2026-09-25

Businesses are paying to maintain fragile, obsolete hardware (DOS, ISA cards) by hoarding parts and accepting huge operational risk; they need virtualization/emulation on modern hardware.

"I know of a DOS machine at a wool testing place that uses an ISA card based imager... When I spoke to the owner he didn’t really understand the risks involved in running ancient hardware and in fact had a storage room with period PCs in it if the machines failed. He didn’t have much of a backup plan for the imaging hardware though."

Professionals are losing money from fraud ($1200+), capped profits, and silent errors because general-purpose tools (Excel, Stripe Link) are inadequate for high-stakes finance and trading.

"I have more or less working more or less market making algorithm (eat the spread). It works extremely well at 1 lot trades, but once you increase the volume profits reach maximum at some point... What bothers me - maybe I simply quote inefficiently? I tried a lot of of approaches (imbalance, skewing, VWAP, hand crafted signals), and at some point they stopped improving my PnL."

Power users paying for frontier AI models are hitting walls and need professional tooling for complex project management, integration with existing systems (e.g., security), and basic dev environment features.

"For me in my day job, having extremely fast low quality decision makers over noisy inputs is very valuable. I work in security and having something that can help triage alerts, classify items and group things together is extremely valuable... Just being able to take a set of inputs from deterministic tooling and to be make general priority classifications goes a long way on helping humans look at the most important items first."

Developers are spending significant effort cobbling together a complex stack of tools (NixOS, sops-nix, restic, etc.) to achieve reproducible, declarative system configurations.

"Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even)."

Companies are paying consultants for months to fix performance issues caused by ORMs like Hibernate failing to generate efficient queries, indicating a need for better optimization or analysis tools.

"My favorite example of this is a project where a consultant writing a Java web service struggled for months to get Hibernate to emit queries than ran efficiently on the company's Oracle database."

Users of Spaced Repetition Software like Anki find the default algorithms painful and demotivating, creating a need for an alternative that prioritizes user enjoyment and consistency.

"I realized Anki was optimized for the opposite of the problems I actually had. Anki's optimized to minimize study time. It does this by maximizing difficulty. For me, this means maximizing pain! I'm not low on time; I'm low on willpower. I need it to be fun and easy! Otherwise, I quit and memory goes to zero."