Reminds me a little of the story of the fleas. They can normally jump 3 ft, but when the are put in an 18" high container with a lid, they can never jump more that 18" for the rest of their lives, even when the lid is removed.
Sometimes I wonder how much I let the rest of the world turn me into a flea.
This is true in some instances, but not generally. I think most advances are made gradually by very experienced people who understand exactly why things are "unsolvable" and what paths may be more fruitful.
Secondly, it is doubtful that a student will solve a millennium problem or make any other advance of that caliber.
Let me see... it's a classic story about a fascinating event in the history of a field that many people here find interesting and/or have studied. It's about a creative breakthrough that came about in an unanticipated, nonstandard way - something very much in the hacker ethos. It's information that many of us would never have run across if it hadn't been posted here (if it was posted before, I missed it). It even has a cameo by Knuth!
The story is in fact so relevant to Hacker News that it would be hard to imagine anything more in the spirit of the site.
The only thing lame about it is the title. The problems were obviously not unsolvable.
Edit: while I'm at it, a lot of people here are students, or were recently students, or are lifelong students. Many have spent time in the academic milieu described in the story and are familiar with this kind of folklore. The meme of the math professor assigning unsolved problems as homework is a familiar one.
I like the one about the professor accepting the excuse of the students who missed the final exam by saying they couldn't make it - car troubles. And the professor let them retake it - and the exam was one question: "Which tire?"
I want to build a spam filter that would throw out email based on some measure of its content relative to Snope's DB score.
Sure, yeah, there's a Ferma's last theorem as an "extra hard exercise" in Knuth, a story of Huffman and his codes, device
for thin shaving IC for the purpose of cloning them, etc, etc
It's all part of a standard CompSci folklore package. If
you dig into Math or Physics folklore, there's even more stories. In fact, there are thick books filled with them. But do you seriously want to see them on a front page ? I can assure you many of them inspiring and a lot of them are far more "in the spirit of the site" than this one.
From http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html: "The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I can only speak for myself. This story appeals to my intellectual curiosity an order of magnitude more than the mediocre blogs and transient tech-du-jour articles that constitute the bulk of what gets posted even here (a site which is well above average). I would love to see more high-quality historical material and it boggles my mind how anyone could not find it interesting.
There's a lot of things that are interesting. All needs to be taken in moderation or this place will end up chokeful of Digg-style news.
TOP 10 BESTEST HISTORICAL MATIREAL
OMG .. THE MOST AMAZING URBAN LEGEND YOU READ TODAY !!
etc etc
There's nothing wrong with the orginal story, but if you are after quality anecdotes, then scooping them from an urban legends site should be your last option.
Sometimes I wonder how much I let the rest of the world turn me into a flea.