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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?
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...
Yeah, but if USA and India had the majority of contestants, the bias is in their favour, and they went bad nevertheless.
On the other hand, I'm ashamed at my country that we scored best in such a piece of poo as Java. Well, at least that's not PHP...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Do you think that 0.01% of Chinese coders competing in a coding contest are representing their population the same way that 1% of English or Indian coders would? When they are taking a very small sample from a country you are inherently getting the most motivated and best skilled of that country. If you are then rating them by average score then the country with less competitors gets a significant boost. It's like the reverse of how the Olympics work (which heavily biases towards countries with more population).
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.
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.
"When they are taking a very small sample from a country you are inherently getting the most motivated and best skilled of that country."
Why? Fewer participants doesn't mean they are the motivated participants.
I love my sig.
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!
Um, I think I would learn more in a class of 20 motivated students than in a class with only 2 motivated students..
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
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.
Um, I think I would learn more in a class of 20 motivated students than in a class with only 2 motivated students..
That's ignoring or not getting the point. The point is that only the more talented and the more motivated will take a test that inherently has no value other than to see just how well they score. They will tend to be the top end of the talent pool, not the lower end
In addition the matter of culture also comes into play. For example, someone from the US/Canada without a lot of talent is much more likely to try a contest like this either just for fun (i.e. people for whom coding is a hobby, not a profession) or perhaps to learn something even though they know that they have little chance of achieving a good score. However, coders from other societies are less likely to take the chance of poor publicity due to their code of honor, face, or perhaps the amount of weight given to something like this in the marketplace or peers.
The point is that extrapolating these results to any sort of realistic ranking is pure folly and statistically impossible due to the lack of population distribution and high variance. Yes, it makes a good soundbite, but it just doesn't mean anything.
If they want it to mean something, what they need to do is narrow down the field of participants based on increasing challenge complexity until they get to the point where they have the top 20 coders from each country and then have a final set of challenges. At least then you would have something meaningful.
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.
Russia came in first but they hacked the scoreboard to appear second.
Gates was a skilled poker player. His using one monopoly to gain another, and pricing and bundling the right way at the right time to kill nascent competitors is poker-like.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, but if USA and India had the majority of contestants, the bias is in their favour
That's not how statistics work. If the samples are random, but different in size, the smaller sample will have a more biased average. So in this case, if we assume the samples are random, we just know that the Russian and Chinese averages are much less representative than the American and Indian averages.
However, we also know that the samples were biased. American and Indian programmers speak English. The testing company is based in Palo Alto, CA. Their website is totally in English. The Russian and Chinese programmers were selected not only for motivation to take an online test, but for a preexisting ability to speak a nonnative language.
.: Semper Absurda
Why?
In this case, because they all had to read and write English. The Indian and American programmers probably grew up speaking English. The Russian and Chinese programmers who took the test were selected for preexisting proficiency in nonnative language.
.: Semper Absurda
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"
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