One of your problems is that you are judging yourself by your natural abilities. I think this a trap that a lot of smart people fall into, perhaps being used to being the kid who always gets the gold star. There are studies that show that children who are praised for being "smart" stop working hard, because that threatens their self-image. Children who are praised for working hard go on to greater successes.

But back to HN. Recall that people post here, in part, to feel good about themselves and appear smart to others. It may be that the real heroes are not here. They are off doing stuff, not yammering about it.

I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of successful web startup people (a different group from say, pg or other YC alumni). I can tell you that the only thing they have in common is that they Keep Doing Stuff. No matter what, Keep Doing Stuff. They often have very low tolerance for naysayers and armchair critics. This isn't so much iron determination (well it is, in part) but mostly because they are motivated by the intrinsic rewards of building and exploring. In other words: they are just trying to have fun.

Their initial prototypes are ugly and naive. They don't care because it does something they wanted. They use a language that others deride as a toy. They don't care because it gets the job done fast. At launch, the whole thing is held together with tinkertoys and chewing gum. They still don't care as long as it's making people happy. Then scaling problems happen. Then they hunker down and make even more spectacular mistakes.

And you know what? Then one day they look back on at all they've done, and the system is humming beautifully and they're experts in multiple fields. And O'Reilly starts bugging them to write a book about how they did it all so effortlessly.

Meanwhile those guys on HN are still whining about how it would have been so much better with a functional language and a NoSQL data store.

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P.S. This is not an argument for doing anything sloppily. It's just that you have to be laser-focused on results. It's a paradox; you have to be capable of rolling out something of heart-breaking beauty but also have no concern for things that ultimately don't affect success. It's been my experience that the version 1.0 of anything really creative looks like a piece of junk. And it takes a very sharp eye to see that it's doing something new and important. I guess this is why not everybody is a successful investor.