[earlyresort]

Well, you should start by stopping reading Hacker News, because it's clearly not good for you in your current mental state. I promise, you won't miss anything important.

Next, take some of your time and go volunteer somewhere - go tutor a child or teach someone to read or feed the homeless or whatever else you like, just go help someone out. You're now accomplishing something way more important than interning with some 'top company' somewhere. Congratulations, your existence is now justified.

Finally, now that you're doing something worthwhile for humanity and you're not tormenting yourself by wallowing in everyone's self-promotional bloviating, you can happily focus on learning new things, gradually improving your own skills, and figuring out how to make a big dent in the universe on your own personal schedule, which is different from everybody else's.

Hey, I spent my entire twenties fucking up left and right - whatever you end up doing, I guarantee you're way ahead of me.

[kaolinite]

Consider using this Adblock/uBlock filter:

    news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext

I've been using it for a week or two now. It blocks links to all comments (besides Ask HN, Show HN, etc - which is why I'm here). I've drastically cut down my HN time but still keep up to date on tech news. I also read the articles in full a lot more than I used to.

(It also tidies up the homepage and makes it look a lot cleaner, IMO: http://i.imgur.com/RzHKD2d.png)

[sanarothe]

Contrarywise, I usually just hit the comments without reading the article. It's super fast for bootstrapping yourself into an issue. Does rely on the people on HN not being full of crap, though.

[peterjmag]

+100. And an extra +1 for teaching me a new word (bloviate). =)

I wrote a bit more in response in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523788

[peterjmag]

Oops, wrong link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10524479

[pndpo]

Going through a similar struggle as OP and this really helped me out. Thanks.