I don't have the answer to your problems but here's a friendly reminder that your life is not defined by an illustrious career or the size of a bank account, unless that is your personal choice. Richard L. Evans said it best:

"May we never let the things we can’t have, or don’t have, or shouldn’t have, spoil our enjoyment of the things we do have and can have. As we value our happiness, let us not forget it, for one of the greatest lessons in life is learning to be happy without the things we cannot or should not have."

I've been working through the Stanford course notes on Programming Abstractions. http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106b/ Click on the link to the course reader PDF

I recommend it because it illustrates important concepts in Computer Science while avoiding the unnecessary idiosyncrasies of C++. I like to think of it as a Coles Notes version of CS essentials but the material might be a little too basic for an experienced programmer.

Crunchy for Python: http://code.google.com/p/crunchy/

You probably already know this but I wanted to point out that users can participate in a limited way without registering on StackOverfow.

Just make a new account.

But then you lose your karma.

Gives you an opportunity to practice another buddhist/zen concept: letting go

It's no good if you're of a competitive nature though, which I believe to be an essential trait if you want to do startups.

You don't see many buddhist monks creating successful businesses.

Points seem easier to get now than back then. There are more upvoters.

I think it's easier to lose karma now becuase there are more people who disagree by downvoting a la reddit (see my comment above for a prime example).

But it really feels like people are more stingy with upvotes, especially at the story level. Gone are the days of nickb getting ~1k upvotes from a single submitted story over and over, now it's a much more reserved upvote culture where you have to submit a lot more material and interact more to get those big numbers.

I disagree. I think it's much easier to earn karma now that the HN community is much larger and diverse than when it was smaller. It's simple math; even if only 0.1% of HN members will upvote your post, you'll get votes much more quickly with 15,000 users (15 votes) versus 2000 users (2 votes).