The original article is in Russian, and here for our mentality this is not such unacceptable sarcastic exaggeration. But it may be too strong for a Western reader. So this can be considered as a little translation glitch (IMO).
Do you see that red `1019855` in the top of that site?
That's the number of "collaterals", sites which are not intently banned, but just happened to share some infrastructure with blocked ones, and suffering as well.
As a most clear example, there is 93.184.220.29, DigiCert's IP to serve revocation lists. It is banned since September 29, don't ask why.
This basically means that GitHub, Facebook, PayPal, SUSE and ICANN websites all are either not opening or take 20-30 secs to load, depending on the browser.
Degeneracy-free indeed!
Censorship is always abused. Once the infrastructure is in place, it's used for all kinds of things. They always start with the usual "think of the children" or "it's against terrorism" spiel, but sooner or later it's used to sweep anything inconvenient under the rug.
I heard there's a country where Entartung ("degeneracy") is illegal and in some cases punishable by death... oh wait, that's Nazi Germany, never mind.
Seriously, if you look at the countries that try to ban "degenerate" activity (which itself is a matter of opinion), the list isn't all that pretty. Singapore is probably the only one that's livable, but only if you relish the idea of living in a full-on police state.
Recently you only could see blocked sites when surfing for porn or on aibs, because some activists hunted for CP (also drug stores and suicide manuals, though I never really seen these). Now I see blocks regularily on definitely-non-porn sites. Turn on Opera Turbo and it opens.
Tendency here is to quick-block-and-wait, and it is site owner who must prove, not they. "It seems like" is enough.
Btw, judge who blocked p*hub.com "didn't know it is popular".
"Well paid trolls", hmm... the monthly salary of Savhuk was 37,000 roubles monthly after taxes (by her words) what equals to ~$750. This is not a lot in St. Petersburg.
And there's a lot of trolls around russian web resources (don't know, on salary or not), especially when some politic issues are being discussed. Actually, it is not possible to do a constructive discussion at any russian forum, no matter if this is pro-Russian or pro-West. So, I prefer to not visit any places where political issues are being discussed.
As a russian software developer from Moscow I can say that this contest is not well-known in Russia software community and it is completely not obvious that this contest is prestigious in some way. It may give you some points on the interview, but is not key point at all.
Actually, most of russian software developers even do not know about this contest.
Wrapping up, it is very, very weak statement that this contest is "very prestigious in Russia" and many people "are spending a lot of time to prepare". I think that ITMO have a good base for this contest is a more reasonable point.
I don't think this or other contests (Code Jam, IOI, TopCoder, Code Forces etc.) are well-known among the software community anywhere. Just like math competitions, they are very much dominated by students who were prodigies in math and computer science. Most of the highly successful competitors grew up being part of their country's math and informatics olympiad training programs, so they have years of practice. Average university students or software developers have little reason to take an interest because they just don't have the skills to compete at that level.
That said, within the competition community, the ICPC is in fact very prestigious, including in Russia, and teams do spend hundereds of hours training. You're representing your entire university, you only have two years of eligibility so winning is very difficult, and it's the only major team-based competition in this format (with the team sharing a single computer), which adds a camaraderie aspect that made it more enjoyable for me than individual competitions.
I'm dev from Yekaterinburg and I'd disagree.
Devs here like to watch ICPC. But it is student championship. Most of my colleagues just are not students.
Mature programmers prefer ICFPC (:
I'm agree that there's a passion among developers for such contests in Moscow, too. But my point is that this is not something "prestigious" and as a consequence a reason why many people "spending a lot of time" for it.
I mean you will not get any major benefits for investing in this, or something. It's interesting but not must-have for a professional developer. And that's why I not see a lot of people around coding contest-like tasks instead of, for example, contibuting to open source or doing freelance job, etc.
You forgot to add the key qualifier "at Google". That says nothing about how being good at programming competitions correlates with being good on the job in general.
It's also kind of common sense that if you spend a lot of time working on something that's not really related to your industry job that won't be as good at said industry job as if you spent that time, say, writing open source machine learning software. People just assume that programming == software engineering, but programming competitions are a lot more similar to math competitions than they are to real world jobs.
dude, you are just plain wrong in this. any of the (few) major software organizations in Russia know very well what ACM/icpc are. the winners definitely get a preferred treatment in the interview pipeline.
If you mean companies such Yandex, Mail, ABBYY (but not Kaspersky, huh) or something like that - I agree. Winners of ACM will get "preferred treatment", definetely. This will not affect their salaries a lot, but that's true.
But you missed my point. I argue that ACM is something extremely prestigious and people practicies a lot in mass. This is not true. And companies such Yandex and Mail is not a some kind of great place to work.
But if I will interview a candidate and know he participated (not won) in ACM I will be much more interested in him.
