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Comment by ackbar03 | Hacker News Reader

Its pretty fascinating how a lot of these technically adept hackers all tend to come from relatively poor environments. Even now a lot of the security bug bounty programs have a large proportion of Indians in relatively poverished villages somewhere. Russia after the collapse of the soviet union produced a ton of hackers. In China some of the most technically competent people I've interacted with doing shady stuff with bots and REing games and what not come from some random village. I'd say this is meritocracy working at its best and something you'd only see in the online world

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I think the fact that you find more people in the world with technical talent who are also poor has a lot to do with the fact that there are a lot more poor people in the world than rich. If a talent is equally spread throughout humanity, then one would expect most recipients of that talent to be poor.

But poor people also have unequal access to educational resources for learning technical skills.

And this is the perfect economic justification for free high-quality education, with some form of acceleration for the best students. This is especially in a country that has a high valued currency - as low and no-skilled jobs that can be outsourced, will be outsourced - but really true for any country as it only increases their talent pool. So if a country, like the US, wants to improve productivity, they should have an education system much like many places in Asia.

Yes. But I don't see what this has to do with the topic at hand?

Not all replies have to be counter to the parent post. I was just riffing off your parent post, much like you were. The topic of the thread being that the poor have unequal access to education, but that exceptional talent may exist within that cohort. I just wanted to emphasise the economic incentives of universal access to educational opportunities.

Maybe it's just that if you're from one of those places you likely have no formal credentials and no relevant local employment options, not at you recruitable abroad. So they do what they can, and a small fraction are successful in good or bad ways.

Also I notice that coders from wealthy backgrounds focus on high level languages, abstractions, etc. I don't see a lot of people digging down to the fundamental technical implementation, and actually tend to look down on such inclinations as over optimization.

On the other hand, a poor person probably has access to a very limited range of technology, so ends up learning the technology inside and out. Maybe they also don't even have regular electricity or internet, so has to learn technology using pencil, paper and by thinking about it. Much more likely to give a deep understanding of the subject matter.

Wealthy people have to be more productive as they are paid more for their productivity.

Being paid more for productivity would imply the opposite about wealthy people, in my mind.

Are you implying that working less while delivering more is somehow bad (or working equally and delivering 10x is somehow perverse?)

Those aren't the only possible options. Another is that if a person is paid more for the same productivity, they are incentivized to be less productive.

Not a valid argument.

Is there any evidence besides movie cliches to indicate there are indeed more hackers in poor countries?

I'm not sure if this is in fact true, but it seems to be.

I think it's because when you grow up poor, you _have_ to hack. If not computers, then something. I'm living in Mexico right now, and it's incredible the ways people figure out how to make money, and figure out how to just make things work.

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