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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Sequence Reconstruction
• Topics: Array, Graph Theory, Topological Sort

What the problem is asking

The input gives a target sequence nums and a list of shorter sequences. Each shorter sequence says, “these numbers must appear in this relative order.”

The task is not just to ask whether nums can be built from those constraints. It asks whether nums is the only shortest sequence that satisfies every constraint. If another sequence of the same shortest length can also satisfy the constraints, the answer is False.

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Darkness that makes stars

Phil Plait’s column begins by turning away from the spectacular images that usually define modern astronomy. The universe is full of exploding stars, colliding galaxies and glowing nebulae, but some of its most important objects are visible because they are dark. The article focuses on Bok globules: small, dense clouds of gas and dust that can look like holes punched into a starry background.

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Techmeme surfaced this May 20, 2026 story in its Techmeme cluster, and the original report is Sergiu Gatlan’s BleepingComputer article, GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension.

The developer toolchain is the target

The breach is striking because it did not start with an exotic cloud exploit or a direct attack on GitHub’s production systems. According to BleepingComputer’s report, GitHub said roughly 3,800 internal repositories were exfiltrated after one employee installed a poisoned VS Code extension. GitHub removed the malicious extension version, isolated the affected endpoint, and began incident response.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Grouse and chairlifts and published under the headline Last resorts.

The article turns a small Alpine conservation problem into a useful lesson about design. Black grouse have been flying into chair-lift cables at ski resorts for years, often fatally. Resorts tried to help by hanging warning markers from the cables. The trouble was that many of those markers were red, and new research suggests red is precisely the wrong signal for the birds.

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Trump says he’s postponing ‘scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow’ at Middle East leaders’ request (r/worldnews)

• Leather_Net_3330: its not even tuesday yet.
• Flimsy_Category_9369: This feels like Groundhog Day at this point
• lastpassonright: This idiot has absolutely no way out of this mess.
• Temporary-Canary-346: Sorry there were attacks scheduled for tomorrow?!?

Bodies of missing Italian divers found in Maldives (r/news)

• ScottScanlon: Sad situation all around, but you can’t pay me enough to be going deep into caves in the ocean.
• Tyrrox: The had an improper gas mix for the depth they went. It’s a sad story but unfortunately even tenured diving professionals get complacent with the dangers.
• ThriftyMegaMan: New YouTube video from like 12 different content creators coming in 3, 2, 1,
• Hefty_Anywhere_8537: I’m a diver, and very nearly died on a 50m nitrox dive in French Polynesia. Traumatic experience, this is so sad and tragic.

Active shooter reported at Islamic Center of San Diego: Police (r/news)

• lostroadrunner22: Its over, both shooters are dead.
• YOSHIMIvPROBOTS: Police say shooters appeared to have killed themselves.
• Brilliant-Concern620: People are celebrating it on YouTube. We are living in sick times.
• Jamie00003: Can you just stop for 5 minutes America?

An asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth (r/worldnews)

• Catchphrase1228: It’s the bugs again!
• orangelity: Am I to understand that our entire planet’s radar capabilities to provide us with radar information on these types of objects were dependent on only one telescope (which collapsed 6 years ago) and one antenna (which is currently down for extended maintenance)?
• TheOriginalBroCone: Why are redditors so weird about wanting people to die from asteroid strikes? 
• RandomPantsAppear: Getting hit by an asteroid feels like it would fit right in with the 2020s itinerary. 

What is something you’ve officially stopped buying in 2026 because the price has become genuinely insulting? (r/AskReddit)

• xxleoxangelxx: Fast food
• myotheroneders: Fast food. The prices are so stupid that I can go to my locally owned sports bar and get much better food for a comparable price. I can’t justify spending that same amount of money for shitty food.
• garej: Food delivery. Buying a taxi for a burrito is too expensive.
• queenmellyy: Beer/wine/liquor at a restaurant. The drink shouldn’t cost as much as a meal.

TIL that the son of the man who welcomed the puritans and fed them when they were starving had his head cut off and put on a spike for 20 years at the same location as the first thanksgiving. (r/todayilearned)

• Gargomon251: Wait his SON? What the hell did HE do?
• SeaBearsFoam: And that’s where the Thanksgiving tradition of killing one of your family members and putting their head on a spike came from.
• LAAccountant: He was killed by another native.
• Porlarta: Deeply misleading way to talk about King Phillips war.

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META PLANS LAYOFFS IN 3 BATCHES GLOBALLY WEDNESDAY: RTRS (Blind)

• vNFr16: H1bs prioritized?
• xytcyiuo (eBay): Is anyone getting any work done with all this anticipation?
• UQu4gs6Z (Meta): Feeling anxious…
• GasonJ (Marqeta): Are debelopers affected though?

Is AI actually helping you ship faster? (Blind)

• rkigxvwkfi (Netflix): Only slightly in corporate setting because of review/planning/alignment/etc. much much faster for my side projects because i dont need any approval
• mXsM13: Everyone tells me how productive it has made them. I see 5000 line PRs left and right. But what is really being produced? Do any of the big tech sites have anything new and great? Are your releases bigger or better than before? I am just not seeing the end result.
• Ysbsbrb (Google): No because I just work less
• mUEm22 (eBay): coding is only a small part of software engineering. And most people don’t like AI documentation slop.

Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix (r/technology)

• EntireBig7258: building data centers in phoenix and then being surprised they make it hotter is like building a fireplace in a sauna and wondering why it got warm
• justmitzie: Great idea. Build something that raises temps and also sucks up water. In the desert.
• torgofjungle: Ahh I see we want to remove what little water was left in Phoenix
• Slippery-ape: In Phoenix at that. Where Asphalt remelts.

Senator Adam Schiff Proposes Bill Requiring Data Centers to Pay for Own Power (r/technology)

• mattreyu: Sorry, what now? Why on earth would power-hungry private companies not have to pay for their own power?
• alchemyDev: How the hell isn’t this already a thing?
• Decimit-: What is this magical idea of the business paying for the things they use??!!!
• FriedWhy: This is outraging! What’s next? Making companies pay taxes? Pay workers livable wages? The left just does not know when enough is enough. /s

314 npm packages just got compromised, 271 @antv, echarts-for-react, size-sensor, timeago.js (r/programming)

• SupermarketAntique32: Just another tuesday for NPM
• Maybe-monad: the s in npm stands for security
• dark_mode_everything: Why does this keep happening to us asks only package manager where this keeps happening regularly.
• Independent_Image_59: Is it just me or major CVEs got way too frequent now?

Creator of C++: “AI-generated code isn’t ready - it generates more bugs, more bloat, more security holes, and is nearly impossible to validate” (r/singularity)

• OrkWithNoTeef: It would take at least two singularities for AI to understand C++ variadic template metaprogramming compiler errors
• jferments: Code that people write using AI tools is not “impossible to validate”. You validate it exactly the same way you validate code written by humans who aren’t using AI tools.
• SgtChrome: Love Bjarne, but mentioning specific problems like that will look shortsighted when, two models down the line, AI will inevitably not make those mistakes anymore.
• AddingAUsername: As someone that (for some reason) likes C++, I can definitely say that using AI is much harder for it and much more micro-intensive. It’s much harder to vibecode etc. so I understand where he is coming from.

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What happened

GitHub’s official engineering blog published From latency to instant: Modernizing GitHub Issues navigation performance, a production writeup about making GitHub Issues feel fast by changing the client/server navigation architecture rather than treating the problem as a narrow backend-latency optimization.

The core idea is that a developer tool’s perceived performance is dominated by the loop between intent and visible feedback. Opening an issue, jumping to a linked thread, returning to a list, and scanning the next item are not isolated page loads. They are part of a triage workflow. GitHub therefore measured the work around Highest Priority Content, or HPC, an internal metric aligned with Largest Contentful Paint that tracks when the main issue content, usually the title or body, is rendered. The team bucketed navigations into instant, fast, and slow using HPC thresholds, then optimized the distribution rather than focusing only on the worst tail.

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A forecast for the sun’s temper

Solar flares are not just spectacular eruptions on a distant star. When they are aimed the wrong way, they can disturb the technological systems that modern life keeps in orbit and on the ground. A flare releases intense radiation from the sun’s surface, and it can be followed by a coronal mass ejection, a giant bubble of magnetized plasma. If that material reaches Earth, it can trigger geomagnetic storms that threaten satellites, communications, navigation systems, power grids and astronauts.

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Clean power’s crisis dividend

The article argues that the new Gulf war has made clean energy look less like a climate preference and more like a security asset. The immediate temptation is to assume coal will be the main beneficiary of disrupted energy markets, especially in countries that have domestic coal but rely on imported liquefied natural gas. Coal is indeed getting a short-term lift. But The Economist’s sharper point is that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz strengthens the case for solar, wind and other renewables even more.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced this May 19, 2026 article, and the original post is AI’s impact on software engineers in 2026: key trends, Part 2.

The productivity story is getting messier

Gergely Orosz’s latest survey analysis is interesting because it treats AI coding tools less like a single productivity lever and more like an organizational stress test. The piece draws on more than 900 responses from The Pragmatic Engineer subscribers and closes a series on how software engineers are actually using AI tools in 2026.