart kid, and that I'll be a millionaire some day, and all of that shit.  I see these ideas gaining traction, some of which I could never be able to do myself, some of which I could have done overnight, and I see myself staying still.  It's overwhelming.<p>3) There are people that post here that are so smart.  There are people here that can express their ideas so clearly.  There are people here that know so much about so many things.  And there's me... I'm not really able to contribute much.  How am I to believe I'm any good at anything?  If you all are to be my competitors, I should just give up now.<p>At any rate, I'm just curious to see if anybody gets the same feelings of being overwhelmed by the amount of awesomeness that's on this site.  Thanks.
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