Very interesting. I've held off on showing HN my recent projects for a different reason: I'm just not that proud of them. Lately my projects have all been very

Very interesting. I've held off on showing HN my recent projects for a different reason: I'm just not that proud of them. Lately my projects have all been very quick, niche money-makers that almost leave me with a bad taste in my mouth - I'm working for myself but I'm still not really working for my self. None of the projects represent a non-trivial solution to a problem, none of them are a new fresh take on anything, they are all just plain old CRUD apps for very specific clientele (even the public facing ones). My challenge to myself in the new year will be to set aside some time to create something that excites me, and when I do I will happily show HN without a thought about "handing [my] idea on a silver platter to other capable would-be entrepreneurs to work on". Partly, it's because I like to think that this community is made up of people who respect intellectual property a great deal, but mostly it's because I don't give a damn if someone wants to compete with me. The fact is, we work in an industry with extremely low barriers to entry and I think it's a good thing. That's what the "only execution matters" folks mean - it means that to make it you need to be the best. It needs to be hard to compete with you. There have been many times where I've jumped into direct competition with other sites (and I haven't been at this terribly long) because I thought I could do better. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But I don't think it was wrong or unfair, and I don't think I was stealing any ideas. It seems to me a lot of "Show HN" is a cheap excuse for claiming you've done your part to drive traffic to your site, even if that traffic is less than pertinent to your site's demographic. That, I can get on board with. Show HN because you want critique, show HN because you want employees, show HN because you want l337 hax0r cred, but unless HN is your target market, please, for god's sake, find your target market and show them, too.