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Comment by asxndu | Hacker News Reader

Quick question.

What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.

Is it that they have better quality books?

Competition. Nobody in the US cares about school math/physics/... olympiads. But they are/were a big deal in schools in the xUSSR.

There also was no centralized test system (like SAT) up until early 2000-s. People had to go and sit on entrance exams in each university where they wanted to apply. But winners of olympiads got automatic admission into good universities.

In addition, social sciences were a minefield in the USSR, especially subjects like political science or history. And hard sciences were safe.

For entrance exams though... At least in Poland, we had them as well. They were corrupt.

Cheating was rampant, and a very common way for getting admitted was paying professors from that uni for tutoring - who would train them on the type of tasks they would do at that uni.

And it prevented you from attending unis far away a lot of time due to time contraints.

Oh, absolutely. Especially for the top universities. That made olympiads even more important because they allowed students to bypass the exams.

And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.

Same in Poland. My civics teacher in high school was a historian.

He hated that, he wanted to be a lawyer. But he didn't get admitted to studies, so he had to pick something close in order not to be drafted, and so he stuck with it.

They would still nail you after university. For 1.5 years instead of 2.

They had a thing of encouraging talent and putting it in special schools to develop it. Then Maths reading groups etc.

Not only that. Corporations are filled with excellent software developers from Russia who did not go to any specialized schools or graduated from prestigious universities.

They have a very strong DIY culture which I'm sure helps with making people explore and discover knowledge and develop skill

Description of different developer mindsets when they encounter a problem with a tool from a vendor.

Americans: contact the vendor and report the issue. Then wait for the vendor to fix it, applying pressure as needed. Because of the delay, the product ends up being 6 months late, but then it works reliably.

Russians: curse the vendor, then use undocumented APIs and live code patching to work around the bug. The vendor is never told about the issues. The product is released on time, but it breaks in 1 year when the vendor makes an incompatible change that breaks the workarounds.

This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people. And it's very helpful when you're doing security research.

Incidentally, Jewish people also excel in security due to a similar cultural mindset.

>This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people.

How do you people come up with such stories?

Hackernews thrives on users confidently making claims based on their own limited perspective and providing next to no reasoning or evidence.

I don't know... Maybe by growing up in Russia and starting my software career there?

To add some color, here is my favorite hard-to-translate idiom in a Russian developer community:

"File away rough edges" ("доработать напильником") - adjust something to work in a way that its original creator never even realized is possible. And usually for a good reason.

Of course, all generalizations should be taken with a grain of salt. They can never be used to judge individuals or even individual companies.

I still don't see how the government comes into play

I can't say anything about the "centuries" part, but the rest sort of checks. In those old soviet countries there was no such thing as "customer service", the politburo didn't get around inventing it and every economic cog was created from above. If a modern American had seen how things were done there, they would have wrongly assumed that a powerful pulp-and-paper lobby was in control. Also, when the thing in question was made in the West (which was often the case for high tech stuff), and somehow smuggled under the iron curtain and Western sanctions, customer support was unaffordable or simply out of reach.

This trope is very widely documented in Russian literature, in fact it's one of the "corner truth" of Russian existence.

Checkov, Gogol, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky all wrote novels with this exact plot, because it was so lifelike and tangible for all Russians (Soviets) to understand. If you're interested, check out The Bronze Horseman, The Overcoat, or Poor Folk.

Thank you for being familiar with Russian culture, but I don't remember these classics writing about casual link between oppression, suffering, depression and hacker mindset.

Me and cyberax are both Russians, except I never wanted to emigrate

Well, Gogol's "Dead Souls" is the first example of a lifehack.

I wouldn't call a deception "lifehack".

But anyway, what makes Chichikov's "lifehack" "a result of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people"?

Math and physics are more theoretical in curriculum and less students can grasp, but ones who do perform better. So, higher input filter, earlier talent detection. Western education is more applied to a business, Russian is more like a generic theory. This makes Western schools prepare to develop, Russian to research. Note this is a generic distinction, MIT and Stanford are higher standards and provide access to field practitioners so my take it is genuinely provide more quality than MSU or Baumanka alike.

Americans were great researchers at the time, as well. During the Cold War era, Soviet culture included an ambition to rival and surpass American research and technology.

One word, "Culture";

See the comment by "elzbardico" here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738277

Sadly, current-day global culture/society does not value knowledge if it is not in the furtherance of capitalistic goals.

Russians consider their profession a calling and try to be the best at it. Makes big difference when it's calling and not just-a-job.

I dunno what attitude russia's gen-z holds towards profession but in my time it was definitely considered a calling.

I think part of it is that unlike in the US, access to education wasn't paywalled.

Higher education in the US, with the exception of scholarships here and there, requires you to come from a wealthy background to afford the best schools.

In other words, it's more about perpetuating class privilege than it is about developing the best and brightest of a generation. If you're a genius with poor parents, you have to really hope to get lucky enough to get a scholarship.

In socialist societies, despite the claims often leveled against them, things were more meritocratic. If you're a genius with poor parents, you got access to the best education as that's what's optimal for society.

It's also about poor children getting worse primary education . According to Google "roughly 21% of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate".

If you never learned to read, good luck getting higher education.

I'm not defending communist societies like Soviet Union or China but I think "social democratic" countries like those in Scandinavia have shown generally good education outcomes.

It's more like 4%

mostly because people had no option to leave the country.

also the salaries of scientists and engineers were notoriously shitty, so only those with passion for the subject studied it.

Good thing we've overcome that! Today, in the land of the free, researchers' passion is rewarded with good salaries and working conditions. Right?

I assure you that Soviets did not have the kind of ```science``` that is temporarily defunded in the US.

Oh come on, Scientific Communism was even a separate discipline in universities.

yes, but Soviet communism was the "he who does not work, neither shall he eat" kind, not Cultural Marxism beloved by the Western academia. I'm sure even the people who studied hard sciences had to endure a few hours of commie bullshit each week, but just like in present day China, there were preciously few people who took it seriously. it was just nagruzka.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80...

>In the USSR, retail stores weren't allowed to promptly raise prices on popular items or lower prices on unpopular ones. One way to circumvent this was through "loading": stores would combine a popular (scarce) item with one or more unpopular ones into "food sets" on their order desks, preventing customers from purchasing the scarce item separately.

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