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US Would Be 28th In 'Hacking Olympics', China Would Take The Gold (infoworld.com)
After analyzing 1.4 million scores on HackerRank's tests for coding accuracy and speed, Chinese programmers "outscored all other countries in mathematics, functional programming, and data structures challenges". Long-time Slashdot reader DirkDaring quotes a report from InfoWorld:
While the United States and India may have lots of programmers, China and Russia have the most talented developers according to a study by HackerRank... "If we held a hacking Olympics today, our data suggests that China would win the gold, Russia would take home a silver, and Poland would nab the bronze. Though they certainly deserve credit for making a showing, the United States and India have some work ahead of them before they make it into the top 25."
While the majority of scores came from America and India, the two countries ranked 28th and 31st, respectively. "Poland was tops in Java testing, France led in C++, Hong Kong in Python, Japan in artificial intelligence, and Switzerland in databases," reports InfoWorld. Ukrainian programmers had the top scores in security, while Finland showed the highest scores for Ruby.
While the majority of scores came from America and India, the two countries ranked 28th and 31st, respectively. "Poland was tops in Java testing, France led in C++, Hong Kong in Python, Japan in artificial intelligence, and Switzerland in databases," reports InfoWorld. Ukrainian programmers had the top scores in security, while Finland showed the highest scores for Ruby.
Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?
stop fat shaming!
They looked at average scores for an open competition. This leaves you incredibly open to being biased by which people decide to join your competition.
All the skillz in the world don't mean a thing without creativity and grit. There were better painters and sculptors than Michaelangelo, but only he had the mix of inspiration and perseverance to 'make the brushes sing.'
Same holds true here. It's like telling me that the country with a soccer team with the best technical skills will win the World Cup; tell that to the imaginative Brazil team of 2002, or the wild Spaniards or 2010...
It is important to realize that you couldn't even have a Hacking Olympics without shitty vulnerable OSs like Microsoft makes, vulnerable email servers like criminal Hillary ran, and a generous supp;y of back doors like the NSA has given us. Say what you like about China and Russia here, but they are not the ones who have done the most damage.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Complete beginners in the US are far more likely to try hackerrank; whereas on average more experienced coders from other nations are likely to compete.
Also in the US graduating from a good school is adequate for employment prospects, so many good programmers don't use hackerrank and other competitive programming platforms.
I was hunted in Slab City
https://www.reddit.com/r/solot...
"A tiny history lesson on Slab City for those that have no idea what it is. I first became aware of it in the Sean Penn directed movie about the life of Christopher McCandless, "Into the Wild". In Alexander SuperTramp's (A name Chris chose for himself) travels around the US before ultimately dying in an abandoned bus in Alaska, he spends time at Slab City.
It was originally an army base, it looks peaceful and loving, a hippie utopia. He visits Salvation mountain. It is a monument right outside of Slab City that was built over the course of 30 years by Leonard Knight. A crazy old Slabber, but full of love like nobody you've ever seen. He built it out of Hay bails covered in adobe, items he found in the desert and covered it in over 300,000 cans of paint, all donated. Leonard has since died and his mountain is a tourist attraction. Without him to do the constant maintenance on his creation, it will slowly crumble to nothing.
I researched the Slabs a bit just out of curiosity. Even thoughhough it is in the damn Imperial desert in California, it has a water source. What I believe to be the Colorado River is redirected along side the Slabs. There is a natural hot spring where these fuckers bathe in each others filthy body stew. There is a makeshift Library, an internet cafe, a bunch of little social clubs you can join and even a hostel for teenage runaways that takes any sort of miniscule donation. There is a church and they actually feed the Slabbers on Saturday's. And of course, there is "The Range". Saturday night's entertainment. A stage set in front of a hundred of the worst condition couches and chairs you'll ever see. Have you ever seen a stained couch on the sidewalk with holes and springs poking out and a "free" sign on it? Well, I assure you it ended up at The Range. Anyway, it's a talent show of sorts. Possibly the only talent it has ever seen was an acoustic song sung by Kirsten Stuart in the movie.
So that's Slab City. The state of California is trying to sell the land and evict all of the squatters, Snowbirds (retirement age RV'ers) tweakers, criminals, hippies and lowlifes. Had I written this before my actual experience there I would have said they are trying to evict the loving hippie commune that just want a simple life and deserve to have this one forgotten piece of desert. But, I've been there and opinions change. So, I figured if I ever want to check out this place before it is sold or Salvation Mountain crumbles to dust, now is the time.
That's why I went. Just to check it out, camp for a week or so...maybe longer if I liked the vibe. I had enough supplies to last me and my dog for months. Now on with my horror story...
I left on 11/3/15 at 7am with my trusty road dog named Cooper. He is an Italian Greyhound/Pit bull mix. I wanted to get there as fast as possible. New Hampshire to southern California, just over 3000 miles in a Honda Civic with NO radio. I only stayed at 2 Motels long enough to get a full night sleep and took a 3 hour nap at a rest stop. There isn't much to say about the entire length of the US when you're rushing through it. I arrived at Slab City on 11/6/15 at 9:30pm having spent only $300 on gas, not bad at all. Being so late at night and as dark as I've ever seen, I had no idea where to go. I didn't want to infringe on someone's established site. I drove down a dirt road that could shake the bolts loose on your car. I saw a spot I could pull in with nobody around. I got out and looked into the darkness and filled Coopers bowls with food and water. I was expecting to hear people, maybe rowdy people or talking or music, something. It was completely silent, at 9:30pm. NOTHING. I then realized that I am making a lot of noise when A flashlight came on in the distance. I've been opening and closing my doors and my dog eating is echoing in the distance. I realize that I'm the asshole.
or Steve Wozniak's functional programming score, or Bill Gates' data structures score. The point is that they are really good at what they do because of what they have achieved. There are people who hone their skills to get the highest test scores, and those who run with them and do something real. I've had *some* exposure to programming contests and did OK in them as an undergrad, but there's absolutely no incentive in the US to train those skills to "olympic levels" The system is set up to get them to the point at which you can build stuff that works really well, and then just run with them. I think this is the right system to have.
In addition to the gold in government corruption, oppression of civil rights, and lack of a free press.
The corporate culture in the US drives the best tech minds away from the industry. Our computer people are just as smart, but after being shit on, looked down upon, and forced to complete meaningless TPS reports for so long they just give up and go do something else. It's our corporate culture that can learn from the Chinese, not our high tech pros.
And let's not forget the amateur hour that Linux is. A slow bloated mono kernel wrapped in a flaky crust of GNU crap.
getting caught != best hacker
The zeitgeist takes hacker to imply use of computers and technology for malicious ends. HackerRank is a website that presents it's users with common programming challenges for the purpose of providing a programming portfolio and self edification.
By trade I am a sysadmins but modern DevOps or SRE positions usually require a certain level of programming proficiency. I have completed the python examples to prepare for interviews. I have never been a "hacker" in the way that the media takes it to mean.
As for China and Russia, I would wager a few things are going on there. 1. There are some good programmers in each country. Though I have had experience with outsourced development in both countries and let me say I am not impressed. 2. Both countries are well known for lack of concern for copyright laws of other countries. I suspect there are places you can find solutions to every HackerRank challenge.
It is important to realize that you couldn't even have a Hacking Olympics without shitty vulnerable OSs like Microsoft makes, vulnerable email servers like criminal Hillary ran, and a generous supp;y of back doors like the NSA has given us. Say what you like about China and Russia here, but they are not the ones who have done the most damage.
Presumably you understand that in "Hacking Olympics" "hacking" means "developing software" not "breaking into computer systems".
This just in: People in countries where hacking US targets isn't going to land you life in prison, have more people with more practice/skills hacking US targets.
Tonight at 11: We discover why a country that treats track and field in a similar manner as the US treats football has Olympic gold medal winners in track and field!
or about equal can't be using a reasonable metric. That's ridiculous.
This is not much of a surprise as we deny fostering growth in areas that would lead us in the right direction, which is to say that I am a citizen of the United States. Instead we are so short sided that we make our talent train their talent just to get our severance. It is no fucking wonder.
As far as hacking strictly for military might? That is where this becomes what I like to call a "magical metric". We have the talent, and our government is afraid of it. Now, what does that say about the state of affairs.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Not to worry, Hillary has promised military retribution for cyber attacks. I guess she'll either start wars with Russia and China on day one of her presidency or draw red lines and then run away from them like Obama has.
Hacker rank is used for screening perspective employees before we waste time talking to them. This year I've interviewed 3 Chinese (mainland) who blitzed the hacker rank but in the face to face interview where I gave them well defined problems, including a programming exercise, it became apparent they had not completed the online tasks themselves and had entirely inconsistent stories of work history compared to the previously provided resumes.
I'm sure there are quite a few awesome Chinese programmers, but my sample thus far has lead me to believe there are a lot more cheaters. That and the new cheating scandal involving international (Chinese) students at our universities that seem to be an almost quarterly event in the papers.
Russians though, I've hired quite a few awesome programmers from that part of the world.
Compared with?
When the city got the statistics, it said there needed to be 10x as many trains as they currently had. That obviously couldn't be right since the trains were only occasionally full. So what went wrong?
Likely, the only thing these HackerRank statistics are measuring is that there are just a lot more job opportunities for mediocre programmers in the U.S. and India. While there are fewer such opportunities in China, Russia, and Poland, so the few people who pursue programming careers there tend to be the cream of the crop. To normalize it, you'd have to survey to find out how many total programmers there are in each country, compare to their total populations, then assuming a normal distribution of "skill" for the entire population of the country, map each countries results to that distribution. Then for the countries where the number of people taking the test are overrepresented relative to the total population, truncate their distribution to match that of underrepresented countries. e.g. If, say, only 0.01% of Poland's population tried the HackerRank tests, while 0.1% of the U.S. population did, then you'd have to compare Poland's results with the top 10% of the U.S. results (0.01% of the U.S. population matching the 0.01% of Poland's population) to get an apples-to-apples comparison. But that's a lot of assuming and normalizing for me to be comfortable with using the data to draw conclusions.
Stop counting web "developers" as developers and this would go away in an instant.
while an interesting anecdote, people aren't actually competing. if it was a competition, everyone would no doubt take an entirely different approach to maximize their scores. besides, we already had a DARPA challenge to generates exploits, so can we just enter those programs as contestants?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The real test of computer hacking is: Does your code achieve its objective.
I don't give a shit how elegant, performant or maintainable a piece of code is if it runs once. I care that it works.
to use the illusion of the American dream to lure and import the kind of talent that only exists in fragments at home, because American culture and society has dumbed people down to the point where the country is producing young people that can't think for shit. The country is now dependent on importing foreign talent to run its tech sector, among other things, and "dumb American" is truer than it has ever been.
Comrade, why do you have such hatred for The People's Love?
Russia came in first but they hacked the scoreboard to appear second.
A site that can't handle uMatrix running in your browser (some error occured (sic)) - a great choice to handle the interpretation of programming standards! Can't spell and can't handle proper browser extensions.
The world got a look at what the NRO, NSA and GCHQ worked on together over the decades. ;) Tapping some telco cable in the ocean is not a perfect solution for interesting regional networks.
The contractors, universities, private sector all soaked up that US talent for decades to keep admin control over domestic and international telcos and networks.
What a China and Russia lacks is global NSA, GCHQ like access to safe staging servers that can reach international and domestic networks and limited telco hubs.
A few 1980's spy ship's is not the best for that anymore
Long range hacking and data movement will get noticed.
Whats a "talented developer" worth if they are limited to fully imported, altered US phone home hardware and software to code on?
i.e. that best code runs on what the Equation Group kept well hidden and allow a winning nation to import. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Journalism and current culture in general has a bad habit of glorifying certain activities with soft labels. Hacking is either malicious or theft. When programmers, organizations, or governments do it should be called theft. When caught red handed and identified then they are thieves. Why are they called hackers?
Another favorite term of the journalism world is "mastermind". Why do we call the leader of any slightly complicated terrorist or criminal plot a mastermind. This is glorified term and just short of calling them brilliant or genius.
The big one being software that gets produced and used/sold. The US and Western Europe dominate that arena. You go and look at who it is producing the big commercial and OSS stuff, from OSes to games to productivity software to media creation tools and so on and those are the areas that dominate. To be sure it is an international endeavour, software is great in that there isn't a huge fixed startup cost so a great many people can participate. But those regions see -by far- the most production. It isn't like it is all immigrants working for the companies either, lots of domestic labour.
So, if China and Russia really are so amazing, so far ahead, I mean we are talking #1 vs #28, then where are all the software companies? Where are all the people contributing to OSS projects? Where are all the indies from those areas?
There is just no way if China is this unstoppable force of the "most talented" developers (not just most numerous) that they wouldn't also be a huge force in the software industry. They just aren't though. They are a participant, as nearly every nation is, but they aren't anything special, nowhere even approaching the US.
I would win in hacking olympics.
My skills with the hacksaw are exemplary!
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
... since they are likely making top-$$$ and have no time competing.