I actually had this problem when I was reading through Steve Yegge's blogs. Here was this guy who had done so much, had so many great insights, and was routinel

I actually had this problem when I was reading through Steve Yegge's blogs. Here was this guy who had done so much, had so many great insights, and was routinely pushing himself to do better. It was very inspiring, but also kind of scary: how can I ever be that awesome? It took me about a year to realize that his blogs are collectively almost a decade of work by him, his collective wisdom and insight, which wasn't even started until he had been out of college for at least 5 years. I was getting a compressed version of his long-term work. Like robryan says in another comment: the collective knowledge of HN is vast and deep indeed, but most of these people have been hacking for years or decades. Just keep at it, and try to realize that creating useful things is not a zero-sum game.