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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Kth Smallest Element in a BST
• Topics: Tree, Depth-First Search, Binary Search Tree, Binary Tree

The problem in plain language

Given the root of a binary search tree and a 1-indexed number k, return the value that would appear in position k if all node values were arranged from smallest to largest.

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Quantizing a language model is often treated as a final conversion step: train in high precision, compress the finished checkpoint, measure the damage, and accept the best compromise. NVIDIA’s latest work makes a more useful engineering move. It turns quantization error into a condition the model can train against, allowing the deployment format to influence the model before release rather than merely constraining it afterward.

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Fighting Fire by Moving Air

Fire needs heat, fuel and oxygen. Conventional suppression usually removes heat with water or separates flames from fuel with chemicals. The Scientific American Advances article “Fire Stoppers” describes a more unusual approach: using sound waves to disturb the air around a flame so quickly that combustion cannot keep going.

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Techmeme surfaced Emanuel Maiberg’s August 17 investigation, “We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility”. The story turns a murky argument about AI training data into a physical supply-chain investigation: 404 Media placed a tracker in a rare-book shipment and followed it to Amazon’s VGT3 facility in Las Vegas, where Amazon scans books for AI training and destroys the paper copies.

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SK Hynix has gone from near-collapse to the front of the artificial-intelligence boom. Once a struggling second-place memory-chip maker, it now leads the market for the high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, that feeds data to advanced AI processors. Its recovery shows how patient technical bets and a collaborative culture can let an underdog overtake incumbents. It also exposes the danger of expanding at the top of a notoriously cyclical market.

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Massive egg recall in US south and south-west due to salmonella outbreak (r/news)

• Existential_Vibes: “The affected eggs were available at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana and Brookshire Grocery locations in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Mississippi – as well as “other smaller retail outlets,” according to the initial recall alert.”
• Kopav: It’s almost like a functional government with regulations to protect citizens is a good thing and worth paying for. Dismantling important infrastructure is bad.
• VegetableYesterday63: Inspections and monitoring were a Doge cost reduction. You have to pay for those tax cuts for the rich somehow

2 planes with the same flight number avoid possible disaster thanks to quick-thinking controller (r/news)

• Ginger_Anarchy: I’d always assumed, I guess wrongly, that those numbers were assigned to that specific plane, not each individual flight. TIL.
• ValuableFun6447: Good job by the air traffic controller to deal with this situation. Importantly, what procedural failures allowed two aircraft in simultaneous flight to be assigned the same flight number? I suspect the airline was responsible.
• Antique-Quantity-608: Those pilots were super chill professional during the radio call. Respect. 🫡

HR of reddit, what was the worst case for firing a worker? (r/AskReddit)

• maybenomaybe: Manager went into the office on a weekend to pick up something he’d forgotten there and found another employee downloading the entire contents of the company server to personal hard drives. That guy was fired with prejudice.
• DuffMiver8: A news photographer for the television station I worked for had a habit of taking one of the news vans, with our station logo prominently displayed, to the local strip club.
• tcrispina: A salesperson threw the prospective buyer’s keys on the roof of the building to prevent them from leaving. He was still insisting it was to make a point about the quality of the item for sale. He had 20 years at the company. It was wild.

Which companies do you think are dying? (r/AskReddit)

• baronvondoofus: I can’t believe JC Penney is still holding on after all these years.
• TheSnappleGhost: iRobot (maker of the Roomba) is dying. They went through a bankruptcy, restructure and sale. Tons of their products are discontinued and have no support, parts, filters etc. They’re on their way out.
• Zebrehn: Harley Davidson. Their target demographic is boomers, and they’re getting too old to ride. The brand is basically toxic to younger riders.

What’s your “20 dollar burrito” example for how expensive things have got? (r/AskReddit)

• Stunning-Example208: I’ll go first: last night we went to a fast casual counter service burger place for dinner and it was over 100 dollars for 4 people.
• Stunning-Example208: Another example: a can of diet Coke used to be 50 cents at Walmart on our way in. It’s 1 dollar now
• hemoglobinBlue: A silly example, but I’ve been the cool house every halloween for a while now - giving out big candy. For what I’ve got in the past, prices are up %50 and the size is down %20.

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Companies with strong engineering culture? (Blind)

• bampf_it (Waymo): Lol @ the people saying Waymo isn’t quality critical or is a slop factory. Very high standards here for good reason.
• jaskeerat (Salesforce): Strong engineering culture lol. These places are all slop factories. If you want to see real engineering, there are no name companies who do phenomenal open source work. Plenty of DB startups in this category. Big tech has stopped innovating for a long time.
• something4 (Meta): Meta used to have a strong engineering culture but it’s all AI slop now

Should I give up coasting at work to let my fiance be a stay at home wife (Blind)

• vJlu25 (Microsoft): If your fiance has any decency at all, she wouldn’t want you to sacrifice your wellbeing and health. If she’s OK with you working 60h weeks and adding stress so she doesn’t have to work, that tells you something.
• o’henry (Zoox): I don’t remember.. remind me again. Is you fiancé beautiful you said? Work your ass off. If you send her outside maybe she might get stolen!
• aVqo85 (The Trade Desk): This is a troll post. He’s bragging about his lack of work, TC, and “beautiful” wife when everyone knows it’s total BS cus nobody would write this garbage. Lol

Building a business is so damn hard (Blind)

• auqhzu (NVIDIA): Which is why you need to be an operator plugging into a platform like Airbnb, Turo, VRBO. Outsource the front end to an established player and focus on the operations.
• &3’h &3$w (Salesforce): It is an infinitely easier and higher ROI path to wealth to be a random, checked out employee at a large company than to start your own business. This is why the politics at companies is so nasty: people know how hard it is to actually make a living outside doing real work and 99% of corporate employees have no talent or drive to do anything else
• oopskie (Oracle): Why wont you just pay for ads. Or use agents. For me hardest part is to listen to management.

Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees (r/technology)

• frquency-equinox: Who would’ve thought people that don’t have to sit in hours of traffic, can be at home with their pets (and maybe their spouse), and save money making food at home etc would be happier 🫨?
• Javontarious: All the studies in the world can show how remote work is better for people, the environment, etc and it won’t matter. Companies are weaponizing in office regardless of the data.
• ifeltatap: I wish that everybody who has a job that doesn’t need them be on location, can work from home and avoid all the added stress that comes with a commute, traffic, crowds etc… it’s a massive quality of life improvement that people deserve.

Chris Hansen banned from Roblox live at CrimeCon during child safety demo with Schlep (r/technology)

• Rockyrox: I will never let my children play this game. It’s filled with creeps and it’s just too much exposure to the world for children.
• dpny_nyc: Why does dexerto cite Gays Against Groomers, the far-right anti LGBT org?
• StatementCareful522: Nothing says “we have have nothing to hide” like banning one of the most renowned predator-hunters

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A Sky Report Hidden in a Poem

For three nights in the winter of 1204, red and white bands stretched across the sky north and northeast of Kyoto. The Japanese noble and poet Fujiwara Sadaie recorded part of the display in his diary, Meigetsuki (The Record of the Clear Moon). More than eight centuries later, physicist Hiroko Miyahara and her colleagues used that description, along with other historical writings, as a guide to the behavior of the sun.

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Techmeme surfaced Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers’s August 12 essay, “What sort of maths are LLMs good at?”. Written days after OpenAI announced ten claimed advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science, the essay asks a more useful question than whether language models are simply “good at maths”: what kinds of mathematical search currently play to their strengths, and where might human judgment still matter?

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Europe says it wants larger companies capable of competing with American and Asian giants. Its leaders call for deeper integration, more investment and new “European champions”. Yet scale cannot be created by declarations or a common incorporation regime alone. In practice, it requires mergers across national borders - and dealmakers willing to push through the political resistance those mergers provoke.