Once I’ve found my first letter, I don’t actually know where in this string I am. We keep trying letters one by one until we hit a match for something that’s not in our subject line. So if we take all of the characters that aren’t in the subject and try searching for each of them, we know for sure we’ll hit a unique letter that’s in the password. So we’ve got six slots of characters, some of which may appear in the subject line, some of which certainly don’t. Let’s pretend the body is 6 characters long. We also have a subject line as part of the string we’re querying. I probably didn’t include any upper-case characters (and Reddit doesn’t enforce that as a password constraint) so let’s assume for now that I didn’t - in case I did, we can just expand the search space later if the initial algorithm fails. A few things I know about my password: I know it was a long string with some random characters, probably something along the lines of asgoihej2409g. Given this function, write an algorithm that can deduce the hidden password. I hurry into my apartment, drop my bag, and pull out my laptop.Īlgorithms problem: you are given a function substring?(str), which returns true or false depending on whether a password contains any given substring. By entering in a string into the search bar, the search results will confirm whether my password contains this substring. Remember: the body consisted entirely of my password.Įssentially, I’ve been given an interface to perform substring queries. I pulled up the app on my mobile phone and tried it: I was walking home that night from the office pondering my predicament, when suddenly it hit me. I started brainstorming elaborate explanations involving dead relatives about why I needed access to the e-mail…Īll of my options were messy. Not to mention it would be an embarrassing e-mail exchange. Plus this site doesn’t look like it has a support team. We’ve already established I’m wildly impatient. But they would probably take a while to get back to me. I could write in to LetterMeLater and explain that I didn’t mean to do this. What do I do? Do I just have to create a new Reddit account and start from scratch? But that’s so much work. I also set it to “hide,” so I couldn’t view the contents of the e-mail until it’s sent. I didn’t remember doing this, but I must have gotten so fed up with myself that I locked myself out until 2018. I decide to scrounge up my old account and find my Reddit password. This means waiting, and waiting of course means internet rabbit holes. And Airbnb, it so happens, has a large test suite. It worked quite well from what I remember.Įventually I got so busy with programming stuff, I completely forgot about it. Perfect - an automated, friend-less solution! (I’d alienated most of them by now, so that was a big selling point.)Ī bit sketchy looking, but hey, any port in a storm.įor a while I set this up this routine - during the week I’d e-mail myself my password, on the weekends I’d receive the password, load up on internet junk food, and then lock myself out again once the week began. A little Google searching, and I came across this: Looks legit. The technical terminology for this is that they are “nice to you” and will give you back your password if you “beg them.”Īfter a few rounds of this failure mode, I needed a more robust solution. Unfortunately it turns out, friends are very susceptible to social engineering. (Also changed the e-mail for password recovery to cover all the bases.) With that, I’d have a foolproof way to lock myself out of Reddit. Then I asked a friend to e-mail me this password on a certain date. So it occurred to me: how about I lock myself out of my account? 2015 was one of these times - I was singularly focused on improving as a programmer, and Redditing was becoming a liability. But sometimes you need to turn on the blinders and dial down distractions. If I want to procrastinate on something, I’ll often open a new tab and dive down a Reddit-hole. This allows me to consciously engineer my life so that despite having the emotional maturity of a heroin-addicted lab rat, I’m occasionally able to get things done. By Haseeb Qureshi That time I had to crack my own Reddit password (Kinda.) Hack the planet, everybody.
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