bqe
Joined 13 years ago
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221
Member since
Mar 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
I remember being asked this during my interview at Google. It was the first time I heard it and I gave an answer that iterated over the list twice. The interviewer said that it wasn't good enough and I am only allowed to iterate over it once. He didn't let me write my O(2n) solution down so he returned a strong no as feedback.
Comment · 4 years ago
Why this is interesting: a major defense against mass account takeovers (ATOs) at large scale companies has been fingerprinting browsers. You as a normal user see this most when you use something like reCaptcha, but it's actually happening on nearly every login flow for major websites. By blocking automation like evilginx, you stop a lot of phishing and credential stuffing attacks against your users.
Using VNC here is super clever. This means that the "automation" part of the phishing attack is actually a browser just like the user is using, so you can't fingerprint it. In fact, the victim is really typing in their password into a real Google login page, but the attacker is logging everything through VNC. It's going to be very hard for Google (or anyone else) to detect this.
The solution to this (like all phishing attacks), is still WebAuthn. However, many of us in security were hoping we could get by with bandaids like fingerprinting until WebAuthn was more widespread.
Comment · 4 years ago
I haven't tried it yet, but if it does what you say it does, I honestly think you underpriced this.
Comment · 5 years ago
Awhile ago I wrote a Python library called LiveStats[1] that computed any percentile for any amount of data using a fixed amount of memory per percentile. It uses an algorithm I found in an old paper[2] called P^2. It uses a polynomial to find good approximations.
The reason I made this was an old Amazon interview question. The question was basically, "Find the median of a huge data set without sorting it," and the "correct" answer was to have a fixed size sorted buffer and randomly evict items from it and then use the median of the buffer. However, a candidate I was interviewing had a really brilliant insight: if we estimate the median and move it a small amount for each new data point, it would be pretty close. I ended up doing some research on this and found P^2, which is a more sophisticated version of that insight.
Comment · 5 years ago
I think the simplest solution to this would be to simply hide comment/retweet/like counts. It will be possible to sort of figure this out from the engagement, but it won't be easy to figure out if a tweet is popular or wildly popular.
Comment · 5 years ago
Spiritless Kentucky 74: https://spiritless.com/products/kentucky-74
It's pretty good!
Comment · 5 years ago
That website is not a quality source of information. Media Bias/Fact Check rates it as questionable, low quality, and far to the right: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/here-is-the-evidence/
Comment · 6 years ago
> They pay for expensive ($$$$$$) cloud anti-bot/anti-scraping, captcha you after a few requests if you run adblock, they pay for extensive browser/device (attempting to reidentify a user across multiple devices/multiple browsers) fingerprinting services and Fastly.
This sounds like a great anti-account takeover program. I imagine with all of the various compliance programs they have to deal with and the legal risk, these are prudent measures.
Comment · 6 years ago
The parent commenter was discussing revenue and not profit. If they were aggressively expanding, I would expect that profits to remain small or negative, but I'd expect revenue to grow as a result.
Comment · 6 years ago
It's important to know the limits of your knowledge and reasoning capabilities and defer to relevant experts, which is known as epistemic learned helplessness[1]. This is also much faster, as a lot of bullshit sounds like truth if you're unfamiliar with the field.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180416171148/http://squid314.l...
Comment · 6 years ago