tuscarok
* Rubbish font handling and formatting
* Superfluous functionality when it doesn't get the important things right
* The new beta interface doesn't give you a nice general overview of your notes. I preferred the old interface.
Seriously seriously seriously OP, you've got to try to make the first move. Women, regrettably, are inherently passive about this sort of thing.
* dynamic programming
* tries
* depth/breadth first traversal of a graph
* combinatorics
* graph colouring
* prime generation techniques
These topics are almost guaranteed to crop up every year, and the people who do well in these programming competitions learn all these techniques off by heart. They have their own library and macros which do all this stuff, and when they read the question they instantly see which technique they need to use and boom they're done. You have to remember that these people have been practising this stuff from a very early age, and that in many cases, spending hours and hours becoming good at this is their only way out of a crappy life (Eastern Europeans). However, being good at competitive programming has very little correlation with being a good software engineer (I think there is some analysis done by the likes of Google or Microsoft which proves this, I will try to find the link later).
Now that I've stopped using it I find that I'm in a better, more stable mood throughout the day. Not being reminded of my inferiority means I find I can concentrate better on self-improvement i.e. the things I should be doing if I want to be as successful as these people I'm so jealous of.
This is similar to the problem of movie/book recommendations, which has not been solved to my satisfaction. I have yet to see any good recommendation systems out there which go beyond recommending movies based on simple things like 'same actor was in this movie', 'people who watched that watched this' etc.
Ask HN: A recent graduate, how do I get over regret of not doing internships?
I have just graduated with a PhD in CS from a top world university. I never did any internships during my studies because I always thought the PhD should take priority. Now I'm beginning to realise that this was a mistake. My friends who did internships with the likes of Google/Microsoft are now walking into top notch, high-paying jobs, while I am being rejected at every turn. This is probably...