C++ feels like a Japanese sportbike for small projects: your code will run crazy fast and it's easy to kill yourself if you're not good enough at it.

When your project grows beyond a certain size, C++ starts to feel like early soviet ballistic rockets: plenty fast, but a nightmare to maintain while on the ground, take forever to prepare to launch and can explode at any moment while in flight.

I used to love it, up until I bought a Pentium-III 800Mz with 512MB of RAM somewhere around 2001.

This was nice of them. It didn't bother us too much. We were indignant the first time someone copied our application form, but at least these guys admitted it.

This same story seems to get rehashed weekly here. Without insight into what the business is, you can't really judge how important a programmer is. For some, it's paramount. For others, it's not as important.

Interestingly enough, a lot of people get stuck in some sort of weird trap: Their idea is worth so much to them that they won't give up equity yet their idea is worth so little that they won't invest in it.

I would actually be thankful if most sites charged me, as I'd waste less time on them.

The only thing I really worry about is that competitors will use artificial deadlines to panic founders into taking offers from them before they've interviewed with us. 100% of the clones make decisions before we even do interviews, probably not by coincidence. Last year when they made offers to groups that had also been invited to interviews with us, they tried to pressure them into accepting before they'd heard from us. I assume they'll do that again. That makes me mad, I admit. It seems such a nasty thing to do to a group of young founders.

Because News.YC doesn't have it's own search engine. So I use google to search the site.

why not block all search engines?

Dugg for 'Ask Reddit.'

We all misjudge that which we don't understand. And if we did understand, we could do it ourselves.

"Perspective is worth 80 points of IQ" - Alan Kay

Almost everybody here is focussed on a single, simple consumer niche: rich white people who shop online.

Because, you say, that's where the money is. Well... no.

That's where 2% of the money is. Maybe 5%. Out there, in the big wide world, there are tens of thousands of other lifestyle niches, other places to see. Take a look at that Nokia guy's blog,

http://www.janchipchase.com/

Nokia pays him to wander around the world learning about people and how they use things including but not limited to cell phones.

The whole B2B boom, just before the .com bust was a moment of insight... "wow, people outside of the home shopping by internet niche can use the internet to buy things."

So. Ideas.

First thing, get the hell out of San Francisco. Stay away from TechCrunch. Go to Iowa or Brazil. Spend two weeks walking or bicycling around. Call it a vacation. If you take a computer, don't look at your usual sites, turn off your RSS feeds, don't take work email. Put yourself in a new state of mind and then, if money is the goal, ask yourself "what would these people like their computers to do?"

But the space of "software for technohip 20somethings" is heavily swamped right now. It's a saturated, clogged, grossly overfilled demographic.

You want a freebie? An integrated software/hardware/services combo for old people's homes. Does email to help residents talk to their families, prints out pictures when they are sent automatically so people can take them back to their rooms, reminds people of calendar obligations like their grandchildren's birthdays. Maybe even supports some kind of mediated e-commerce which has a credit card account which can only be spent at a known-good list of a couple of hundred stores, so that they can't get phished.

Yes, it would take some selling, but the improvement in quality of life for the residents, and for their families is not insignificant, and business is booming for old people's homes.

Get out of your demographic. That's where the money is.