Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

cclmul 3 days ago 19 commentsRead Article on mirtitles.org

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Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

blackoil•6 minutes ago

Anyone aware of any official/private efforts in China or Russia to digitize or republish these books. Nowdays, finding these books particularly in languages like Hindi is very difficult.

blackoil•about 1 hour ago

I have very fond memory of these books. We are from lower middle class family in India. My dad was fond of books. Western books were costly, but Soviet and Chinese books were of high quality and cheap. So we used to get loads of them from book fair.

wolfi1•34 minutes ago

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

arjie•about 2 hours ago

I loved these old books. I think I had the Seven Clam Sisters or something like it. My parents managed to rescue and bring to the US two childhood stories I really enjoyed: The Long Haired Maiden, and Shihan and the Snail[0].

These old folk tales are really entertaining. Often there’s no real moral or anything. It’s just a story. And to this day I really like these stories that are just “this happened and that person did that” and so on which don’t have to say “And the message is X”.

Unrelatedly, my wife jokes that I ended up marrying a Taiwanese woman because my childhood was spent reading folk tales about Chinese women.

0: both these are somewhere on archive.org e.g. https://archive.org/details/thelonghairedmaiden

alok-g•about 1 hour ago

A discussion on this happened recently here*:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739003

Someone (@rramadass) made me a good set of recommendations from the titles.

* Edit: I see now that linked comment too is from @clmul, the OP here. Thanks clmul!

HelloUsername•about 2 hours ago

Better link? https://archive.org/details/mir-titles

zem•about 1 hour ago

i have very fond memories of mir books from my childhood, especially yakov perelman's outstanding maths and science for fun books.

asxndu•about 2 hours ago

Quick question.

What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.

Is it that they have better quality books?

Exoristos•24 minutes ago

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.

physicsguy•about 2 hours ago

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

kdmtctl•about 1 hour ago

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.

ricardobayes•about 2 hours ago

cyberax•about 1 hour ago

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.

drysine•32 minutes ago

>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?

cyberax•about 1 hour ago

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 pass 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.

vrganj•about 2 hours ago

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.

galaxyLogic•about 1 hour ago

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.

selimthegrim•27 minutes ago

It's more like 4%