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Hacker News addiction linked to staking your self-worth on...

• freehunter 8y ago
  I came here to say this exactly. I'm only a hobbyist programmer even though I'm pretty darn good in my niche technical (non-programming) field. But almost every time I jump into the comments section my self-worth goes down a bit and I feel just a bit worse because really this is a community of programmers. And even though I'm not a programmer, I do write computer programs occasionally, and quite often I see people calling out my style of programming as the worst thing in the world. I have a side business, but I haven't created fifteen startups with successful exits, so I feel less important than a lot of people here. I don't have a Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition running Arch, so I'm not as pure as a lot of people here. I use Facebook and not Mastodon, so I'm a sheep contributing to the downfall of society. I live in the Midwest, where nothing happens and land is worthless and colleges are even worse and we don't even have the Internet here do we? If you think Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram are damaging to the self-worth of its consumers, try being someone who doesn't live in SV and 10x some Phoenix/Elixir at an AI-owned biomed non-profit stealth-mode VC-backed startup collective. I've never even wheeled a suitcase into Paul Graham's office! I'm basically worthless.