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Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

#11

Post by dragonwriter »

tryitnow wrote: post #7

> although there currently are just over 42,000 high schools in the United States, only 2,100 of them were certified to teach the AP computer science course in 2011. This boggles my mind. Only 5% of high schools are even certified to teach CS? I wonder if this could be addressed at the state level. Why couldn't California mandate a more Russian style approach - perhaps even with an entirely new exam and curriculum si…

> This boggles my mind. Only 5% of high schools are even certified to teach CS?

No, only 5% are certified to teach AP Computer Science; AP is a particular, privately governed, college-level advanced placement program.

At least back when I was in high school, it wasn't typically the first CS class one would take in High School.

Re: Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

#15

Post by kilroy123 »

I always thought it was because smart people who will become good programmers are guaranteed to get a nice cushy job. (In the US) In Eastern Europe and especially in Russia that isn't the case. Great cushy jobs are hard to come by.

However, there's virtually unlimited opportunity doing shady things or hacking for profit. I once even talked to a Russian developer about this in great length. He came to the US for one such cushy job. I was pretty shocked about how freely he talked about past "shady" jobs. He told me, yes he _could_ make more money but he also didn't like being so unethical. So he came here to be "legit".

Re: Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

#16

Post by xor1 »

vrutkovs wrote: post #6

This article may have a point about poor state of basic computer education in US, but its just blindly guesses the reasons on the topic of why so many hackers are from ex-USSR countries. A pretty good level of CS doesn't help here much - take a look at Europe, for instance. The secret ingredient is a culture of cheating. Its absolutely fine to cheat on any level of exam (unless you get caught, obviously). This makes…

>The secret ingredient is a culture of cheating. Its absolutely fine to cheat on any level of exam (unless you get caught, obviously). This makes students think about the weak points of any system, gives them a chance to train their skills etc. The side effect of this culture is much higher level of corruption and financial crimes

If your theory was true, Chinese devs and hackers would have the same reputation for prowess as their Russian counterparts.

I like Sergey Aleynikov's explanation:

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

Re: Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

#17

Post by maxxxxx »

rndmize wrote: post #4

I think this stems in part from the "oh I'm so bad at math" culture we have in the US, where its almost expected that most kids won't be good at mathematics. The side effect of this, imo, is that fields that are close to math or dependent on it (physics, stats, CS, etc.) pick up a piece of that stigma and idea that its acceptable to be bad at these things. I've seen occasional articles about quants on wall street and…

the "oh I'm so bad at math" culture

So true. It's cool to say you are bad at math.

Re: Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

#20

Post by chaosagent »

The article mentions an "AP Computer Science" curriculum that it claims does not cover programming and is not actually APCS, but is instead AP Computer Science Principles, an "intro to computers" for less stem-oriented students that was introduced last year. The actual APCS curriculum mostly involves learning basic programming constructs and some Java APIs, and is done solely in Java.

Also, there used to be AP Computer Science B covering basic algorithms and data structures, but CollegeBoard killed it because barely anyone took it.

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