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Anthropic’s coding bar is fucking ridiculous (Blind)

• Poloipl (Google): The bar is high on purpose. Companies like Anthropic and Google aren’t trying to be reasonable to every candidate , they’re trying to be selective. Insane that I have to explain this.
• jEoc64 (NVIDIA): The people I know who got into Anthropic / OpenAI already knew what was going to be asked. You’re either cracked or you cheat 🤷🏽‍♂️. Don’t complain kiddo
• hApT36 (Vouch Insurance): When you have unlimited numbers of applicants, you can ask whatever insane questions you want

Senior Engineers Can’t Do BFS Now? (Blind)

• Ekjuiop (Pinterest): If 30 candidates in a row are failing the same problem, I’d at least look at the interview itself before declaring an entire generation of engineers incompetent.
• nihtimsksn (Capital One): Because senior engineers have been busy building systems and applications. Not memorizing bullshit algos to pass interviews and never use them again. Are you brain dead?
• mydP87 (Highspot): Funny thing is if you were given the option to re interview for your own job to keep it, you’d fall just like 95% of other Googlers

Is everyone getting am massive paycut in 2026? (Blind)

• typhoonie (Amazon): constantly getting/hearing about down leveling even with good YOE
• YNBQ33 (OpenAI): I 5.5x’d my TC this year.
• rn17d (Discord): Couple years? The peak was mid 2022 for pay unless you’re in the ML field. The market has shifted downard since then with all the layoffs the last 4 years.

Zuckerberg Knew. A Whistleblower Has the Emails to Prove It. - Gadget Review (r/technology)

• Additional-Signal327: He knew? This was all intentional. Facebook and social media is 100% designed to addict its users.
• McHoff: Maybe we should hold people at the top accountable even if they didn’t “know”. It’s their goddamn job to run the company.
• Oye_Oso: Behold, as absolutely no consequences befall anyone! Ever! It’s like magic.

Republicans are realizing that no one wants data centers (r/technology)

• Virtual-Relation303: But will they listen to their constituents or just pocket the money and say ‘fuck you guys’?
• nautilator44: But their owners want data centers, so they have to ram them through regardless.
• The_High_Life: So weird that people wouldnt want to live near a giant super loud, resource hungry monolith that employs almost no one.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol XHigh

Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree
• Topics: Tree, Depth-First Search, Binary Search Tree, Binary Tree

The problem in plain language

Given a binary search tree and two different nodes p and q that are known to be in it, find their lowest common ancestor. This is the deepest node whose subtree contains both targets. A target may be its own ancestor, so if p is above q, the answer can be p itself.

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Accuracy Is Not the Question

A statistic can sound decisive while answering the wrong question. A test that is 99 percent accurate appears to make a positive result almost conclusive. But that percentage describes how the test behaves when a condition is already known; a person receiving a result wants to know the reverse: given this positive result, how likely is the condition?

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A kettle has an unusually clear purpose: it boils water. That simplicity makes it an ideal target for Bartleby’s satire of brand positioning, the marketing exercise that decides which audience a product should address and what identity it should project. The article imagines a strategist trying to replace a practical, successful message with something more exciting. What follows is a catalogue of familiar corporate fashions, each claiming to transform the same basic appliance.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced the Asana Engineering Team’s August 7 post, “We migrated off Enzyme in 2 weeks. It should have taken five years.” The eye-catching result is real: Asana removed its remaining use of an obsolete frontend testing library in about a week and a half of engineering time. The more useful story is why this particular job was unusually well suited to coding agents.

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The difficult part of defending a shared compute platform is rarely a single missing check. It is the interaction among mechanisms that each look reasonable in isolation: a language sandbox, restricted timers, workload limits, anomaly detection, and efficient tenant placement. Cloudflare’s latest security research shows how those pieces can still compose into an unexpected attack path—and why the repair also has to be layered.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol XHigh

The Secret That Once Had to Travel

Secure communication has an awkward starting problem: before two people can exchange encrypted messages, they need a shared key, but sending that key may expose it to the very eavesdropper they are trying to exclude. For most of history, cryptography solved this key-distribution problem physically. Trusted couriers carried codebooks, agents met in secret, and militaries risked lives to seize an opponent’s instructions.

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The proposed merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery is more than a fight over the future of Hollywood. It has become a test of how antitrust enforcement is changing as American politics grows more partisan and state governments take on a larger role.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced the piece in “Headed for the Exit: the Great Engineering Leader Career Break”, Gergely Orosz’s account of an unusual pattern: experienced CTOs, vice presidents of engineering, and heads of engineering are leaving desirable jobs without another role lined up.

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Luigi Mangione’s state murder trial postponed indefinitely amid double jeopardy fight (r/news)

• XfinityHomeWifi: This guy will spend years locked up before he’s actually sentenced for anything. Going to an actual penitentiary by that point will feel like a hotel
• CMG30: He’s got a smart attorney. She’s working all the angles here.
• CleverInternetName8c: I was wondering why he would plead guilty given there didn’t seem to be much of a concession in exchange but it being as part of a strategy to make a double jeopardy argument makes total sense.

Disney sues FCC over challenge to broadcast licenses, claiming retaliation over ‘Jimmy Kimmel’ (r/news)

• OhNoIBoffedIt: Oh God we are in the end times. They have me rooting for Disney’s legal department.
• Successful-Medicine9: Mouse money is nothing to be messed with.
• AMouthBreather: Not a fan of Disney. But the mouse can and should fuck the FCC here and put them in their place. Just wish it wasn’t on all of our dimes.

What “unskilled” job would humble most people after just one shift? (r/AskReddit)

• rastanaut33: Trench digger for a plumber.
• ATXKLIPHURD: Throwing hay. First you go pick up the hay bales and stack them in a trailer. Then you unload the bales from the trailer and stack them in a barn. The bales weigh about 50lbs each and anywhere from 50-250 bales in a day.
• Ready-Laugh6249: Restaurant dishwasher. People call it “unskilled” until they’re three hours into a dinner rush and the dishes are multiplying faster than they can wash them.

What is a skill that looks completely effortless when an expert does it, but is ridiculously difficult when you try it yourself? (r/AskReddit)

• mrclean2323: Drywall finishing
• CoffeeGrinder999: Close up card magic. Looks effortless. Really hard to do.
• SensualEnema: I had a voice teacher who said, “Singing is easy; learning to sing is hard.”

You wake up tomorrow and suddenly find yourself back in 1990. You have \$500 in your pocket — what would you buy with it? (r/AskReddit)

• ExpertIAmNot: Apple stock
• three-sense: I’m going to a damn concert
• RuutuTwo: Dinner for my father and my mother. He dies in less than three weeks from now in 1990. We are drinking the best bottle of wine and eating the best food in the city. My mother is currently 90 and has dementia and to see him and her again could bring me more joy than anything.