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Ask HN: What are problems that need to be solved?

69 points by derekc 16y ago

So we've kept on getting threads like "Would this idea be cool?" on HN, and I've always thought that this wasn't the correct approach in creating a startup. The problem should be recognized first. So HN, what are problems that you face everyday that need to be fixed or remedied?

AmberShah 16y ago
- Work should be value based (productivity or ROI or something) rather than paid by salary or by the house - All people should be able to work from home if they want to Some of this is "company culture" but technology can help it along a lot more than it currently is. There is a lot of software out there that addresses this issue, but it's just not solved because it's NOT THAT WAY at 99.99999% of companies. Great technology should be able to make this seamless. This is not a spec for a software product because I don't know what spec would solve the problem. That's what makes it valuable.
mainsequence 16y ago
These may or may not be super-profitable or particularly solvable via software: Basic math and science literacy for a large percentage of people (in the US at least, but I suspect many other places as well). The pipeline from childhood to the ability to make something people want. Access to the opportunity to gain economically valuable skills for those who happen to be born in poor families, neighborhoods, cities, countries.
j_baker 16y ago
A couple of things: 1. Everyone I know has a few CRT TVs they want to get rid of. I don't know how to solve this, but surely there's a startup idea in here somewhere. 2. This thread establishes that there is a problem figuring out what problems need to be solved, otherwise it wouldn't exist (maybe that one was too easy though).
- trafficlight 16y ago
  In my area at least, it costs me money to recycle CRTs as well as a lot of other electronics. I'm just not going to pay $25 to throw something away. If this was free, or even if the cost was built into the front end purchase price, I would absolutely recycle old monitors and parts.
pigbucket 16y ago
It's graduation time, so I'm reminded that high school kids are horribly ill-prepared for making the kinds of decisions they have to make and for appreciating the consequences.
r0s 16y ago
Key input on mobile or touchscreen devices still sucks. Lots of progress has been made but something fundamental could really solve this problem. Here's a good idea that almost gets there: http://gizmodo.com/5047798/blindingly-fast-touchscreen-text-entry-system-gets-a-push-by-creator-of-t9 http://gizmodo.com/5047798/blindingly-fast-touchscreen-text-...
robfitz 16y ago
Problem: most startups fail
cmars232 16y ago
Censored information can be distributed anonymously in the small, but in practice, in the large, censorship still works to marginalize content to a medium that is not readily accessible, save to a technically savvy few (Tor, freenet, I2C). For 99% of the intended audience, it can still be effectively censored. Is it possible to have anonymity, security and generally-usable accessibility? Not necessarily speed -- latency can be acceptable when the user isn't stuck waiting in real time on a spinning circular icon.
pingswept 16y ago
Mechanical CAD software like Solidworks and PCB layout software like PADS is expensive and sold through resellers. I can't compare prices between different vendors without giving them my contact information, which results spam. There are a few semi-exceptions (Sketchup for mechanical CAD and Eagle for PCB layout) but neither is strong competition for the market leaders.
pingswept 16y ago
The industrial automation world (Allen-Bradley, Siemens, Mitsubishi, Fanuc, and so forth) has missed the arrival of the internet. Uniformly, their software is terrible-- ActiveX controls and weak, homegrown webservers, if they even support TCP/IP. Trying to build modern web interfaces that have to talk to hardware feels like inventing time-travel (but it's a one-way trip, 15 years back).
adrianwaj 16y ago
Any chronic illness: fatigue, insomnia, pain, tinnitus. Mental disease. Antisemitism, double standards against Israel.
nradov 16y ago
Problem: Businesses require too much working capital. This slows down growth and reduces ROA / ROI. Solution: Create a B2B network that automatically finds and eliminates cycles in the A/R-A/P graph. For example, let's say that company A owes $100 to company B, which owes $80 to company C, which owes $50 to company A. The settlement network could tie into the accounting systems of all 3 companies, identify the debt loop, and instantly apply the appropriate credits and debits. It would need strong controls against fraud and some ability to stand behind transactions that had to be unwound later.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  That would be a wonderful way to solve the financial crisis, too. If everybody knew who owed what to everyone else, we wouldn't be in this mess.
liangzan 16y ago
Forum search. It's incredibly frustrating to sieve out the signal from the noise. You need to spend so much time to read though all the conversations to find information you need. The best Google does is a regex like word matching search. It can be better.
mkramlich 16y ago
We should make it much easier, and more pervasive, and accepted, for people to be able to work from home or otherwise untethered to a central office. We might not want or even be able to achieve this 100%, but the more we can do this, we can reduce so much waste and pollution, and there would be so many less car accidents, gas/oil demand, pavement area, etc. Those of us in the software field are lucky in that many of us already do it, but there are still a lot of software shops that do not, and many other industries where it is still impractical or at least just not accepted and understood yet. Less commute-to-cubicle-on-highways-9-to-5-pollution-lemmings-culture. More home offices, craftsmanship, communal/village/nomad/informal/flexible lifestyles.
- robotempire 16y ago
  The Obama administration agrees with you. http://www.mnn.com/eco-biz/money-green-jobs/blogs/american-companies-need-to-embrace-teleworking http://www.mnn.com/eco-biz/money-green-jobs/blogs/american-c...
aitoehigie 16y ago
I am new in a city, with few friends. I need information on stuff like restaurants, library's, movie theatres, clubs, etc. I live in West Africa.
logicalmind 16y ago
It depends on how big of a problem you want to tackle. The biggest problem I have every day is that I get tired and have to go to sleep. This time spent sleeping could be better used by doing more productive things. Finding a solution to the "sleep problem" would be a huge win in many ways.
- rokhayakebe 16y ago
  I had a conversation with a friend and asked him if sleeping was a disease. I firmly believe that one day human kind will solve both the need to eat, sleep and death. Meanwhile you can stop trying to be more productive. It is really overrated. Try taking a Saturday off and do nothing but read, watch good movies you have been putting off, and just relax overall.
JesseAldridge 16y ago
Healthcare is expensive.
- Sindrome 16y ago
  http://www.destinationrx.com/ http://www.destinationrx.com/ - I work there
- orangecat 16y ago
  And it will continue to be until we institute severe rationing, or cure aging. I vote for the second.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Cure aging and you either: a) Have a quite sudden and very severe overpopulation problem, or b) Are forced to ration babies. Both of these are pretty damn dystopic. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to live forever, but not necessarily at the cost of having everyone else live forever too.
    - orangecat 16y ago
      c) Institute a Logan's Run policy where you get 80 or 100 years of good health and are then painlessly euthanized. I think we can do better than c, but it's a lower bound: it avoids your concerns and is still a large improvement over the status quo. I'd like to live forever Curing aging doesn't let you live forever. There would still be diseases (at a much lower rate), accidents, murder, suicide, natural disasters, etc. All it would do is prevent the deterioration of our bodies and often our minds that generates large medical expenses, prevents us from being productive, and impairs our quality of life. It would also give us the option of living for several centuries longer than we do today, which we could take or not.
      - hugh3 16y ago
        I think we can do better than c, but it's a lower bound: it avoids your concerns and is still a large improvement over the status quo. I'm rather unconvinced that's an improvement over the status quo... you've just granted the government the power to euthanize people. And you just know that they're going to find a way to abuse that. They'll start by giving extensions to really valuable people we don't want to lose; great scientists, artists, writers. And then it'll be "gee, I guess politicians are pretty awesome as well, perhaps politicians should get another hundred years too..." Pretty soon it's effective-immortality for political favours. No thanks, I'll take my chances with old age. The best solution is: (d) Build starships and expand into space. But I worry that curing aging might come first.
edw519 16y ago
Enterprise software sucks. We don't talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entertainment, etc., etc., etc. and you have tons of stuff. But you don't see it and rarely think about it. Kinda like most of the iceberg being underwater. And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks. Enterprise software is so bad that there are multi-billion dollar industries devoted to consulting on how to use it, how to share it, and how to store it in data warehouses and harvest it. It's so bad that lots of people have to dump the data out of their enterprise systems and into Microsoft Excel just to get anything done. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that's where the money is. What banks were in the 1930's, enterprise IT is in the 21st century.
- j_baker 16y ago
  Actually, you need to think of who's making the decisions to buy enterprise software. Is it the people who use it, or executives? In most cases, it's the latter. Most big enterprise companies are where they are because they've learned how to market to the right people. So in that sense, most enterprise software is good. It just depends on whose definition of good you're going with.
- ronnwer 16y ago
  What your thought on new companies like yammer.com and socialcast.com ?
- hooande 16y ago
  Enterprise software sucks because corporations have little incentive to improve it and it's almost impossible for a startup to gain a foothold in terms of sales and adoption. There are so many smart hackers and the problems are so obvious...if they could have been solved with better software, it would have been done long ago. If you try to make any kind of software that competes even tangentially with SAP, Oracle, etc...you lose. If someone at a big corporation hasn't already heard of your company, the odds of them using your software drop to almost nothing. Because no one has ever been fired for going with IBM. Because big companies are playing strategic games many levels up and don't care about day-to-day employee software usage. Because a startup with a silly name just seems silly, and people willing to fight for adoption from the inside are few and far between. I'm staring to think that the real game isn't figuring out how to make enterprise software better, but to figuring out how to hack the system itself so that new ideas even have a chance.
peteforde 16y ago
As it turns out, humans are really bad at answering questions about what they need. Often if they knew they needed it, we would be competing to provide the best solution for it. This is the difference between inductive and deductive analysis. Deductive would be tasking a student with applying pattern matching to a known domain to find an expected result. Inductive analysis is when you don't actually know if there's an answer to be found. Obviously this is a bigger challenge with a more interesting payoff, but I believe inductive analysis is a skill that can be practiced. Demand Media realized that humans were really bad at coming up with problems to solve, so they started buying bulk search engine results and harvesting queries where people did not find what they were looking for. They then farm out these non-obvious (and often highly specific) needs to videographers to produce low production value clips that nail these never sexy "how do I fix the towel rack in my bathroom?" type questions. They then dominate the search results advertising for the extreme long tail of semantic Q&A on the web. Last I heard they are releasing thousands of videos a day, and making hundreds of millions in revenues. If you want to solve a big problem, apply the same inverse deduction logic to the question of which start-ups are really needed (vs. the ones people keep building over and over) and you will be the next Richard Branson.
- ronnwer 16y ago
  Completely agree with you.
- peteforde 16y ago
  I just posted my reply on our blog: http://rethink.unspace.ca/2010/6/11/what-are-the-problems-that-need-to-be-solved http://rethink.unspace.ca/2010/6/11/what-are-the-problems-th...
- stcredzero 16y ago
  As it turns out, humans are really bad at answering questions about what they need. Often if they knew they needed it, we would be competing to provide the best solution for it. I think today's problem is that people figured out the needs and figured out how to satisfy them while making a profit. What's left are the needs that are hard to fulfill or the ones that we weren't aware of before.
fletchowns 16y ago
We need to eliminate packaging waste. My laundry detergent ran out, so I had to go get some more. Why am I throwing this big plastic jug back into the recycling loop? Why can't I just take it back to the store and fill it up again? I could use the same jug for years and years and years. How many of those jugs do you think are just going into landfills every day? I saw a link recently to a "bring your own container" type of grocery store that was in NYC. It was so small though, and I've never seen anything like that around where I live. We need something like that but on a massive scale to invoke a fundamental shift in the way every single person does grocery shopping. I don't see it happening any time soon though, unfortunately. I mean, how are plastic bags still legal in so many places? How are people still not using reusable grocery sacs at this point? It's just so frustrating to think about how many perfectly good containers are being thrown away every second of every day. Why are we so damn wasteful?!
- japherwocky 16y ago
  Michigan's deposit system is very effective at getting beverage containers recycled!
- hugh3 16y ago
  I saw a link recently to a "bring your own container" type of grocery store that was in NYC. It was so small though, and I've never seen anything like that around where I live. We need something like that but on a massive scale to invoke a fundamental shift in the way every single person does grocery shopping. That sounds less like giving people what they want and more like giving people what you think they ought to have. Correction: some people want this. Some people want to wear hair shirts of inconvenience in order to impress some narrow circle of like-minded friends with how environmentally-friendly they are. But there's a limited number of hair-shirt people out there, and there's already massive competition for their dollars.
  - r0s 16y ago
    We need something like that... I think he's saying there should ideally be more demand, not that supply should be forced. narrow circle of like-minded friends There really are informed consumers out there who evaluate products based on all available information, and the people who trust them may take the lazy route and imitate. That can look like wankery if you dismiss informed consumption outright.
steveklabnik 16y ago
I live in Pittsburgh. We have a huge lack of talent at the moment. There are tons of startups with funding that are looking to hire people, but a huge lack of skilled people around. We've got companies paying $1,000 bonuses to anyone who can get a hire. It's crazy. I'm not sure how to properly attract and keep talent in the city.
- georgecmu 16y ago
  In Pittsburgh, NREC (a division of the Robotics Institute) offers $5000 bonuses for referrals that result in a hire.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Ouch, why all the massive downvotes to everyone responding here? It's a real problem, and several local founders, VCs, and even the local incubator are all trying to come up with new ways of fostering entrepreneurship around these parts. Pittsburgh is undergoing a bit of a tech renaissance, or at least we'd like to think we are. That's hard to pull of without great developers.
  - georgecmu 16y ago
    There's been quite a few robotics start-ups coming up in the past few years (a new CMU spin-off was announced literally two days ago). It's amazing that with all the university talent in the area, it's still so hard to find qualified people.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      Lots of the CMU guys just want to go into research. If not, they end up going into a robotics spinoff that only does government contract work.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  One idea is to promote remote/distributed workforces. Find ways to hire folks that live in other cities or countries. There are challenges and downsides to a distributed workforce, but advantages too. The chief of which is the ability to draw from a much larger pool of potential talent.
CytokineStorm 16y ago
Someone needs to prove that P != NP. Want to understand why that's important? Read this: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the-p-versus-np-problem/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the...
- keefe 16y ago
  it's also extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to prove. This is a problem for researchers, not people looking for ideas for startups.
  - larsberg 16y ago
    You could probably make some money on a "proof validation service" where you charge all of the crackpots who think they've solved P!=NP to validate their proof. Or, if you just happen to find an error, send that back. But the service is free if you don't!
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Why would a crackpot pay for this? Their incentive is for people not to find errors in their proofs, not for them to find errors.
      - larsberg 16y ago
        From talking to the mathy-side CS faculty in my department (UofC), the crackpots all think they've solved it. Genuinely, honestly, and completely. These faculty complain about getting e-mail spam and sometimes even visits and phone calls out of the blue from people who claim to have solved it and want their proofs checked.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    OTOH, if you prove that P = NP, you can probably make huge windfalls of money, and some of it may even be legitimate!
  - 16y ago
geuis 16y ago
How do you configure gzip for certain urls on Akamai? This is a problem I just can't find an answer to.
- seiji 16y ago
  You don't configure it per URL, you configure it per MIME type. text/css, text/html, etc. It's under Last Mile Acceleration in EdgeControl: "Apply to content with Content-type: text/html, application/x-javascript, text/css" If you're using the XML config it resembles: <match:response.header name="Content-Type" value="text/html* application/x-javascript* text/css*" value-case="off" value-wildcard="on"> <edgeservices:lma.edge-browser>on</edgeservices:lma.edge-browser> <edgeservices:lma.incoming>on</edgeservices:lma.incoming> </match:response.header>
mechanician 16y ago
The airport check-in security process.
- orangecat 16y ago
  I wish, although it seems fixing that requires convincing several million people that that terrorists are not actually hiding in every shadow. But somewhat related: fix baggage handling. There's no reason you should have to wait half an hour to get your bags after you get off the plane. Take care of that problem and people will be more willing to check their bags, which in turn will make boarding and exiting much smoother. Although airlines would have to get rid of their idiotic baggage fees, the improved efficiency should more than make up for it.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    On the contrary--if you increase baggage fees, you could reduce the amount of baggage (making it easier to handle) and have more $-per-bag to spend on your fast baggage handling system.
dsc 16y ago
I think a problem that bugs me a lot is how I see lots of people wanting to do lots of cool things, but they lack the appropriate guidance. We do that on a day-to-day basis, but what about the other folks out there who don't know about this place? Usually forums, IRC, blogs help in getting immersed with anything, but I have a feeling that a startup with the primary purpose of "Enlightening" its users has yet to come. edit: Basically what I'm shooting for is: how to get rid of the crappy forums and allow a truly easy and fun way to go about learning new things. People go to college to learn about how things should be, but not how they are. Waste of time and money, sometimes.
- ronnwer 16y ago
  I agree, but how do you build such a community? Hacker News is a great example. Perhaps this could be redesigned and made available to everyone :)
- imp 16y ago
  Would you mind commenting on my website, Curious Reef, which is aiming to help people learn new things? I would love to hear if you think it's a solution to that problem. http://curiousreef.com/ http://curiousreef.com/
  - JoshCole 16y ago
    Cool site, I've been looking for something like that for a while.
dpcan 16y ago
Keys. Note: This same question came up a few months ago. Said the same thing then. I really want to gain some traction here :)
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Can you elaborate? What about keys? Too many of them? The necessity of having them at all? The fact that they can be stolen/forged, what?
thunk 16y ago
I posted this problem on "Intrinsic Motivation Doesn't Exist": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424520 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424520
nlh 16y ago
I think there is a fundamental problem with the process of getting funding for a new business. I'm not sure there's a simple or even reasonable solution, but there's definitely a problem. I know many smart, capable, enthusiastic people who have a very good business ideas, would be totally capable of launching a new product/service/etc., and would make fine entrepreneurs -- but who have absolutely no way to get their ideas/product/services off the ground. Every time someone approaches me and asks for direction on how to fund the idea, the answer always seems to end up at "find a wealthy friend or family member to invest in you." Some people have those connections. Most do not. We all know that VCs only go for very specific types of high-growth products / services. Places like Y Combinator have a very specific (and great!) niche. Banks are entirely useless in 95% of cases. Even the SBA -- the government's best effort in this area -- is still basically for businesses that have already gotten off the ground. There are a ton of great ideas - great products - great services - that aren't necessarily VC-worthy but do deserve to be given an opportunity to be born.
- kishorenc 16y ago
  I think this is where something like Kickstarter is cool. I really wish they go international soon...

tjmaxal 16y ago

"curing aging" would actually INCREASE the cost of healthcare to nearly infinite.

stcredzero 16y ago
Not necessarily. http://www.sens.org/ http://www.sens.org/
orangecat 16y ago
Please explain. The average medical expenses of a 30 year old are vastly lower than for an 80 year old, and a successful cure for aging would give you the health of a 30 year old indefinitely.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  Over a long enough lifespan the chance of contracting cancer approaches one. So we'd have to fix that too, for starters.
  - orangecat 16y ago
    Nah. Sure, even if you don't suffer from aging you'd still occasionally get diseases, and eventually one would be fatal, but your medical expenses per year would be far less than they are today.
    - ErrantX 16y ago
      Ok then, how about this. Obesity is a growing cause of illness. Removing aging is unlikely to affect that, arguably it could compound the problem.
      - orangecat 16y ago
        Potentially, although I'd expect that a person with the health of an obese 30 year old would still have lower medical expenses than a non-obese 60 year old. At any rate, obesity is a relatively easy problem compared to aging. (Step 1: stop subsidizing corn syrup...)
        ErrantX 16y ago
        No it doesn't work like that; it's not the age, it is beig obese for a length of time. I'm not sure it is as easily fixable as your comment suggests - I'd argue it is as non-trivial as stopping aging.
      - jeffcoat 16y ago
        Careful, here: this is exactly what the argument would look like if you'd decided in advance what the right answer is, and you kept casting around for reasons why that's so until you find one that seems to stick.
        ErrantX 16y ago
        Not at all I'm offering reasons - all pretty solid ones - why fixing aging wouldn't remove the cost of healthcare. The point was to show there are lots of other healthcare costs unrelated to aging. I'd argue it is the other poster who has become set on a theory. :-)
Robin_Message 16y ago
Dammit that is a ridiculous statement. No aging -> people still get sick occasionally -> it costs money to fix them -> it had better cost less than they earn between sicknesses, else they die Or, at the moment healthcare is O(1), based on a lifespan of N, but if the lifespan is extended radically, it will become O(N). So, if eliminating ageing causes N to tend to infinity, then I suppose healthcare costs will also tend to infinity. But then so will the accommodation costs, food costs, toothbrush costs, internet access... Healthcare looks like capex at the moment; if we lived much longer it'll look more like a variable cost.
tjmaxal 16y ago
say it costs a dollar per person each year to keep their bodies in perfect condition. without aging there is no death, no death means that the population will always grow or stagnate. $1/person/year Time becomes infinite, population is always positive there for no matter how small the cost they will always become infinite because time is infinite and population is a positive number.

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

Another trend I noted after sitting in on a VC pitch: Look where people use Excel as some sort of database/process management system because an existing app isn't there or just sucks. That probably spells out opportunity. The world's most used database isn't Oracle or MySQL, it's Microsoft Excel...

hernan7 16y ago
Also, SharePoint "surveys" as quick&dirty data entry forms. Kind of a modern-day Microsoft-centric version of the venerable FormMail script.
spatulon 16y ago
This is something I've noticed before, and I'm not the only one - it's number 22 on pg's list of "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" from a couple of years back: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
dockd 16y ago
It seems like another major use for Excel is its ability to allow people type text in tables. That's using a big hammer for a rather small nail. This fails in Word--it tries to make the table fit onto a printed page--about 6" across. It doesn't work very well in my [old] copy of Dreamweaver.
bdickason 16y ago
Also look for places where small businesses use paper :) My fiance and I started a salon together and we started out using an appointment book and client rolodex to track their customers because the software all sucks. Two months later, I built some software for it with some friends and now we're getting close to being able to launch it to the world :) Every day I walk by 2-3 barber shops and salons in NYC without computers or with old Windows 3.1-esque programs.
logicalmind 16y ago
I work in enterprise software, trying to improve it one company at a time, and the biggest niche I see for excel is bypassing existing security mechanisms or procedures. We tend to expose data to users in a secure manner based on roles or authorities. But once users can export the data into excel, all of those security mechanisms are bypassed and they can send the data to other people or take it home. I've even seen instances where excel exports are used as disaster recovery mechanisms.
- joshu 16y ago
  Excel is perhaps the single largest development tool used (mostly by people who don't think they are developing anything.) I keep wondering what a next-generation replacement might look like?

fjabre 16y ago

So true. Also don't forget how many people actually major in information sytems in college. The whole industry is self perpetuated by overly complicated software. The more complicated the more they can milk their clients.. Such a waste.. Although I suppose in the current environment it's better to have these guys employed instead of looking for jobs.

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
Ha, I've renamed my degree in computer information systems to a degree in: How Not To Build Software.
jcromartie 16y ago
Every single Information Systems graduate that I've met has made a horrible horrible mess of every piece of code they touch. I hate to stereotype, but when it's all you have to go off of, it's all you can do.
- jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
  The capstone project for my class had a teacher that required we used Blackboard as a code repository system instead of me setting up Github or beanstalk. She also asked that we use stored procedures for MySQL, which no one was familiar with and would take way longer. The code was horrible, the design was ugly, and half the class was spent designing by committee. It was all for an app that should have taken a couple of weeks to build (it tracked absences for the school of business).
  - jcromartie 16y ago
    That's really amazing. What was her title? Was this supposed to be a programming professor? How can anybody who purports to be teaching the practicalities of software construction require you to use the wrong tool? Blackboard has terrible handling of file uploads... as of fairly recently two users couldn't two different files with the same name.
    - jwhitlark 16y ago
      Heh, I had a CS Professor once refer to the command line as "a legacy technology that's still occasionally useful for testing." I didn't tell her that saying that at a hiring interview at my company would end the interview.
      - _delirium 16y ago
        I've had more the opposite experience--- one CS professor used only a Unix command line without X installed, and his machine didn't have a mouse. Not sure which is worse.
        desigooner 16y ago
        i can relate to that .. not only did my professor use command line only, he required the finals (more like a paper) and the project reports typed up in LaTex + the presentations in .PS/PDF format .. No Word or Powerpoint
        Quiark 16y ago
        Isn't that actually a good thing? :)
        jodrellblank 16y ago
        In the same way that forcing people to code everything in assembler or C instead of Ruby or Python out of some religious ideology is a good thing. Word produces acceptably formatted acceptably cross platform documents with low effort and a PDF export option for the last three years too.