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Comment by FraaJad | Hacker News Reader

As usual, most people here are trying to "understand" Indians by looking at some comments.

Some people would like nothing better than shoe horn every Indian student into "them stupid Indian" and feel smug.

The amount of clue-less students is fairly constant across countries. But, when you multiply that with the huge number of Indian students taking CS for better job prospects, you end up with this horde of n00bs.

It's just that most Indian students can read/write/speak English than, say, Chinese or eastern Europeans. So, all the English speaking world's internet is their internet too.

Chinese have their own internet. Russians have their own language forums and websites. Indians don't need that. So, India has "outsourced" student "guidance" system to the internet.

sorry about that? ;)

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No offense, but if that's the full explanation, then why aren't the helpful Indians in the majority, too (there should be 2 or 3 times as much 'good' content from Indians than there is from Americans / Western Europeans)? Now there are plenty of Indians who do provide good content, on this site and elsewhere, but not in the per-capita rate one would expect from your theory (I feel, I don't have data on this). So IMO at best your theory only explains part of the phenomenon.

People have down-voted you but I actually agree with your empirical evidence. Most knowledgeable Indians don't really give much back to the greater community.

Most Indians (including me unfortunately) consume far far more content than we produce. I am concerned about this too and I've been thinking about this and I do not have concrete reasons for this yet.

I could throw up a few reasons though. It may be cultural, since many of us just do not know how to share. It may be a work-life balance issue where people who-know-stuff consider this work and won't do this in their free time. It may also be because the Indian economy is growing fast, growth opportunities are immense, so spending time on tasks that don't directly give them anything has a huge opportunity cost.

Once again, the incentives.

There is no obvious cultural incentive for smart Indians to share their knowledge on the "anonymous" internet. People look for "leverage". Sad, but true. This is the same reason why contributions to Open Source is so low from Indians.

As Aniket pointed out, knowledgeable Indians give back far less than they are capable of.

I have had the chance of observing this closely. My own mentor who is a PhD wouldn't divulge anything to anybody unless there was something in it for him. He is a great teacher, but not when it comes to sharing the "jewels".

As usual, most people here are trying to "understand" Indians by looking at some comments.

I trust it was clear from my original post that I was trying to understand this group of people and not Indians in general.

Apologies.

English is only my second(?) language. I did not mean to drive any such meaning from what you said. :)

I might have generalized the answer too much to answer all the comments I've been reading here and on reddit.

The amount of clue-less students is fairly constant across countries. But, when you multiply that with the huge number of Indian students taking CS for better job prospects, you end up with this horde of n00bs.

This is not the only factor.

It seems that a substantial fraction of people are not suited to computer science. For instance in usability studies, most adults - even educated adults - are just unable to get the metaphor of a directory tree. They can and do learn to do sequences of actions with them by rote, but don't understand them. (These usability studies are one of the reasons why companies like Apple keep inventing UIs that hide the directory tree from people.)

In the USA this population of students is happy to ignore CS and instead study something else that they are more suited to. And can still have a good chance of getting a high paying job.

In India this population of students is under pressure to go into CS anyways because that is where the good jobs are. The distribution of clue in the population is similar, but the distribution of clue among students studying CS is not. Worse yet, universities are under pressure to avoid delivering the bad news that these students are going into the wrong line of work.

in usability studies, most adults - even educated adults - are just unable to get the metaphor of a directory tree. They can and do learn to do sequences of actions with them by rote, but don't understand them.

Non-technical users don't "get" the directory tree because it is a leaky abstraction that fails to consistently deliver on the assurances offered to users. It helps when deterministically planning a Unix filesystem but over time the system destabilizes due to inevitable mismatches between the expectations of OS maintainers, package authors, and end users.

- Underinformed users make best-guess choices (that contradict the intentions of the system designers) as to where to put new files

- Software authors publish conflicting install guides e.g. "sudo make install" vs. "extract to ~/bin/ and add it to your path"

- Symlinks - which are fabulously useful by the way - undermine the promise of a canonical location for each file.

Sorry, but people's comprehension problems are much more basic than that. The very idea of a hierarchical filing system where things can be put at any level hits a mental block. This is well before any detailed discussion of how any particular thing should be organized.

I think we agree with each other; I failed to properly acknowledge your main point.

The underlying problem users have with software - as illustrated by the hierarchical file system model - is being required to make decisions than they are comfortable with. If you as an iPhone user simply want to edit and store a text file, you're not going to want to have to know the stories behind emacs vs. vim, the "everything is a file" ethos of Plan 9, or the sordid history of Hans Reiser.

Apple (and other minimalist UX designers) have the right idea here: remove all unnecessary choices and questions so that the user can solve their basic need. This is minimum viable product. This is Basecamp vs. MS Project. Add extra features (i.e. extra decisions to confront the user with) if necessary, but only if they prove themselves.

> Some people would like nothing better than shoe horn every Indian student into "them stupid Indian" and feel smug.

I don't like it very much either, because in real life I have to pay the price for the stereotyping. However, stereotyping is a perfectly normal thing for humans to do, and I strongly recommend that we DO NOT make people feel guilty for it, especially in cases where it'd be quite warranted. This doesn't mean that we are all free to stereotype - it just means that we should not expect extremely unnatural behavior from others.

Indians I'm sure don't have any qualms exploiting any positive stereotypes associated with us. I suggest we own the negative stereotypes as well.

I appreciate your enlightened thinking. I hope that it does not fall on deaf ears.

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