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US Would Be 28th In 'Hacking Olympics', China Would Take The Gold (infoworld.com) 112

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.
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US Would Be 28th In 'Hacking Olympics', China Would Take The Gold

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  • Um, baloney (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Saturday September 03, 2016 @02:36PM (#52822067) Homepage Journal
    Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?
    • by cjeze ( 596987 )

      All the time we use Chinese software. It's everywhere.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've been using WeChat because I'm working on a project in China, and everyone uses WeChat over there. Like instead of Facebook or email or text messaging or any combination of the above, it's WeChat. And they use QR codes for everything and the QR codes actually work and everyone actually voluntarily uses the QR codes. It's actually surprisingly well built and functional software. And there's no ads. And I haven't seen any outstanding bugs. And almost everything can be displayed in English, including
    • by Anonymous Coward

      The only Chinese software that I heard anyone using is Foxit PDF reader, however I stopped using it after the developer added invasive Windows 10 style cloud integration.

      • by NotAPK ( 4529127 )

        Seconded.

        I transitioned to Sumatra PDF and never looked back.

        Yes, the installer looks a bit ugly, but don't let that put you off, the software does exactly what you want: display and print PDF documents.

        Not sure if it does PDF forms, I haven't had to do one in a while.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hacking != software development

    • Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?

      Anyone who's jailbroken an iPhone during the past few years has used Chinese software...

    • by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Saturday September 03, 2016 @05:01PM (#52822585)

      > Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?

      No dude, Chinese software uses YOU.

    • Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?

      It's possibly been running on your computer, your antivirus just hasn't found it yet.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's about the same as western software, it's just that you have a skewed view of it due to selection bias.

      You don't speak Chinese, so you see translated software and judge it based on the quality of said translation. You buy the cheapest possible webcam and get similarly cheap software with it.

      Chances are the only Chinese websites and apps you see are spam, since you won't be looking for quality software in that language. In fact there is lots of good Chinese software if you know how to find it.

      • I'm a bit tired of guessing what icon means what :D especially if there is enough space to write the relevant word, at least below the icon.

        On the other hand if I use a japanese software, I simply learn the relevant Kanjis :D I guess Mandarin is not much more difficult (I don't want to speak it, only read and write it).

    • yes, An office Product for English market. I rate it as above the best that is sold to English markets

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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...

    • by Archfeld ( 6757 )

      Luck and timing, will power all play into it. The most talented sometimes don't want it bad enough. I also question whether the 'best' hackers would have anything to do with a 'test' or the 'man' giving it.

    • There were better painters and sculptors than Michaelangelo, but only he had the mix of inspiration and perseverance to 'make the brushes sing.'

      But Michaelangelo had the wealthy connections, too. He knew what to kiss and when. Especially when you're talking about commissions for his work coming mainly from the Church. I'll bet the reason he painted the Sistine Chapel lying on his back is that his butt was too sore to sit down, if you catch my drift.

  • 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.

    • Also many of the competitions are for money for amounts that in the US are quite small, but for a hacker in a foreign country are a significant sum - so there simply isn't motive for top US programmers to compete.

      If they want a realistic sample - put a substantial sum of money in contention and such that it isn't 'winner take all' (ie payout the top 20 or so slots).

    • Not that I'm a good test case; but I'd never heard of hackerrank until just now. I'd be curious to hear whether other people knew about it - and what country you're from (I'm an American).

    • I looked at HackerRank once, there problems were easy, but so tedious that I just left. Someone in China is using the HackerRank score to evaluate applicants and that's the only reason anyone they're finishing. If Google started requiring high HackerRank scores, USA would take the "gold" in a heartbeat. But it would still be meaningless.
  • In addition to the gold in government corruption, oppression of civil rights, and lack of a free press.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • 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!
  • 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 affa
  • Not to worry, Hillary has promised military retribution for cyber attacks [youtube.com]. 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.
  • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday September 03, 2016 @04:11PM (#52822435)
    Once upon a time, a city was considering expanding its subway system. To determine if this was a worthy use of public money, they decided to find out how many hours a week the average person rode the subway. The agency tasked with collecting these statistics thought about the problem. Asking random people on the street seemed like it would waste a lot of time since most of those people might not even ride the subway. Then they realized if they just asked people riding the subway how many hours a week they rode, it would neatly filter out the non-riders and dramatically simplify their job. So that's what they did.

    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?
    • First, the statistical gathering method filtered out non-riders. This skewed the average (both mean and median) up, since they didn't have a bunch of "0 hours" in their statistics.
    • Second, asking people riding the subway gives you a time normalized sample, not a population normalized sample. Say only two people use the subway, one of whom rides it 1 hour a week, while the other rides it 10 hours a week. If you randomly hop onto the subway at any give time, you are 10x more likely to encouter the 10 hr/wk rider. Your statistics end up saying more about who is riding the subway at any given time, rather than how much each person usually rides the subway.

    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.

    • 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

      • huge force in the software industry. They just aren't though.
        You are silly! Who do you think is making all the software in China, for China? The USA? Europe? They do their software themselves.
        You are mixing up Windows and "Office" sales with "the software industry".

        Here: http://www.investopedia.com/ar... [investopedia.com]

        Hope you know at least two of those companies ...

        • If all you can point out is stuff "in China for China" then you aren't strengthening your case. Linux isn't made "in Finland for Finns", Windows isn't made "in the US for Americans," QNX isn't made "in Canada for Canadians," and so on. When you are really good at something, you export it and sell it worldwide. You see that with US and European (as well as other) software, just like you see it with Chinese SMPSes. When you are really good in this interconnected world you cross borders, you aren't only able t

          • Canon, Zeiss, Leica, Nikon, etc don't sell glass just in their native countries or regions, they are the worldwide leaders because they are good.
            No, they sell it because:
            a) they are good at selling
            b) despite your thinking: the market is rather small and competition is terse
            c) they have a head start versus any Chinese company of over 100, close to 200 years.

            And if you missed it: none of them is an US company.

            For a Chinese company it is much easier to deal with a domestic market of 1.5 billion potential custo

    • by abies ( 607076 )

      This would be true if you would, for some unkown reason, try to compare smartness of general population, to answer a question "if I take random person from US (versus China or Poland), how good programmer he could make after training?". But who cares about that? What most people will be probably a lot more interested in is "If I take random PROGRAMMER from US (versus China or Poland), what are the chances they are good?"

      So no, this doesn't mean that people in US are on average less 'smart' (assuming 'smart'

  • 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?

  • 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.

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      That might be sufficient to become "employee of the month" at MicroSoft or HipsterApp Inc., but the company I work for actually deems it relevant how performant my software runs, how maintainable it is over decades of use, and that it runs flawlessly not just once, but every time, all the time - 24/7.
      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        Sure, but then you're talking about software engineering, not exploiting a vulnerability quickly and effectively.

        If you're writing Nessus then you're in the sweet spot of both, but for a targeted zero-day, people want shit that works.

        Look at is another way: Do you want a top-end mathematician making their unique and innovative algorithm work, or do you want someone that productionises that?

        One comes before the other.

  • Russia came in first but they hacked the scoreboard to appear second.

  • The world got a look at what the NRO, NSA and GCHQ worked on together over the decades.
    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 ;) Tapping some telco cable in the oce
  • I would win in hacking olympics.
    My skills with the hacksaw are exemplary!

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