Comment by TekMol

Agreed, although the issue is that it's damn difficult to find something real that is at the intersection of: (1) pleasing users, (2) making them pay, (3) actually being useful, (4) being possible to get off the ground without a multi-year investment in time or money, and (5) remaining profitable or even revenue-generating for at least say three years before competition or evolution gets to it. It's a lot easier to hack something nice when you don't have to sell it.

Because people have families, mortgages, rent.

It's all fun and games until the bank takes back your house.

Also, while I love programming, I have zero interest in owning a business.

There is much innovation, hacking, etc. in "regular software jobs". Many companies that get launched are about improving efficiency or solving problems that these "regular software jobs" face. Once a startup grows, the product may continue to be interesting and new, but the day to day for the engineers building it begins to resemble a "regular software job".

That was back then when we were in our infancy as an industry and everything was about spitting out some cool graphics in less than 100 lines of JavaScript

Right now(specially looking at the world economy) It's all about getting yourself a nice, stable placement.

I haven't stopped hacking away, but I need an income

Do you have 1 of these 2 things?

1) No family to support 2) A set of assets to support not having income?

Because having a golden cushion on which to rest and create isn't something most people have.

There are different kinds of folks on HN. I, for one, just don't have any business ideas worth quitting a job for.