It's even better when it gets into specifics.

"Wanted: a feasible business idea not quite lucrative enough for the proprietor to be able to afford to take legal action."

My sense is the expected value is positive (new paying users > revenue stolen)

Well then, you're quite an optimist if it takes the cynic in you to suspect that.

Maybe I'm more cynical than you because I think lots of hn posts are fishing attempts :)

I assume they all are, but thankfully for the fisher(people), most hn users with products have large enough egos to not care about new competition, and thankfully for them most people fishing for ideas will probably have 10 new ones by next week and never implement any of them.. (I sure have done that a lot myself, haha).

They might be, but there is so much data on profitable ideas out there it wont make any difference. For example on indiehackers, various businesses for sale sites, and reddit/HN threads.

On the bright side, people here will spend 3 years creating the latest microservice + ai orchestrated infrastructure before launching.

Also it could be the other way around, you need a solution for a problem you have. Say that you built something profitable and wait 'til someone "copies" your idea.

If that's the case it definitely works as creators look for every opportunity to mention their projects somewhere and what better place than this thread.

I asked the question out of curiosity + shared what I'm working on.

Copying an idea and writing code will get folks maybe 10% of what goes into building a sustainable business, so I'm not too worried myself.