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.
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.
Um, baloney (Score:5, Insightful)
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All the time we use Chinese software. It's everywhere.
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The old tired argument that there is a lack of qualified workers in this country is pretty much not in line with reality.
He's right. Show us the wage spike and we'll believe in your worker shortage.
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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.
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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.
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Hacking != software development
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Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?
Anyone who's jailbroken an iPhone during the past few years has used Chinese software...
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All of the iOS 8 and 9 jailbreaks have come from either Taig or Pangu, both of which are Chinese hacking groups.
Re:Um, baloney (Score:4, Funny)
> Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?
No dude, Chinese software uses YOU.
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Has anyone actually ever used Chinese software?
It's possibly been running on your computer, your antivirus just hasn't found it yet.
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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.
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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).
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yes, An office Product for English market. I rate it as above the best that is sold to English markets
Re:Um, baloney (Score:5, Insightful)
The first one I worked with was pretty good. Nice bloke too.
The dozen after that ... stupid, incompetent, dishonest too.
Re: Um, baloney (Score:2)
I can't help but wonder if this is only a measure of publicly known hacking, which is often ignored in Russia and China when it's discovered, whereas in the US it's aggressively prosecuted, hence it must be done more discretely.
Take for example stuxnet, which is perhaps the most sophisticated hack ever done and nobody has even managed to fully disassemble it even after all these years. It's pretty much a gimme that it is a US project with some joint Israeli effort, but who is it actually associated with in
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I can't help but wonder if this is only a measure of publicly known hacking
Hacking? TFA is just about test scores.
On a side note, the sample size of 1.4 million doesn't matter if the sample is non-random. Many more Indian and American programmers took the test, and their average scores are most likely lower for that reason, even if there is no additional bias in the Russian and Chinese scores.
That's a big "if" though...what India and the United States have in common with the testing company is the English language. The Russian and Chinese samples are sampling Russian and Chinese p
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I know it's not done to actually look at the article in question, but you might have checked hackerrank.com and seen that it is a very simple testing site, with questions ranging from the laughably easy to the ridiculously obstruse, and that you can just google every answer. I spent an hour answering questions and they could really use a lot of improvement.
My take? This whole press release was designed to get attention for the site. No need to actually take it serious enough to think about it. If you want t
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^^ this. they've been spamming my inbox as of late trying to get me to come back.
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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...
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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 populat
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Why? Fewer participants doesn't mean they are the motivated participants.
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Um, I think I would learn more in a class of 20 motivated students than in a class with only 2 motivated students..
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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 professio
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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.
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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
Creativity and Grit? (Score:1)
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...
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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.
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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.
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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".
BS study (Score:2)
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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
They win the gold in air and watter pollution too (Score:2)
Blame corporate culture (Score:1)
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 is news? (Score:1)
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!
US & India vs. Chin & Russia (Score:2)
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
Hillary promises military retribution (Score:2, Insightful)
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Self-selection sampling bias (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It also doesn't jive with other evidence (Score:2)
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
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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 ...
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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
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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
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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'
not competing (Score:2)
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?
hacking competitions? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
China (Score:2)
Russia came in first but they hacked the scoreboard to appear second.
Look at NSA, NRO and other agencies (Score:2)
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
I would win! (Score:2)
I would win in hacking olympics.
My skills with the hacksaw are exemplary!