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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Department Highest Salary
• Topics: Database

What the problem is asking

There are two tables. Employee stores each employee’s name, salary, and department ID, while Department maps each department ID to a display name. The result must contain every employee whose salary is the highest in that employee’s department.

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Why Closeness Changes Giving

Helping a close friend often feels automatic; helping a near stranger can prompt a quick calculation of time, effort and personal cost. Psychologists call this pattern social discounting: people generally become less willing to sacrifice for someone as that person’s emotional or social distance increases. In “How a Tiny Brain Region Guides Generosity,” comparative psychologist Tobias Kalenscher argues that part of the amygdala helps make this response flexible rather than simply turning generosity on or off.

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Techmeme surfaced Hiroko Tabuchi’s August 8 New York Times report, “New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.,” which connects Amazon to a private power project of extraordinary scale. Amazon confirmed that it acquired the GW Ranch site in Pecos County, Texas, and plans to build an AI data center campus there. The campus would initially get its electricity from an on-site natural-gas plant rather than the Texas grid.

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China’s leaders want more marriages and children, yet many of their policies make family life less attractive. The article argues that the Communist Party misreads the country’s demographic crisis as a failure of women to embrace traditional roles. By tolerating misogyny, sidelining women from power and leaving them poorly protected inside marriage, the state is aggravating the problem it hopes to solve.

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ICE will release body camera video only when seen in the agency’s ‘best interests,’ policy says (r/news)

• Koru03: Well at least they’re openly admitting what they already do…
• JohnnyGFX: At this point we’re going to have to abolish ICE and form a new agency to handle immigration enforcement, because ICE is not redeemable.
• adham06: So never, gotcha. Absolute asshats

US unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July as slump in growth continues (r/news)

• Small-Sample3916: How is this unexpected? Job market has been crap for a while.
• TheCarrzilico: A loss being called a slump in growth is an excellent use of doublespeak.
• rabidstoat: Economist expectations were for 80,000 to 95,000 job gains.

What is a “poor man’s meal” that you still eat and genuinely love, no matter how much money you have? (r/AskReddit)

• illustrated_womxn: This is gonna sound weird, but I grew up poor and this is such a nostalgic comfort meal for me. My parents called them “hotdog boats”. Split a hotdog lengthwise, load the top with leftover mashed potatoes, cover in cheddar cheese and bake.
• ginger1009: Beans and rice. I love beans and rice.
• PhotographLess6194: Grilled cheese and Campbell’s tomato soup

What is a real-life “cheat code” you use everyday that everyone should know about? (r/AskReddit)

• Red_Squirrel__: Being nice to people around you. Makes their day better and usually gets you most of the things you want
• Barbaranln: no matter what your problem is always be polite to customer service people
• Annual-Two1507: Leave 10 minutes early, tbh - it kills the annoying panic when traffic, parking, or a delayed train shows up.

What was the reason your friendship ended with someone? (r/AskReddit)

• doesthishurt94: I realized I was just a placeholder for when she couldn’t get anyone else to show up for her.
• Ecstatic-While-2473: No reason, sometimes people just evolve in different directions
• RumorsOFsurF: Cancer took him. RIP Thomas.

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Told the girl I’m seeing I’m prepping for Anthropic and she called me scum of the earth (Blind)

• Sstayn (Google): Short answer, end things. We don’t need to know about your relationship problems and we don’t care. I feel like this is the 100th time I’ve made a comment like this on blind. Stop bringing your personal life to this app. Talk to your friends, write it in your diary, tell your therapist, but here, tell us your tc, talk about your job or aim and call it a day. I can offer you prep material for your Anthropic interview and that’s that. Also tc or gtfo.
• jjr03 (ServiceNow): She’s fine with you working for TikTok but draws the line at Anthropic?!!
• TheBank (Google): She’s a pear, and you want an apple. She’s not being unreasonable, your values just don’t align. Move on.

Hot Take: Getting Laid Off can Actually be a good thing (Blind)

• rezdev (ex-Microsoft): Duh. I’m a millionaire on unemployment getting money I don’t need
• CooBear (Apple): My coworker was fired from Apple. Now works at Anthropic.
• bbWI22 (IBM): Yeah, I definitely went through a lot of anxiety during the process, but I landed a job with 2x the pay working on essentially the same stuff with the same (lack of) wlb. I was a lifer previously and never would have thought to leave otherwise

9 Onsites, 0 Offers — 80+ Interview Rounds In and I’m Mentally Burned Out" - is it over for us? (Blind)

• grand_cany (PayPal): This too shall pass my friend! Keep at it
• VatYZYj (Klaviyo): I mean, there are some people I interview that I cannot imagine ever getting an offer anywhere
• metamate__ (Meta): 9 onsites and 0 offers means skill issue. You need to study more

YouTube’s AI slop detector incorrectly targets Kurzgesagt as other creators fear same fate (r/technology)

• SudhaTheHill: It’s funny because YouTube allows so MANY videos that should literally be exhibit A in court.
• dancrum: It’s painfully obvious which videos are AI on YouTube, but they somehow target a show known for its human-animated videos. Amazing stuff.
• Jmund89: And yet they won’t actually take down accounts that literally post AI garbage

Meta CTO says employees should use AI productivity gains to do more work — not take more time off (r/technology)

• LouBarlowsDisease: Saying that while major tech companies have had layoffs in the name of AI is wild.
• ChodeCookies: I wonder why there is AI backlash…
• kryndude: Pay more for the increased productivity then

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Browsers have accumulated decades of machinery for people: tabs, extensions, synchronized profiles, pixel-perfect rendering, video, and smooth animation. An AI agent usually needs a narrower instrument. It must fetch an unfamiliar page, execute enough of the web platform to expose its structure, interact with it, extract an answer, and then disappear. Carrying an entire Chromium process through that workflow makes every session expensive to start and costly to multiply.

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Happiness in Minutes, Not Months

Programs meant to improve well-being often ask for substantial commitment: daily meditation, long conversations or weeks of gratitude journaling. Those practices can help, but they are hard to maintain when people are already tired or overwhelmed. “Small Acts of Joy Bring Big Gains,” by psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Emiliana Simon-Thomas and biomedical informatics researcher Xuhai “Orson” Xu, asks whether much smaller actions can make a meaningful difference.

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TBPN surfaced the piece in its August 7 episode, “AI Viruses, OpenAI’s First Device, WSJ Mansion Section,” whose opening segment discussed the newly peer-reviewed Science article “Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models.” The Stanford- and Arc Institute-led team used genome language models to propose complete viral genomes, had the DNA synthesized, and recovered 16 viable bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria rather than people.

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Donald Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to pursue enemies is the most visible sign of its politicization. The deeper danger, the article argues, is quieter: the department is losing experienced staff, abandoning important work, overwhelming itself with presidential obsessions and forfeiting the trust of judges. Those changes could weaken American law enforcement long after Trump leaves office.