Quitting is a poor idea. Maybe the work is something you love or maybe you are simply using it to occupy your time and create an excuse to avoid the anxiety of social situations. Either way the key is going to be moderation.

My previous roommates in college found it odd that I would spend Monday through Friday alone in my room working or reading, yet on the weekends come out an be completely extroverted. They were almost offended that I didn't want to sit around and watch tv with them during the week. That is somewhat of a sidetrack, but this balancing method allowed my to keep somewhat of an equilibrium with my life.

Take the approach starting tomorrow the same way you would if you were learning a new programming language. It would be insanity and a complete suicide mission to dive into the properties of compilers without even understanding the basic "hello world". You need to take smalls steps and develop your social skills in the same way you would your programming ones.

And by the way, normalcy is overrated.

Hmm, somehow I managed to have a computer habit AND friends. Also some drugs, some drinking, etc. Of course, my grades weren't stellar in high school; something has to give.

You have too rosy a picture of what your high school classmates were doing. They were mostly wasting their time. What you're calling "dating girls" is better described as "chasing girls", and they were mostly unsuccessful.

You need, at most, a bit of moderation. Don't try to be normal - normal sucks.

I really need to see the URLs for hits.

Pretty impressive results for the terms I searched for. Unfortunately, the design made me temporarily go blind.

In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we returned.

Not really a design thing - although it stems from the design - more like a workflow thing... I dunno, hard to describe.

It makes me regret when I recall how much of my life I've lost to programming.

I spend most of my mid-teens (15,16,17) writing pointless C programs (interpreters, compilers, etc. for pathetic new languages that probably no one except me will use).

While my classmates from high school went out dating girls, watching new movies, etc.; I would be sitting in front of my computer palms on forehead fixing hard to find C pointer bugs.

The only person I could have a decent conversation with was my CS teacher. In the end it was only after coming to college I realized how much I had lost.

I barely had any communication skills, absolutely zero sexual experience (haven't even walked holding hands with a female - even today) and the reputation of being a geek. And you know what? I realized I wasn't a happy person anymore.

I think this kind of a life is seriously screwed. Very soon (been trying) I'm gonna totally quit "being geek" (programming for a hobby, etc.) and try to be normal like everyone else.

Great point here as well.

People often feel like they wasted their youth regardless of how they spent it. They always feel they could have done more, could have been more. I have heard the same stories from friends who made it to a very high level in sports - they feel they dedicated too much of their life just to one purpose too. The same goes with the socialites - they often feel they just wasted too much time at parties and all those blend together with time.

It actually reminds me of a key point in my life when I was talking with a close friend of mine. He had just returned from an amazing trip backpacking through South America for 4 months and he told me he was envious of how I could be so stable and driven towards my one goal of starting my own company. I was shocked, because I felt the exact opposite and wished I had went on that trip with him.

Such is life, and it is full of compromises.

Two chicks at the same time.

Seriously, I have no idea what I'd do with that amount of money. If I was completely selfish maybe I'd buy an island somewhere. I sure as hell wouldn't use it to bail out a bunch of failed businesses whose executives have been giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses.

Yeah, I didn't have those problems. Of course, my dad's a physicist who hacks Matlab & FORTRAN all day, so I may have grown up with a different interpretation of all this.

The wonderful thing about programming is that the computer is an honest mirror. If you screwed something up, you'll know. It won't spare your feelings or let you delude yourself into thinking it's working (well, within reason -- eventually you learn to write good tests).

In a world with so much bullshit, it's pretty nice. While growing up, it's a great anchor of simple reality in a volatile time in your life.

As for other questions as "does it make you into a loser" or "is it a life-long cockblock?" the answer's simple: it's fairly unrelated. If you're a true loser, you'll just be a computer loser. Ditto for the cockblock.

OTOH, you'll notice that there percentage of college-educated men has been dropping recently, while the opposite has been occurring for women. Which means a certain tolerance to loserness is building to help against that self-cockblock threshold.

Maybe 5-10 years ago it was a problem, but in my generation (I'm 29), everyone's using a computer almost all day long. The only difference is that it's my job directly, while others have other jobs using the computer. Gaming is deeply mainstream now (esp. in men in my age group & younger), and programming's just a good sign of intelligence in this group.

Look, here's what you do:

1. Hit the fucking gym. It's really not hard. Usually single programmers have lots of disposable income. Instead of buying that new Amiga motherboard you've been salivating over, spend some cash on looking hot. Experiment with it like you would any other problem: maybe a trainer, different exercises, buy some books on it, maybe some equipment, whatever. You've got the CPU for this, and this really is a simple problem that's usually solved if you can get off the terminal for an hour or so every other day (and you can, just schedule your gentoo builds).

2. Drink water and/or diet soda while hacking. It's the cheap sugar calories in regular soda that give programmers the "fat loser" stigma.

3. Don't wear the free t-shirts you get at social events. Actually spend money on what you wear and research what looks good & bad. For men, fashion is dumb-fuck-simple. If you don't know, just read "Dressing the Man" and only do 1/10th of what it says.

4. Have other non-computer-geek things in your life. Somewhere that'll let people connect with you somehow. Politics, music, sports, whatever.

With that, you're a good-looking, intelligent, well-paid guy. Suddenly you can be a complete jackass and still get laid pretty often. Just, you know, don't start singing to yourself & rocking in your seat when a girl approaches you.

Sorry for the preaching, but when I hear the same seemingly easy-to-solve complaints over & over, I kinda have to get this way.

Space shuttle demolition derby, then?

Create an alternative, multi-tiered research funding organization and proceed to turn the education system upside down.

In fact, $700b is more than enough to do this several times over, so the surplus will probably go to funding a century of other programs related to exploration, bioengineering, green technology, and other sustainable development projects.

Seriously, what could it be other than this?

"Is this indifference to the world a consequence of too much intercourse with machines that give the appearance of thinking? How were he to fare if one day he has to quit computers and rejoin a civilized society?... The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them."

-J.M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature and former IBM programmer, from "Youth, Scenes from Provincial Life II."

Once a hacker, always a hacker.

For anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee knows, he is no F. Scott Fitzgerald, the stereotypical glamorous and superfluous writer; his prose and temperament matches that of a mathematician, rational and precise but nonetheless beautiful in its own right. Without going to the emo's and my personal sob stories, I'll jump right into how I cope with dealing with loneliness and the mainstream society.

1) Learn the protocol and languages of the mainstream American society: two words. Sports and music: they may seem like the most unhackish things to do, the former an activity of "dude-bro's" and the latter the effeminate hipsters, and both the epitome of American "individualist conformity."

But if you look past the posers, they are incredibly, like hacking, creative activities. Weight-training and aerobics is by definition, pushing past your limit of endurance and strength, like a late night coding marathon: a mind game (Romo: "My body is the soldier, but my mind is the general").

Music, is by definition about pushing the envelope, coding and playing. Sampling is like googling for code snippets online, re-arranging and constructing your personal software. Practicing is like coding and going over and over the compiler error's and then tracing through the runtime errors: if you really get into it, it's addictive to get it perfect.

2) Hack the social system. The social culture of the American high school and college and yuppie's in their early 20's is very much like the wall street c(v)ulture. Women and your peers are like wall street analyst, with absolutely no regards to your underlying vision and long-term potential. But if you do not beat the next quarter earning estimate or put out a good looking short-term "balance-sheet," (but it's okay if it is faked), all hell break loose.

So sell yourself like the slickest CFO's from Lehman/Enron/WorldCom. Hackers are sometimes too grounded, wondering out aloud what frameworks and API's they should use; they are too truthful sometimes when American culture is a shallow and superficial one.

This means going to a party, approach a group of people, interrupting the dude-bro talking about "doing a keg-stand" and the hipsters talking about (un)indie bands, smile and say, "I make software that predict breast cancer susceptibility in women, that plays the most appropriate music for your current mood, and that exploit the inefficiencies in the stock market to perform algorithmic trading for maximum profit." You don't even need to go further, the people in the attendance will be pressing you for more.

But in the end, superficial women and friends (read: friends that you go out with, not friends you have deep connections) are just that: wall street analysts. Don't get too hanged up by the "short-term balance sheet," be in for the long term. And by the long term, I don't just mean: an engineering degree or a stable job, but the software that will predict cancer, recommends music and exploit the stock market - and also yes, friends who could respect and relate to who you are.

Don't sell-out, buy in. Be a hacker, go against the grain, always be exploring, sharing and not ever yielding.