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Quick facts

• Difficulty: HARD
• Problem: Find Median from Data Stream
• Topics: Two Pointers, Design, Sorting, Heap (Priority Queue), Data Stream

Problem gist

Design a data structure that receives integers one at a time and can report the median of everything seen so far. If the count is odd, the median is the single middle value after sorting. If the count is even, it is the average of the two middle values.

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Proving Knowledge without Revealing It

Ordinary mathematical proofs are meant to be inspected. Cryptographic proofs face a stranger demand: one person must convince another that a statement is true without exposing the secret that makes it true. A zero-knowledge proof might show that someone knows the solution to a sudoku puzzle, for example, while revealing nothing about the solution itself. The same idea supports virtual identity checks, financial transactions and blockchains.

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Techmeme surfaced the Sunday Telegraph report “Iranian hackers shut down UK power plant”. The article describes a rare kind of cyber incident: an intrusion that did not merely steal information or disrupt office systems, but reportedly forced a British electricity generator offline for four days.

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Narendra Modi’s relentless travel is more than personal diplomacy. It reflects a wider effort by Asia’s middle powers to protect themselves against two uncomfortable realities: China’s economic and military weight, and an America that many governments now regard as less dependable. India is not choosing a new bloc. It is helping build a network of practical partnerships that can give countries more room to manoeuvre between the superpowers.

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At least 55 sickened in salmonella, E. coli outbreak linked to sprouts (r/news)

• Lucid_Insanity: This is insane. That’s what? 5 outbreaks in the last couple weeks or month?
• B-Z_B-S: RFK Jr. is Pestilence, the First Horseman of the Apocalypse.
• Ancient_Spite_725: It’s almost like firing a bunch of people at the CDC and the FDA makes things less safe. Who could guess?

Court slashes \$50M judgment against Infowars’ Alex Jones over falsely calling school shooting a hoax (r/news)

• SnooPets1826: Texas reduced their verdict from 50 million to 1.5 million. The billion dollar judgement is from another state and is unaffected.
• Affectionate_Neat868: Truth doesn’t matter. Corruption doesn’t matter. Criminals are pardoned. The rich are lining their pockets. Science and health research are being defunded. We can’t even eat half the food at the grocery store. How do we fix our society?
• Mountain_rage: Expected because Texas is not a serious state.

Fit guys who let themselves go, what was the most surprising thing about getting fat? (r/AskReddit)

• yewtoo22: How easy it is to get fat
• CasperRimsa: How quickly it happens. Wasn’t years, but months. It’s tough, especially when life hits you with left and right
• jim_dandy_: Its never mentioned, but being fat is physically uncomfortable. Like 100% of the time you are uncomfortable. You adjust your shirt or pants not because it looks bad, but because its uncomfortable.

What’s a tv commercial that everyone your age remembers but no one younger has any idea what you’re talking about? (r/AskReddit)

• Feisty_Time7875: “My bologna has a first name…”
• devospice: Where’s the beef?
• Furgems: Clapp on! Clap off!

Parents of twins, when they were newborns, in the 1st few weeks, did you ever lose track of who was who? (r/AskReddit)

• WrenMorbid—: My parents say they just don’t know whether they confused us an odd or even number of times…
• Hedgiwithapen: I can say with 100% certainty that my parents never confused me and my twin. This was helped greatly by the fact that my twin was twice my weight, had very different coloring, and was a boy.
• Livid-Visual-1543: I knew a set of twins in grade school who one of them had a small dot tattoo on the bottom of their foot.

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What exactly does one need to prepare for a role at Anthropic and OpenAi? (Blind)

• agiforall (OpenAI): I think technical depth is very helpful and it makes on boarding much easier
• Not.Indian (Uber): You need divine intervention
• apple145 (Meta): Get an interview first

Failed an anthropic interview. Passed a staff Loop six weeks later with AI (Blind)

• Ayiyeiyuo (itana): Thought you were going to say you cheated lol
• Subarui: Blind tax
• Ekjuiop (Pinterest): Thanks for the insight OP

What is it like working at OpenAI? (Blind)

• zbjjw (Waymo): What level makes \$800k?
• tik-tock (Walmart): Which level and yoe at G?
• tzoR76 (Google): What is near offer stage

Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera (r/technology)

• Themodsarecuntz: No one wants these things. They’re scary and dystopian and a perfect example of the things I was taught to fear growing up.
• mq2thez: Jury nullification is a powerful tool of the people.
• tempinator: Remember kids, if you see someone stealing food, stealing diapers, or destroying flock cameras: no you didn’t.

Walmart finally adding Tap to Pay after years of shoppers asking for it (r/technology)

• djstevefog: All that money from tariff refunds I guess they need to spend some of it
• sadmep: Ok, but why didn’t they allow it all that time? People want to give you money for your goods, seems like you’d want to allow it.
• somefunmaths: Huh, TIL that Walmart hadn’t already joined the rest of the world, and technically advanced retail giants like Little League snack bars and Girl Scouts selling cookies outside a grocery store, by adding Apple Pay.

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An Awkward Encounter Becomes a Theorem

More than a century ago, Hungarian-born mathematician George Pólya was taking one of his solitary walks in the woods near the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich when he passed a student and the student’s fiancée. Later he crossed paths with them again, and then again. Worried that the repeated encounters made him look like a snoop, Pólya did what mathematicians often do with an embarrassing accident: he turned it into a general problem.

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Techmeme surfaced SemiAnalysis’s August 21 study, “Are Open Models Catching Up?”. Its answer is yes—but in a more interesting sense than a leaderboard snapshot suggests. Open models, many of them more precisely described as open-weight models, have repeatedly caught an earlier proprietary frontier, and SemiAnalysis finds that the delay has shortened with each major change in what language models can do.

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The Panama Canal is becoming more valuable just as it is becoming harder to manage. War in the Middle East has redirected energy shipments towards the Americas, pushing demand for the waterway close to its daily limit. Longer-term shifts in trade could keep that demand high. Yet drought and rivalry between the United States and China threaten the reliability and political independence on which the canal’s success depends.

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US retail giant receives \$1bn boost from tariff refunds (r/news)

• Doodl3s: Is this the tariffs helping the american people… Prices went up, tariffs being refunded to corporations… When do prices come back down now that tariffs are gone? Anybody?
• groovyinutah: And I’m sure we’ll see an immediate drop in prices…/s
• jackleggjr: Conservatives freak out when they hear about “socialism” and “redistribution of wealth,” but they seem totally fine with redistributing my wealth into the pockets of billionaires and corporations.

US to end summer blend gasoline requirement early in attempt to lower prices (r/news)

• jeterix7387: Winter blend fuel is a cheaper “crappie” blend of fuel. Worse fuel mileage and more pollution. My bet is prices stay high while oil companies increase profits yet again.
• bitNine: Anything to avoid ending what’s actually causing high gas prices: Donald Trump’s presidency.
• torcsandantlers: They’re really hoping that a dip in gas prices will help them out for the November elections. The turnout for the Primaries have been showing a very heavy shift to the left in turnout and voting trends.

What hobby do you secretly judge people for having? (r/AskReddit)

• Sad_Feeling5746: Collecting expensive sneakers that never actually get worn
• Beneficial_Mammoth_3: People who make their entire personality about collecting Funko Pops. I’m not saying it’s wrong but at some point the boxes start looking like they’re paying rent.
• Alpuka: Honestly, many of my own hobbies - I don’t really like the communities

What do you think is the single most terrifying photograph in history? (r/AskReddit)

• ElSquibbonator: The space shuttle Challenger exploding. The crew were still alive inside the cockpit, and when their bodies were recovered from the wreckage, the oxygen in their oxygen tanks had been used, showing that they were alive and conscious all the way until the cockpit hit the ocean. That would have taken nearly two minutes. They didn’t die instantly in the explosion; they had enough time to realize how hopeless their situation was and see their death approaching.
• Paratrooper101x: A lot of people here are talking about tragic or one-off “just-before-death” photos but any photo depicting the einsatzgruppen to me is bone chilling. Sometimes we tend to think of pictures as flashes in time, without any existence of a before or after. The einsatzgruppen photos depict a scene that played out for years in Europe. People being lined up in front of a pit and shot.
• Ryukotaicho: Pictures of Mount St Helens erupting in 1980. Robert Landsburg knew he couldn’t outrun nature to after taking the pictures, he rewound the film in the camera, put the camera in his bag, and laid over it to protect it.

What’s a horrible thing that a famous person did that everyone forgot about but you? (r/AskReddit)

• Zestyclose_Pass_652: Robert Kardashian carrying OJ Simpson’s briefcase out of the crime scene right in front of police and the press, cameras and all. Then being declared as part of his legal counsel so he couldn’t be called to testify.
• notyourbeans: George Lopez cheated on his wife after she donated her kidney to him
• neecho235: Karl Malone impregnated a 12 year old. edit: When he was 20.