Don't worry about changing the world. If through your best efforts + chance, you happen to change the world, that is great. But if you go through life believing you are without value unless you do something grand, you've got a 99.99999% chance of disappointment.

You're 21. Want to play more sports? Play them. You haven't even reached your physical peak. What, did you want to be a quarterback in the Super Bowl and it's not worth playing sports unless you are? Welcome back to 99.99999% disappointment.

You think that your procrastination and intelligence are unrelated. You think you're horrible on the inside, but you "get away with it" because you're smart. This is nonsense. You are bored. Maybe you didn't do the shit that was assigned to you in high school, but the SATs are not a genetics test. You learned it somewhere.

Don't feel guilty about the money you make. Don't think that you're a hamster on a wheel and you're worth nothing unless you're going at 100% speed. If your job doesn't give you enough work to interest you, be proactive and find some inefficiencies that need fixing. Fix them. Don't wait for someone to tell you to do it. After you fix it, tell everyone. If there isn't anything to fix, get a new job. And... to go against the grain of HN, consider a large company, one that has endless problems and technical debt. If you aren't happy in your own skin, working on a startup to change the world is probably not the best thing.

Also, seriously consider going to a therapist to discuss your issues. I hear that you can afford it. You're basically asking the internet to be your therapist. And the internet is not qualified (on average).

The two footnotes are good counter-arguments. The only time I can imagine making a class final (can't extend) is when it's a matter of security (e.g., Java's String class).

Then there is a matter of "well, it's not MY fault if you didn't use the public API and your code is now broken." I recall even Steve Jobs chastising developers for doing this.

Building something with a sensible yet strict privacy model takes a lot of upfront design. Makes sense for code that will be used by the masses, but maybe not for a small project.

How do you know they don't "deserve" it?

There are many reasons an employee could be underperforming. It could just be a bad fit / poor communication prior to starting. If you're hired to do X and you end up doing Y (maybe the company changed directions), the employee may be "incompetent" (another loaded word) at that task, or might not be interested in that work.

I'm incompetent at lots of things. It doesn't mean I am incompetent.

If a business owner lets paying severance "burn [him] up inside", he's going to be pinching pennies to an early grave.

Try working for your college. The IT department probably has work study jobs, which will give some "real world" experience but not intrude into your studies too much.

The best way to donate your time is if you can contribute specialized skills.

Teaching kids to program? Really efficient.

Serving food? Not so efficient. Also consider there are a lot of unemployed people in this country who would be helped by a job created by your donation.

There are some less tangible factors here, and being involved in a community / serving as a role model can be valuable. But if you research, for example, international volunteering, they don't need people to do manual labor.

This is an excellent point and something I've been thinking a lot about lately. To be honest the work I do at Martin's probably doesn't have the best ROI in terms of potential impact. But it is something that I get happiness from (never thought that washing dishes for two hours straight would be "pleasure" but once a week it is a great break from staring at a screen).

Something that I would be interested in joining/starting is going to talk to inercity youth about technology and entrepreneurism. Gonna go look into this

It's useful if you are underground (e.g., subway).

Imagine if an American said he was going across the "world" from New York to California.

I think you're getting the words, 'Across' and 'Around' mixed up.

If one were to attempt to "walk across the world", this would be about as close as they could get. :)

It makes for a much better headline than "Man attempts to walk across the largest section of the earth that you can."

And also, to "walk across" sort of implies you only need to do half of it.

I'm too tired to check, but Internet, is there any continuos stretch of land that connects one point on earth to it's polar opposite on the sphere?

(too "tired to check" should also imply "too tired to post comment", but oh well. it already is resulting in "too tired to properly edit")

>If one were to attempt to "walk across the world", this would be about as close as they could get. :)

I know this sounds ridiculous, but I've sometimes fantasized about walking around the world and the best you could do in theory is about 10x the distance from New York to California: South America to West Africa (assuming you can cross a frozen Bering Strait). That's 20,000 miles. In reality, you'd probably face insurmountable political and legal difficulties with crossing borders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumnavigation#Human-powered

The 9,000 miles Michael Lee Johnson is attempting is pretty impressive. I've got a lot of respect for this guy for trying.

>I'm too tired to check, but Internet, is there any continuos stretch of land that connects one point on earth to it's polar opposite on the sphere?

Yes! I believe so, based on what I said previously. Here are some tools to get you started:

http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/antipode-map/

http://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-distance-calcu...

There are hundreds of people who have visited every country on the world.

It definitely isn't an insurmountable challenge.

I imagine you could do slightly better. Maybe from the edge of Siberia to the south of Spain, or Singapore to the north of Norway. Walking to London has a big obstacle in the way, the English Channel. I'm not sure how he intends to deal with that.

Edit: D'oh, you could probably do much better by ending at South Africa.

Someone stole a bike before it was initially locked into the rack, which is pretty much a one-time event.

Not to mention the bikes have GPS and can be tracked down.

http://www.businessinsider.com/first-citi-bike-has-been-stol...

I take it the citi bike program has taken steps to ensure there is no market for citi bikes. (Like never selling them.)

Bike helmets are not required for adults.

I usually wear one when biking in Manhattan, but I rode Citibike today and went helmetless.

This is probably statistically whack, but I "feel" safer riding Citibike without the helmet, mostly because I can go a lot faster on my road bike.

I remember reading about a study (can't dig it up now) that said that drivers drive on average 1 meter closer to cyclists who are wearing helmets vs. those without. Maybe that's why you feel safer.

And some evangelizing against helmet laws: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2008/08/helmets-or-health.html

Being social in the real world is a different skill than being social online. You might want to practice both (although, from experience, I'm going to say being social in real life is more important.)

Try a different psychologist, maybe you got the wrong one. But be a little more open to different philosophies of life and goofiness.