Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era(mirtitles.org) |
Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era(mirtitles.org) |
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
On the technical front, one book that I fondly recall, but I haven't seen since is Experiments Without Explosion by O.M.Olgin: https://archive.org/details/ExperimentsWithoutExplosions The title, as well as the content...
That sounds interesting. Could it be this one I just photographed from my library?: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov...
Books being far more precious in those days, we kept these preserved, and my parents have brought them here so that my children may also experience the breadth of story-telling in other cultures.
Here are a few others from the series: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov... and https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:Folk_Tales_From_The_Sov...
My greatest regret is not preserving the few African folktales anthologies that my parents bought me when I was young. I've found that different peoples have quite a variation of stories, and few are easily available today in English, with a great smearing of culture across most of the world with the Anglophone dominance and the shift to a visual medium as opposed to text.
But at least I have only a semi-Bowdlerized (i.e. early 1900s modern) version of tales by the Brothers Grimm and so on.
Glad to see this on the front page on HN, we had a similar bump some years back!
Also maybe redesign the site so it is more easily searchable (fast, functional but no jazz).
I have bought a few print copies from low-cost publishers on Amazon India but the quality has been iffy. Would be willing to pay extra for better quality.
We are using worpdress.com for the hosting, so that more focus is on curating the content with minimum maintenance required (it is mostly me, with little help from colleagues every now and then).
(Love to also see a collection of Soviet Life magazine. What's out there, that I have been able to find, is pretty slim.)
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!
The reason? See my comment from 7 years ago! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21351115
The younger generation in particular need to know of these excellent resources for Science/Mathematics.
Another good publisher of old/classic Science/Mathematics books is "Dover Publications" - https://store.doverpublications.com/
Checkout for example, the books by Richard Hamming, in particular; "Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics" - https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486439457 (highly relevant to today's needs).
Also checkout the book series (mathematics via correspondence for high-school students) by I.M.Gelfand - https://store.doverpublications.com/search?type=product&q=I....
One of my personal favourites is Bulgakov'с Master and Margarita and The Bull's Hour by Ivan Efremov.
Bull's Hour is actually amazing as it explores societies built on different principles using a form of a novel.
I was born in USSR and was an still am avid reader. However never liked either of those two.
Totally agree about Efremov. Great writer
The blog and the archive page are not in sync, we try to publish one book a day on the blog. The archive collection has more (recent) titles than the blog.
All of Perelman's books are a must read, particularly by students. Few books can better motivate you in Science/Mathematics.
Slight digression: Russian cartoons from that era are also very interesting. One of my favorite short cartoon from that era (I still hum its music involuntarily): Ikarus and the Wise Men [0]
https://archive.org/details/m.-l.-krasnov-a.-i.-kiselyov-g.-...
There were some other sketchier pop-sci books, I remember one that had the "water has structural memory" theory in it. But likely those didn't do any lasting damage.
[1]: https://mirtitles.org/2022/07/04/higher-mathematics-for-begi...
Hard copy versions are available from Aargon Press on Amazon India.
https://valeman.medium.com/the-men-who-translated-the-machin...
It was the same with many other countries, whether English or Native languages.
It’s a lot cheaper than bombing schools.
Books like Problems In physics by I E Irodov were my favourites
What do soviets make great researchers? I noticed this pattern in ml, math & physics research.
Is it that they have better quality books?
Maintainer/curator of Mir Titles here.
Officially all this does not seem to be supported in any way, I'm afraid.
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.
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.
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.
See the comment by "elzbardico" here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738277
Sadly, current-day global culture/society does not value knowledge if it is not in the furtherance of capitalistic goals.
I dunno what attitude russia's gen-z holds towards profession but in my time it was definitely considered a calling.
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.
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.
also the salaries of scientists and engineers were notoriously shitty, so only those with passion for the subject studied it.
And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.
He hated that, he wanted to be a lawyer. But he didn't get admitted to studies, so he had to pick something close in order not to be drafted, and so he stuck with it.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80...
>In the USSR, retail stores weren't allowed to promptly raise prices on popular items or lower prices on unpopular ones. One way to circumvent this was through "loading": stores would combine a popular (scarce) item with one or more unpopular ones into "food sets" on their order desks, preventing customers from purchasing the scarce item separately.
How do you people come up with such stories?
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.
Checkov, Gogol, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky all wrote novels with this exact plot, because it was so lifelike and tangible for all Russians (Soviets) to understand. If you're interested, check out The Bronze Horseman, The Overcoat, or Poor Folk.
Me and cyberax are both Russians, except I never wanted to emigrate
But anyway, what makes Chichikov's "lifehack" "a result of having to work around the government that is seen more as an occupying force rather than the will of the people"?
