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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I want to preface this with the mention that understanding other people’s code and being able to modify it in a way that gets it to do what you want is a big part of real world coding and not a small feat.
    The rest of my comment may come across as “you’re learning wrong”. It is meant to. I don’t know how you’ve been learning and I have no proof that doing it differently will help, but I’m optimistic that it can. The main takeaway is this: be patient with yourself. Solving problems and building things is hard. It’s ok to progress slowly. Don’t try to skip ahead, especially early on.
    (also this comment isn’t directed at you specifically, but at anyone who shares your frustration)

    I was gonna write an entire rant opposing the meme, but thought better of it as it seems most people here agree with me.
    BUT I think that once you’ve got some basics down, there really is no better way to improve than to do. The key is to start at the appropriate level of complexity for your level of experience.
    Obviously I don’t know what that is for you specifically, but I think in general it’s a good idea to start simple. Don’t try to engineer an entire application as your first programming activity.

    Find an easy (and simple! as in - a single function with well defined inputs and outputs and no side effects) problem; either think of something yourself, or pick an easy problem from an online platform like leetcode or codechef. And try to solve the problem yourself. There’s no need to get stuck for ages, but give it an honest try.
    I think a decent heuristic for determining if you have a useful problem is whether you feel like you’ve made significant progress towards a solution after an hour or two. If not, readjust and pick a different problem. There’s no point in spending days on a problem that’s not clicking for you.

    If you weren’t able to solve the problem, look at solutions. Pick one that seems most straight forward to you and try to understand it. When you think you do, give the original problem a little twist and try to solve that. While referencing the solution to the original if you need to.
    If you’re struggling with this kind of constrained problem, keep doing them. Seriously. Perhaps dial down the difficulty of the problems themselves until you can follow and understand the solutions. But keep struggling with trying to solve little problems from scratch. Because that’s the essence of programming: you want the computer to do something and you need to figure out how to achieve that.
    It’s not automatic, intuitive, inspired creation. It’s not magic. It’s a difficult and uncertain process of exploration. I’m fairly confident that for most people, coding just isn’t how their brain works, initially. And I’m also sure that for some it “clicks” much easier than for others. But fundamentally, the skill to code is like a muscle: it must be trained to be useful. You can listen to a hundred talks on the mechanics of bike riding, and be an expert on the physics. If you don’t put in the hours on the pedals, you’ll never be biking from A to B.
    I think this period at the beginning is the most challenging and frustrating, because you’re working so hard and seemingly progress so slowly. But the two are connected. You’re not breezing through because it is hard. You’re learning a new way of thinking. Everything else builds on this.

    Once you’re more comfortable with solving isolated problems like that, consider making a simple application. For example: read an input text file, replace all occurrences of one string with another string, write the resulting text to a new text file. Don’t focus on perfection or best practices at first. Simply solve the problem the way you know how. Perhaps start with hard-coded values for the replacement, then make them configurable (e.g. by passing them as arguments to your application).

    When you have a few small applications under your belt you can start to dream big. As in, start solving “real” problems. Like some automation that would help you or someone you know. Or tasks at work for a software company. Or that cool app you’ve always wanted to build. Working on real applications will give you more confidence and open the door to more learning. You’ll run into lots of problems and learn how not to do things. So many ways not to do things.

    TLDR: If it’s not clicking, you need to, as a general rule, do less learning (in the conventional sense of absorbing and integrating information) and more doing. A lot of doing.





  • The main difference is that 1Password requires two pieces of information for decrypting your passwords while Bitwarden requires only one.

    Requiring an additional secret in the form of a decryption key has both upsides and downsides:

    • if someone somehow gets access to your master password, they won’t be able to decrypt your passwords unless they also got access to your secret key (or one of your trusted devices)
    • a weak master password doesn’t automatically make you vulnerable
    • if you lose access to your secret key, your passwords are not recoverable
    • additional effort to properly secure your key

    So whether you want both or only password protection is a trade-off between the additional protection the key offers and the increased complexity of adequately securing it.

    Your proposed scenarios of the master password being brute forced or the servers being hacked and your master password acquired when using Bitwarden are misleading.

    Brute forcing the master password is not feasible, unless it is weak (too short, common, or part of a breach). By default, Bitwarden protects against brute force attacks on the password itself using PBKDF2 with 600k iterations. Brute forcing AES-256 (to get into the vault without finding the master password) is not possible according to current knowledge.

    Your master password cannot be “acquired” if the Bitwarden servers are hacked.
    They store the (encrypted) symmetric key used to decrypt your vault as well as your vault (where all your passwords are stored), AES256-encrypted using said symmetric key.
    This symmetric key is itself AES256-encrypted using your master password (this is a simplification) before being sent to their servers.
    Neither your master password nor the symmetric key used to decrypt your password vault is recoverable from Bitwarden servers by anyone who doesn’t know your master password and by extension neither are the passwords stored in your encrypted vault.

    See https://bitwarden.com/help/bitwarden-security-white-paper/#overview-of-the-master-password-hashing-key-derivation-and-encryption-process for details.



  • There’s no need for something that complex.
    Someone with access to a chess engine watches the game and inputs the moves into the engine as they’re played. If there’s a critical move (only 1 or very few of the options are winning/don’t throw the game) they send a simple signal to let him know. That can be enough to give you an advantage at that level. If you really want, you could send a number between 1 and 6 to represent which piece the engine prefers to move, but it’s likely not necessary.

    That said, all the evidence he actually did anything like that is at best circumstantial (mostly statistical evidence supposedly showing how unlikely his performance was given his past performance and rating at the time, as well as known instances of past cheating by him - though the only confirmed ones were several years ago when he was still a kid and online rather than in person).