A portion of these guys are probably frustrated, burned out, and lost. The only way to reinvigorate in some eyes is to figure out how rich they need to get before they are happy.
Never chase money because it will outrun you. Money is like girls, it only comes in bounds once you stop giving a shit. Ever wonder why you only get hit on by hot girls when you actually have a girlfriend?
There are stories of teenagers making their first million and they're ideas are super-simple. I wonder if its possible some portion of the HN crowd is trying too hard to get rich by being smart.
Tell a million people to go to take a grand to Vegas and bet their 1,000$ on 7 on a roulette table. Then have them take their winnings and do the same thing until FU money. Some of them would become millionaires, but collectively they would all be worse off. (They started with 1 billion.)
The secret is to look for things where risk > reward. Unfortunately writing generic web apps is probably not it. But, the obvious cost is simply time which people tend to undervalue, so it's not obvious if the game is rigged or not.
You want to be the House charging people because you risk something, not the gamblers paying someone to let them make bets. In the startup world that seems to be VC's who charge people money to invest in startups while sharing the startup's upside.
Risk less than Reward seemed like a poor way to express it.
What you want is a reward greater than the risk. Of course, everyone wants that. The way to find it is to have some insight into how to make the market more efficient (ex: a new product that solves a pain point), or to find an under-valued asset (ex: a business that is losing money because it is mismanaged).
Of course, municipal bonds also have a reward greater than the risk, but no one gets rich off municipal bonds. So you do want as much risk as you can tolerate, but you want the potential reward to be worth it.
The risk greater than reward scenario is no different than playing the lottery. You may get rich by chance, but on average, you lose.
However, luck always goes in hand with superior skills and correct timing. Warren Buffett provides some great related reading material here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-an...
Even though I live in the Bay Area, when I read these I always wonder why would someone move from X to an expensive area just to bootstrap their idea. Yes, there are VCs and startup-minded people here. But really, doesn't it make sense to incubate your idea first before betting the farm? Moving to Silicon Valley won't make anyone magically rich -- hard work (and passion) just might.
I don't think this comparison is wholly valid because there is only a limited number of people who can be media A-listers at a particular time, and a large number of people who reach the apparently low threshold for at least the possibility of being a rock or movie star. From there it's mostly luck and serendipity.
By contrast, the number of people with the technical skill necessary to be a great hacker appears to be far lower; the returns to that skill far higher, even if the startup fails; and there appear to be a nearly infinite number of desires that people have for products to make their lives better. There are somewhere between 400 and 600 major movies greenlit every year.
It'll happen with more hacking related subjects as well, and I think the fascination with the 'being rich' thing is that HN started out as more startup oriented and many people pursue the startup route out of a motivation for financial independence.
There are have been a lot of complaints about posts not being relevant. But this is a community and what is relevant to the community is defined by the community, and here that is expressed in upvotes.
In other words, if an article is posted here and gets a large number of upvotes, it is relevant to the community of HN whether you personally find it relevant to you or not.