[vrutkovs]

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 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

[xor1]

>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...

[digi_owl]

There was perhaps also the aspect that when the microcomputers showed up on their side of the curtain, they didn't get a market for boxed software to go with it. So either they wrote their own, or cracked western software. Either way they got intimate with software innards.

[Stranger43]

It could be interesting if we could measure the damage done to computer literacy skills by the huge spending on easy to use well managed edutech like one to one deployments of chromebooks, or worse iPads, compared to forcing the students to wrestling with obsolete poorly managed systems in order to hand in computer typeset term papers.

It might be that the economic constraints imposed on the former USSR states by their failed experiment with reagonomics is in fact themselves the reason why they produce more programmers and fewer failed athletes and actors then America.

[coldtea]

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.

Sorry, what? They are better at math because they cheat at exams, and thus they "train" their minds?

That's not even wrong.

[jabwork]

I read this as the culture of cheating teaches analysis of the system (education /testing) and how to identify weak points and exploit them

Then, using the same analytical skills, students are better prepared to analyze other systems (eg security) and pinpoint/exploit their weakness

[coldtea]

>I read this as the culture of cheating teaches analysis of the system (education /testing) and how to identify weak points and exploit them

Still far fetched (and plain wrong -- it would work for all other "cultures of cheating" too).

[Lordarminius]

I found his logic weird as well

[nopinsight]

The article uses 'hacker' to mean 'programmer', not cybercriminal.

[magic_beans]

That's really confusing. And although I love HN, I find the term "hacker" to refer to any sort of programmer or software developer to be increasingly idealistic (bordering on lame), especially when there are very real and very destructive hackers out here.

[lordCarbonFiber]

I, and I think many here, find the media's insistence that all hackers are cybercriminals far more disturbing. To hack has meant to create long before the popular consensus tried to demonize it. Pretending the only interesting thing you can do with a computer is criminal activity is part of the reason why the US is so far behind in the space.

[tremendo]

I refer you to the creator of this site you're commenting on (BTW titled Hacker News): http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

[tnecniv]

This nomenclature didn't start on HN and goes back quite a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture

[watwut]

For me too. When I heard term hacking in relation to pprograming, it always meant "unmaintennable mess full of dirty tricks holding together with duck tape". Not positive.

[khedoros1]

It's heavily context-dependent for me. Based on the situation, I'd expect it to be:

- A network intrusion

- A cool, clever piece of programming, without any other expectation of quality besides "it works"

- A "clever" (in a bad way), ugly, and (hopefully) temporary mess, done knowingly because of time constraints

- A program, usually put together quickly, to do a specific job

"Hacked into" would imply the first meaning, the others could be differentiated with further adjectives "clean", "dirty", "ugly", "cool", "quick", etc. Whether it's positive or negative really depends on the situation.

[eklavya]

When you say the article is making a blind guess, can you substantiate that your own hypothesis is not one?

[balabaster]

Here is my experience with this:

I grew up the eldest sibling of a struggling single Mom. We didn't have very much. We had to make every penny count. She spent every spare penny we had one year on our first computer to teach herself to program to get herself a better job so we could have an easier life. I was 8. It was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. She had to sacrifice a lot to afford that computer. In comparison, I was surrounded by the friends, the majority of whom had what seemed like a cushy life compared to what I knew. That computer was the start of my career. I scoured the manuals and the programming books my Mom bought and taught myself everything I could about it. I took it apart, I tried to understand the hardware.

The town I grew up in had a university that was heavily interested in computer science. When I was a teenager, my girlfriend's mother and father had programmed the university computer systems with punch cards. All my friends had home computers. Amstrad CPC64, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron. Even with the accessibility I had to a community that were into computers with friends who were into computing and programming, it was hard to find information. The internet hadn't yet been made publicly accessible. You had to beg, borrow and steal books and manuals to try and make progress and share with your friends. This made you dig into things and probe them to understand them.

There is no clear delineation between being a hacker and not being a hacker. You either have the mindset to leverage everything you know to achieve your goals or you don't. It can be learned, sure, but most people don't look beyond the surface of anything. Relationships. Life. Computer systems.

A hacker cares very little about the surface. They want to understand every little nuance. They want to understand how it works, why it works the way it does. Their exploration to extend their understanding uncovers bugs. Most people stop at understanding the features and finding bugs. The hacker wants to understand the bugs too. Why does it occur? When does it occur? What conditions trigger it? What are the implications of it? They want to understand everything.

One thing I've found lacking in the psyche of most of the North Americans I know (not to exclude all of them by any means) is that they don't tend to look under the surface of well, anything. They see the system for what it is and they think about it in the manner in which it was designed to be used. They apply the right tool for the right job.

A hacker is more like a farmer who doesn't have an unending budget to buy the exact right tool for every little job they need done. "I've gotta get this job done, I don't have the right tools for the job, but I do have this other pile of junk over here. How can I use that to do what I have to do?" and hack something together, warts and all.

When you grow up in a situation with pretty much an unending ability to do whatever you desire and the only person standing in your way is yourself, you don't tend to need to think much like a hacker. You just go buy the right tool for the job and get the job done. No more thought is given to it than that.

Conversely, when you grow up with nothing, you figure out how to make do with what you can get your hands on. You develop a hacker mindset. The USSR for all the years I was a kid seemed to have nothing. They learned to get by with and exploit what they could get their hands on. They developed a hacker mindset.

This is just my experience with the people I know. I'm not tarring all of the U.S. with this by any means.

[arvinsim]

> A hacker cares very little about the surface. They want to understand every little nuance. They want to understand how it works, why it works the way it does. Their exploration to extend their understanding uncovers bugs. Most people stop at understanding the features and finding bugs. The hacker wants to understand the bugs too. Why does it occur? When does it occur? What conditions trigger it? What are the implications of it? They want to understand everything.

It is important to remember that we don't have unlimited time. While the hacker mindset is very good for understanding things, we also need to have the wisdom to pick which one is worth deep diving into. We need to learn which ones to leave or delegate.

[balabaster]

Indeed. This is something that comes with experience though. Frequently you don't learn this until you really find your feet and start seeing the patterns between what separates the good tools from the bad... or even the implications of one toolset over another. Sometimes the stupidest most brain dead tool turns out to have implications nobody else ever gave thought to until the light bulb fires in your head and you get that "Wait a minute..." Eureka moment.

[rrggrr]

> A hacker is more like a farmer who doesn't have an unending budget to buy the exact right tool for every little job they need done.

Yes. The definition should be someone who excels at doing more with less. "Hacking" with lots of resources is something else entirely.

[balabaster]

You mean like State sponsored hacking? Sure... I don't know I would say that it's something else entirely.

The core mindset still comes from the same place. Understanding everything. Understanding the implications of bugs and features of known systems, using that for grand exploitation to achieve things they weren't designed for.

What inspired them to start hacking in the first place may or may not have come from a place of not having everything. Perhaps their trigger of interest were movies or TV shows: War Games, Hackers... or James Bond or the nerdy guy from NCIS, 24, Bourne Identity, MI5 or countless other TV shows and movies where hacking is glamorized.

The start of that career path is the same, regardless of what brought you there - a need to understand your tools, deeply.

[bluedino]

At many colleges the CS program is watered down, similar to how watered down the math curriculum is in high school. You barely need a half a year of Algebra to graduate and when you get to college you're doing HTML and very simple C++ (well, C using cout/cin) programs that you're really just copying from the other students.