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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?
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 t…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 vendo…
>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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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.
And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 vendo…
>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?
I loved these old books. I think I had the Seven Clam Sisters or something like it. My parents managed to rescue and bring to the US two childhood stories I really enjoyed: The Long Haired Maiden, and Shihan and the Snail[0]. These old folk tales are really entertaining. Often there’s no real moral or anything. It’s just a story. And to this day I really like these stories that are just “this happened and that person…