I, too, have very fond memories of Mir Publishers. I was on vacation in Greece and had a stop in Athens, where I found by chance a bookshop which had books from Mir. the shop had irregular opening times but I managed to get there as often as I could, the books were dirt cheap

They had a thing of encouraging talent and putting it in special schools to develop it. Then Maths reading groups etc.

Americans were great researchers at the time, as well. During the Cold War era, Soviet culture included an ambition to rival and surpass American research and technology.

Math and physics are more theoretical in curriculum and less students can grasp, but ones who do perform better. So, higher input filter, earlier talent detection. Western education is more applied to a business, Russian is more like a generic theory. This makes Western schools prepare to develop, Russian to research. Note this is a generic distinction, MIT and Stanford are higher standards and provide access to field practitioners so my take it is genuinely provide more quality than MSU or Baumanka alike.

Competition. Nobody in the US cares about school math/physics/... olympiads. But they are/were a big deal in schools in the xUSSR.

There also was no centralized test system (like SAT) up until early 2000-s. People had to go and sit on entrance exams in each university where they wanted to apply. But winners of olympiads got automatic admission into good universities.

In addition, social sciences were a minefield in the USSR, especially subjects like political science or history. And hard sciences were safe.

Loosely related

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/06/why-so-many-top-hackers-...

I think part of it is that unlike in the US, access to education wasn't paywalled.

Higher education in the US, with the exception of scholarships here and there, requires you to come from a wealthy background to afford the best schools.

In other words, it's more about perpetuating class privilege than it is about developing the best and brightest of a generation. If you're a genius with poor parents, you have to really hope to get lucky enough to get a scholarship.

In socialist societies, despite the claims often leveled against them, things were more meritocratic. If you're a genius with poor parents, you got access to the best education as that's what's optimal for society.

Description of different developer mindsets when they encounter a problem with a tool from a vendor.

Americans: contact the vendor and report the issue. Then wait for the vendor to fix it, applying pressure as needed. Because of the delay, the product ends up being 6 months late, but then it works reliably.

Russians: curse the vendor, then use undocumented APIs and live code patching to work around the bug. The vendor is never told about the issues. The product is released on time, but it breaks in 1 year when the vendor makes an incompatible change that breaks the workarounds.

This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people. And it's very helpful when you're doing security research.

Incidentally, Jewish people also excel in security due to a similar cultural mindset.

For entrance exams though... At least in Poland, we had them as well. They were corrupt.

Cheating was rampant, and a very common way for getting admitted was paying professors from that uni for tutoring - who would train them on the type of tasks they would do at that uni.

And it prevented you from attending unis far away a lot of time due to time contraints.

It's also about poor children getting worse primary education . According to Google "roughly 21% of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate".

If you never learned to read, good luck getting higher education.

I'm not defending communist societies like Soviet Union or China but I think "social democratic" countries like those in Scandinavia have shown generally good education outcomes.

Oh, absolutely. Especially for the top universities. That made olympiads even more important because they allowed students to bypass the exams.

And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.

It's more like 4%

>This mindset is very much a result of centuries of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people.

How do you people come up with such stories?

Hackernews thrives on users confidently making claims based on their own limited perspective and providing next to no reasoning or evidence.

I don't know... Maybe by growing up in Russia and starting my software career there?

To add some color, here is my favorite hard-to-translate idiom in a Russian developer community:

"File away rough edges" ("доработать напильником") - adjust something to work in a way that its original creator never even realized is possible. And usually for a good reason.

Of course, all generalizations should be taken with a grain of salt. They can never be used to judge individuals or even individual companies.