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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Second Highest Salary
• Main tags: Database, SQL

What the problem is really asking

There is an Employee table with a salary column. The task is to return the second-highest distinct salary value.

That word “distinct” is the whole trick.

If the largest salary appears many times, it still counts as only one rank. So this is not:

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Remove Nth Node From End of List
• Main tags: Linked List, Two Pointers

What the problem is really asking

The input is a singly linked list and a positive integer n.

The task is to delete the node that is n positions from the end and return the new head.

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A cleaner way to watch a black hole feed

Yvette Cendes builds the article around one of astronomy’s most dramatic scenes: a star wandering too close to a supermassive black hole. Long before the star crosses the event horizon, gravity pulls much harder on the side nearest the hole than on the far side. The star stretches, unravels and gets torn apart in a tidal disruption event. Roughly half of its material is flung outward, while the rest settles into a hot accretion disk that briefly shines across the universe.

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What happened

Techmeme surfaced this story on its April 15, 2026 front page, and the original article is TechCrunch’s After sale of its shoe business, Allbirds pivots to AI.

The basic plot sounds like satire, but it is real. After selling its brand and footwear assets last month for $39 million, Allbirds is using the remaining public-company shell to pivot into AI infrastructure. In its own investor-relations announcement, the company said it signed a $50 million convertible financing facility with an institutional investor, plans to rename itself “NewBird AI,” and wants to become a GPU-as-a-service and AI-native cloud provider.

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What this article is about

This summary covers The Economist’s March 28th, 2026 Science & technology Well Informed article on page 79, which asks whether playing music is good for the brain and answers that it probably is.

The article’s basic point is not that musicians are magical or that music lessons guarantee genius. It is that making music is an unusually demanding mental task. It asks the brain to coordinate hearing, sight, timing, fine motor control, attention and imagination all at once. Done regularly, that seems to act like a form of training that can leave measurable cognitive benefits behind.

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Why this article stands out

Jeff Katz’s guide is useful because it refuses to romanticize speedriding. The sport is easy to describe in a seductive way: skis, a small wing, steep terrain, and the ability to move between sliding and flying. Katz acknowledges that appeal, but he makes the stronger point that speedriding only stays beautiful when pilots treat it as a discipline rather than a shortcut to intensity. The article is built around progression, judgment, and energy management, not bravado.

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Rep. Eric Swalwell resigns from U.S. House after sexual misconduct allegations (r/news)

• FourEightNineOneOne: One sex predator in DC gone. Now for the rest of them.
• Flash_ina_pan: Well shit. He needed to go, but now Gonzales is gonna hang around.
• VOZ1: Don’t care what letter is next to their name, GET THEM ALL OUT. Arrest, prosecute, incarcerate all the predators.

US judge dismisses Trump defamation suit against Wall Street Journal (r/news)

• PogoLlama72: Another day, another Trump lawsuit tossed. For anyone actually curious, it’s worth skimming the judge’s opinion instead of headlines, the legal reasoning is usually way less dramatic than the tweets about it.
• Am_Deer: Can we do away with not prosecuting a sitting president already? This guy sues everyone. What about the people? When do we get justice?
• zedkyuu: Wonder when we’ll see the EO about preserving national and presidential pride that makes it illegal to say anything bad about the US government. And since the Trump org is the US government…

Why are parents who barely passed high school thinking they can teach/homeschool their children? (r/NoStupidQuestions)

• St23mv: They don’t want to teach anything. They want to indoctrinate their kids.
• crackpotpourri: How does that quote go? “The problem with stupid people is they’re so stupid they have no idea how stupid they are.”
• Avery_Thorn: The confidence of the ignorant?

What are the signs that you are wasting your life? (r/AskReddit)

• Prestigious_Emu6039: You never put your phone down
• sexyyisa: If you don’t have goals, dreams, plans, you’re just living in autopilot and that’s not living. Also if you’re not doing things that make you a better person
• AgitatedPatience5729: You live to work.

What do people need to do in their 20s to set their 30s up for success? (r/AskReddit)

• Bix615: Invest in retirement as soon as you can
• Guilty_Cow5673: Eat clean, work out, stay in touch with friends and save money.
• ComputerHelpPro: Avoid personal debt - credit cards will KILL you, lol.

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I think AI has killed my passion for Software Engineering (r/cscareerquestions)

• HelpfulNobody: Right there with ya.
• TheoryOfRelativity12: Pretty sure almost everyone feels the same. Coding is easier but the magic of problem solving kinda vanished.
• djdephcon: I feel like I’m more of a code reviewer than a code writer now.

CEO has started vibe coding. How does this end for me? (r/cscareerquestions)

• DesoLina: Polish your contracting skills, someone will have to clean this mess up in couple years.
• lolCLEMPSON: It ended in me getting another job.
• phast_man: Just start routing all the customer support tickets to him

OpenClaw has 250K GitHub stars. The only reliable use case I’ve found is daily news digests. (r/LocalLLaMA)

• Buggyworm: You forgot it’s main use case: starring itself on github
• RoomyRoots: And security nightmare vector, don’t forget!
• norofbfg: The gap between capability and reliability seems bigger than most people admit right now.

Claude is on the same path as ChatGPT. I measured it. (r/artificial)

• __Scenery: Anecdotally I think this is very true. The amount of “take a break, we’re done here” responses I get when we are absolutely not done here is far higher than it used to be
• Effective_Basis1555: Didn’t they hire that ai safety lady from OAI responsible for destroying 4o?
• Miamiconnectionexo: Response length down 40% and welfare redirects up 275% is a damning stat. That’s not users imagining things. Something changed after March 26.

Does any tech company generate a significant portion of code with ‘AI’ (Blind)

• rajek: Coding with AI is exactly as precise as trying to generate a specific image with AI. At some point you get frustrated and just edit the work yourself. Software engineers will not be replaced and Graphic designers will not be replaced.
• grammay: Sundar pichai said 25% code is ai written, but that’s just bullshit because another news followed up that it was auto suggestion. Which is fine for logging. But otherwise is bullshit
• wcran: I don’t really understand honestly. It feels like a scam.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: HARD
• Problem: Regular Expression Matching
• Main tags: String, Dynamic Programming, Recursion

What the problem is really asking

This problem is not asking for a full regex engine.

It asks for one very specific kind of full-string match:

• . matches exactly one arbitrary character
• * means “repeat the immediately previous token zero or more times”
• the whole string must match the whole pattern

That last rule is the detail that makes many first attempts fail. A match is not enough if there are leftover characters in either the text or the pattern.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: HARD
• Problem: Sudoku Solver
• Main tags: Array, Hash Table, Backtracking, Matrix

What the problem is really asking

This problem is a constraint satisfaction problem disguised as a puzzle.

The board is almost complete already. The task is to fill each . with a digit so that three rules are always true: