I assume you'd be interested in startups if you've come to hacker news, so my simple answer would be "San Francisco."

I don't know why you don't consider web development a 'programming' job. My favorite language is C and I develop in it for my own projects, but I've had just as much challenging work in designing PHP applications.

I've interviewed at several startups that had very difficult and interesting challenges -- and working in Java, Hadoop, etc. So I either don't understand what your real problem is, or you aren't looking hard enough.

Also you might consider mobile development, as Java/C++ can still be quite heavy there -- although, things seem to be moving towards multi-platform frameworks such as Adobe Air / Corona / PhoneGap etc.