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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Managers with at Least 5 Direct Reports
• Topics: Database

Problem gist

The Employee table stores each employee’s ID, name, department, and manager ID. The task is to return the names of employees who manage at least five other employees directly.

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A moving-day question becomes geometry

A couch stuck at a hallway corner is an ordinary frustration. Strip away the furniture, gravity and extra dimensions, however, and it becomes a problem that resisted mathematicians for almost six decades: what is the largest rigid two-dimensional shape that can pass around a right-angle bend in a corridor one unit wide?

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Techmeme surfaced OpenAI’s original September 8 publication claiming a result that, if it survives expert review, would close one of mathematics’ six remaining Millennium Prize problems. The announcement is remarkable for two reasons at once: a large AI-agent system appears to have produced a new proof at the frontier of mathematics, and the race to publish it has already raised difficult questions about priority, private model interactions, and how credit should work when human ideas and industrial-scale computation converge.

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The toll castle of Pfalzgrafenstein once exploited a narrow stretch of the Rhine. Its rulers could lower chains across the river, stop passing ships and charge for access to a waterway they had done nothing to create. That arrangement is an old illustration of economic rent: income extracted by making a cheap or abundant resource artificially scarce.

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Amazon Cargo Boeing 767 Crashes At Miami International Airport (r/news)

• firefaery: Hope the folks that were on that plane are okay
• DarkBomberX: If the photos are anything to go by, hopefully the crew is okay. Looks like the cockpit is intact.
• Grown-Ass-Weeb: 24FlightRadar is showing a lot of planes being diverted to Ft Lauderdale, Tampa, and Orlando. And some being routed to the Dominican Republic or returning to where they came from in South America. I’d hate to be the ATC workers right now.

US carrier Abraham Lincoln departs Thailand after respite visit (r/news)

• Meta2048: I know a couple people in Pattaya where they docked and they said there wasn’t a very noticable increase in tourists. They saw some small groups (3-5 people) of likely sailors wandering around but nothing crazy.
• southendgirl: After 250 days, they only got 5 days in port??? Couldn’t they get 10 days since their carrier just broke the record?
• Cmd3055: All these people taking pictures of the aircraft carrier somehow made me think of what it might have been like to watch the last Roman legions march by as they were leaving Britain.

What’s a common ingredient that completely ruins a dish for you, no matter how small the amount? (r/AskReddit)

• sailphish: Maybe not super common, but lavender. I’ve never had something with lavender that wouldn’t have been better without the lavender. I feel like they put it in deserts to be fancy, but the food just ends up smelling like laundry detergent.
• BrianKronberg: Shell. Sorry Maryland, getting shell in my crab cakes does not prove it’s real, it proves laziness in the kitchen.
• papasmurf303: Anything that touched a silicone utensil that’s been through the dishwasher. Apparently I’m one of the lucky few who has the receptors for it, and it makes anything taste like pure dish soap was added to it.

For the men with more life experience, what’s one lesson you learned the hard way that every young man should know? (r/AskReddit)

• Artofxian: People either like you or they don’t. You can’t make people like you the way you like them
• Specialist_Gas_8984: Meaningful male friendships get increasingly harder to make as you get older. Don’t take your existing ones for granted, invest in them, make time for each other, even as life gets increasingly busy and pulls you in different directions.
• Hogjocky62: Never respond to a major problem instantly. Think about it for hours or days and respond firmly with a steadfast plan. Never make large financial decisions based on emotion! Walk out of the negotiations at least twice before signing!

What animated movie is 10/10? (r/AskReddit)

• Sorry-East-4869: The iron Giant
• expecto_my_scrotum: Emperor’s New Groove
• stag-ink: Princess Mononoke

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Anthropic TC expectation (Blind)

• MasalaPi (Google): Why not ask for 30M+?
• DumbPM (Amazon): Of course you can. But you may not. Congrats and FU!
• beepboop32 (Google): They have fixed comp for each level/roles, no negotiation. Strong L6 RS is 2-3M.

Are Microsoft titles severely inflated? (Blind)

• failmode (Microsoft): I was going to say the other way around. We import dipshits from places like Meta and give them a partner title (or higher) and they just don’t understand what it means to build a platform.
• Yaamraj (Microsoft): I jumped from L62 to E5 so meta isn’t any better wrt title inflation. I jumped back from E5 to L65 in 2 years and now am a L66. I will try for E7 and above now on It’s a funny game
• 他强让他强 (Microsoft): You wish. Partner is the new senior, principal is the new sde2. Yes, in many orgs, giving higher title is deliberate, in exchange for stagnated tc increase.

My wife hasn’t slept with me since she was laid off from Meta (Blind)

• MrWolf 🐺 (Stripe): Man up buddy. Don’t expect anything right now. Give her warmth, safety and comfort. Go out of your way, to cheer her up… whether it involves flowers, date dinner, some gift … anything!!!
• minokotok: About 2-3 month layoff shock is normal. People differ - some instantly get into the maniac phase : grooming like crazy, interviewing, happy and energetic. Others feel down and absolutely devastated. Obviously, maniac version is more fun. All will pass.
• worstever (Microsoft): When my husband laid off last year, he was slowly losing his mind in the whirlwind of interviews and rejections. We actually started doing a thing we called “Small Town Saturdays” where we would go to a new small town we hadn’t been to before, grab breakfast at a local diner, and then roam whatever thrift stores, antique stores, and book stores we could find. Basically, we found that getting him out of the house and routine of constant interviews and rejections for at least 1 day a week was KEY. But he also opened up more about what he was feeling during those trips, which helped us connect better emotionally.

LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices (r/technology)

• Worth_Championship30: Isn’t that considered wire tapping?
• No_Hedgehog1864: lg tv is always the highest count on my adguard blocked dns request
• Knff: I wonder if these findings are true for European models as well. The EU doesnt fuck around when it comes to privacy laws.

Former Capcom Employee Says Western Studios Spend Too Much Time On Jira (r/technology)

• eloAbuse: Every developer on earth just read that headline and felt seen.
• Anelissa-Boden: Jira catching strays from every industry at this point
• crusoe: Half the time is wasted because it’s so goddamn slow

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The usual way to improve a coding agent is to give every task a stronger model. That raises quality, but it also spends frontier-model compute on routine work and still leaves the model without an independent reviewer when the task would benefit from one. Project HydraFusion takes a systems approach instead: decide at runtime not only which model should work, but which small workflow of models is worth paying for.

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A forecast built from one number

Most predictions of human extinction begin with a threat: nuclear war, an asteroid, ecological collapse or some other physical mechanism. The “doomsday argument” begins somewhere stranger. It uses probability and a single estimate—that about 117 billion humans have been born—to suggest that humanity may be much nearer the end of its history than the beginning.

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Techmeme surfaced OpenAI’s September 6 report, “Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI.” The company says it has reached an “automated research intern” milestone: its coding agents can now carry out some well-defined research tasks that would take a skilled person several days, provided a human chooses the task and supervises the work.

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The familiar warning that the stock market is not the real economy now has a second layer: benchmark indices are no longer good portraits of the stock markets they supposedly represent. A handful of enormous companies, many tied to the artificial-intelligence investment boom, increasingly determine the movements of indices containing hundreds or thousands of stocks. The result is that diversified-looking portfolios can carry far more concentrated and volatile risks than their labels suggest.