anon9001

> Write a function to return if two words are exactly "one edit" away, where an edit is: Inserting one character anywhere in the word (including at the beginning and end) Removing one character Replacing exactly one character

I've been writing code my entire life, and I've been employed as a software developer for longer than I'd care to admit. I don't have a quick answer to that problem. I know there's an algorithm for computing the "distance" between two strings, so this is probably about that. I have no idea how to write it, and it would never come up in my job, and if it did I'm sure I'd import a library to do it.

After searching it, this is what they're talking about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

That means my only chance of getting this problem correct was either:

1) I prepared for it by studying the bank of questions and memorized the formula for Levenshtein distance.

or

2) I considered this problem for the first time during the interview, was immediately struck by the same insight that mathematician Vladimir Levenshtein had in 1965, and developed the algorithm on a white board in real-time.

At least they're transparent that if I do lots of HackerRank, LeetCode, and CodeLab then I'll be able to pass their test. I suppose that's better than only those "in the know" realizing how to be employed at FB.

I really hope I never have to do another job interview again.

Let's say I want to research something in private. I can absolutely connect to tor and have my identity hidden from the surveillance networks that track us all. Of course, I can't hide from the NSA. If the NSA wants me, they're gonna get me.

Also, if Google's devices or networks get hacked and used for extortion, they've got deep pockets. It'd be a cool plot for a movie, but I'm personally unconcerned about that scenario.

Here's the problem: The doorbell thing is useful.

I've already given up my location data to Google by using Android with Google's services. It's fine if the doorbell sees me entering and exiting. By adding the doorbell, my threat surface isn't expanded by very much, but I get all this extra doorbell utility.

I don't really have a problem with Google seeing the outside of my home. I wouldn't put a Nest camera inside. Personally, that's my line. The important thing is that I can change it later if I want.

As far as your rights, sure, sue Google or Amazon if you want. It's not really my problem unless the devices get banned, which won't happen. If they do get banned, I'll replace them with whatever the next best thing is, or roll my own.

I understand the frustration, but at this point, the only rational thing to do is adapt.

You don't have to have a phone on you all the time. But if you do, it should be considered bugged because you have no way to audit it.

Also, bugging my residence isn't going to result in very interesting data by design. I could have plenty to hide, but I'm not reading my evil plans for world domination aloud.

If you do need to talk about something private, nobody is preventing you from disconnecting all the microphones.

Know what you're trying to prevent, then take actionable steps. Privacy is hard, but not dead.

How is that possible? As best as I can tell, your location is tracked at all times, the OS has telemetry built-in, and lots of telemetry data is going out with every app. Also how do you audit it?

I'm sure my phone is leaking way more data than an Alexa.

This is really disingenuous. I'm not arguing "privacy is dead" or "nothing to hide". I'm arguing for understanding how to have privacy when and if you want it, and how to hide things you might not want associated with your public persona.

I believe that privacy can co-exist in your life with listening devices (though maybe not in the same room, if you're concerned about your voice being recorded).

> Surely you understand that many people don't want to live in a world where you have to maintain a false persona 24/7 to avoid being flagged for some unknown perceived infraction.

Yes, but they have no choice today.

> Many people already curate a social media presence for that reason, but are you really okay with extending that to every last facet of your life?

Nobody is forcing you to buy an Alexa. If you want an always-on digital assistant, then yes, you're probably ok with curation of the words you say while at home.

> Should you have to worry if some future employer or your insurance company might possibly think that you're buying too much alcohol, are too supportive of the wrong political party, are too gay, opinionated, not social enough, not happy enough, dating too often, eating out to much, etc.?

Yes, everyone has to worry about this in today's environment. It would be silly not to worry about this with what we know about large scale data collection.

> It doesn't make any sense to try to change your behavior to try to look like a model citizen at all times because you can't know what the criteria is you'll be judged by, how accurate the dossiers on you are, or how they're being used to impact your life.

No model is perfect, but I believe there is safety in numbers. You can't know what you'll be judged by, but the more people who share your views and actions, the less likely you are to attract problems.

> This is a broken, dystopian, dangerous system and telling people to give up even trying to limit the amount of data they expose and simply accept it is not going to help change anything.

I'm not telling people to give up trying to limit the amount of data they expose. I'm saying that everyone should develop their own threat model and see if an always-on listening device at home is appropriate for their needs.

I do not see any future where opting out of Alexa or Google Assistant would mitigate any of the fears you have. I do see a future where knowing how to audit your own security and how to use more than one identity will mitigate your fears.

If police are looking for evidence to confirm anything was you, you've already failed.

I'm pro-security-awareness.

Sometimes it is convenient to have an internet-connected device that knows all of your preferences. You'll get better answers to your queries that way, and they'll be more personalized to you. That's ok, and I don't think it's something that should be completely rejected.

Google has been personalizing search for years, and that's ok too, because it probably is better for most users. But users also need to know about DDG and private browsing, so they can see unbiased results when they want.

> If you could have Alexa that doesn't listen to everything you say and offers the same service without the analytics, treating every request as a blank slate, wouldn't that be better in every possible way?

It would be worse in almost all ways except privacy. There's an expectation that when I ask for the weather, I mean at my current location. Or if I ask for sports scores, it knows what teams I care about. And most importantly, it should learn and get smarter over time, which you couldn't do with the type of device you propose.

I'd personally rather have areas with absolutely no devices and areas that are essentially public. I can see how some people would want a middle-ground with listening devices but with more privacy than Alexa. That might be possible, but if that's my concern, I'd rather just not have the microphone in the room at all. I think the market for privacy-vetted always-on microphones is small.

Don't think the privacy people who have gone to great lengths to be off the grid will be first on the list of suspicious people?

And if there's no data available on you, don't you think they'll charge the highest rate anyway?

For the concerns you have, it'd be far better to maintain a socially-optimal profile with data collection, to show what a normal/happy/healthy/productive member of society you are.

I do support regulation on how companies collect and assemble data, but while they're doing it, your best bet is to have lots of uninteresting data collected on you.

Nothing is stopping you from having multiple identities for specific purposes.

You must be really attached to your phone if that's how you're reading it.

Another solution would be to never bring your phone (or any other device) into your bedroom, for example, and only have sensitive conversations there.

How is that ironic? I don't want people associating this account with my real life identity, so I made it separate and access it differently than other identifiable services.

That's the whole point that I'm trying to make. Identify if listening devices are actually a threat to you. Assess the area and see if a listening device would be appropriate before adding it. For most people, who are very insecure anyway, one more listening device is not going to have any significant impact on their threat level.

If anything, what we need is more training available on how they can assess the threats against them in a rational way. And, if they choose, how to mitigate the risks posed by those threats. Sometimes that will include removing listening devices, but for most people, that won't be their largest threat.

Next time you're having a conversation with your wife, count the number of microphones in the room. I'd be shocked if it's zero.

I'm not asking "why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?". I'm asking why don't you have protocols in place that you can enable for private conversations? If I've got my phone on me, I assume Google and governments can hear anything in microphone range. You should too.

Only you can decide how you want to define your threat model, but "Google can hear you already through your phone so why not install more microphones in your house" should be a compelling argument if you've already established which areas of your house are meant to be private.

You could have no IoT devices and demand all occupants and visitors check their phones at the door, if that's how you choose to live. I'm not passing judgment on where to draw the line, but it doesn't make any sense to be afraid of Alexa devices in your living room while you're sitting on your couch scrolling through Facebook on your Android device and watching Netflix on your "smart tv".

Your phone can do all the same things as those devices, and it's a better target for attackers because it's always on you.

I just bought into the Nest system (which also had great deals on black friday), and I'm just not worried about it.

In reality, bugging my residence isn't going to result in very interesting data. What exactly do you think is going to happen?

I just assume all of my data is already compromised, and so is yours, and neither of us can do anything about it. I think it's only useful to mitigate real world risks that materialize from compromised data. So PIN-lock your credit to avoid identity theft, physically secure your home to avoid break-ins, block ads to avoid influence campaigns, segment and restrict your IoT devices to avoid jumpboxes inside your network, etc.

If I'm doing something that I do not want recorded, I'd be using linux with a tor connection and strong opsec. The house can still be bugged as long as I don't have a camera pointed at my monitor.

If you're trying to host secret meetings in your house, maybe you should consider building a secure room to facilitate that. There's a reason the feds take this approach with SCIFs, because there's really no other way to do it.

Yeah, proxmox is debian. I think people don't realize you can install their fancy web UI on debian.

Proxmox is opinionated about how storage is allocated (I think lvm-thin is a bad idea), doesn't support docker, and has some quirks about getting the apt repos set up correctly if you're not a paying subscriber. It's fine if you want to use things in their opinionated way, but know that they're not doing any magic to make KVM work. KVM and LXC are the exact same as you'd get from debian out of the box.

virt-manager can do lxc. I rdesktop to the server and set up things with virt-manager.

You can also install pve on a debian system if you want the proxmox gui. If you want to do full disk encryption, that's the recommended approach, because proxmox's installer doesn't support it.

Proxmox is pretty cool, but it doesn't make sense unless you're running many machines and utilizing ceph. For a home user, Debian (or some other stable distro) is still going to be the best distro for doing hypervisor stuff.

It's really an act of not being prepared.

$1.7B? They should be able to destroy and rebuild their entire infrastructure in less than a day.

Have tested backup and restore processes. Ideally have all users in VMs.

I don't see how this isn't entirely Merck's fault.

I recommend AirVPN. They're very reliable and run by activist hackers. I've heard good things about Mullvad too.

Here's a way to decode it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_lkYQ88kv0

Looks kind of fun.

I use a VPN for privacy, which is great, but routing my traffic through it will exclude me from sites that try to block VPNs (mostly streaming services).

What I really need is Cloudflare's WARP via wireguard config. I love the idea that they'll shield me from my ISP but still provide my real IP to service providers.

I can do this right now with a hack someone wrote https://github.com/maple3142/cf-warp but I don't want to anger Cloudflare.

Cloudflare, if you're listening, is it ok to extract wireguard credentials from your app and use them on my whole network? I'll gladly pay the $5/mo, but I don't want to be banned from Cloudflare or do something you may construe is illegal by extracting keys from your Android app.

That's fantastic, but in terms of threat model, you're still trusting AWS/DO/GCE/Azure/whatever. My hope with a good VPN service is that they'll run their own servers in a data center, so they're slightly less subject to audit than something running on AWS.

If you're looking for VPN review sites, this is the only one with credibility IMO: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/#detailed-vpn-comparison

My personal recommendation is AirVPN, but I wish they supported wireguard.

We're in agreement. I'm just saying the goal is to process events, grieve, and find a path back to "normal". Where, ideally, "normal" isn't constant anxiety and existential crises. Eventually, you have to learn to let even the most traumatic stuff go, or it'll haunt you forever.

Maybe? Let's say I had a kid that got kidnapped, and I spend all night restless like a normal human being. Where has that actually gotten me? And if the kid never comes back, what's an appropriate "normal human" duration of restlessness?

People go to therapy for years to get over that restless stuff and replace it with some version of accepting that the world is not under your control.

No doubt that upsetting things are upsetting, but the guiding principle is that you have to accept the things you can't control, and do the best with the things you can control.

That's funny, because as an atheist, I can step back and say that for whatever unimaginably horrible thing that's happening, it's all just a random walk.

So I find satisfaction in that nothing matters anyways, and the best we can do is try to live a good life while we're here, and not take any of it too seriously. Because it's all random and largely out of my control, there's no rational basis for worry.

It's nice to see a Christian that reached the same conclusion with a totally different process :)

I'm at a startup, not FAANG, but it's pretty much the same for me, minus the rusty part.

It's fine IMO. Work is about producing value for your employer, so do whatever it takes to do that. Usually it's about meetings, which are pretty much therapy for management.

If you want to be better at code and can't work it into your day job, then you'll have to work on projects outside of work.

Also consider taking it a step farther, and go ahead and initiate some of those meetings or email threads. There's a reason people are making them. They help the team stay in sync and feel better about the project.

I thought that was absolutely hilarious when I saw it as a kid. Fast-forward a couple of decades and now this is on store shelves: http://malkorganics.com/

Extra Credits did an excellent job covering this as it relates to video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K1Kd9mZL8g

I moved to the middle of nowhere and did not take a paycut. Now I work remotely and I'm saving so much money that I might even take a year off after this job expires.

It still sucks and I hate working, but it's the least bad path that I could find.