🧠 A Software Engineering Interview Question Worth Asking: Computing the Median
Although it’s an opinion piece rather than a news article, it provides practical insights into designing interview questions that reveal a candidate’s engineering thought process.
Kris Shamloo explains why implementing a median function makes an effective technical interview exercise. Beyond assessing core programming skills, it naturally leads to discussions about API design, sorting, mutability, edge cases, testing, statistics, and algorithm selection. The article covers common pitfalls such as off-by-one errors and handling even versus odd-length arrays, concludes with a Python implementation, and briefly discusses alternatives like Quickselect.
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🚀 Grok 4.5 Raises the Bar for Coding and AI Agents
Because this is a vendor announcement, its performance claims should be considered alongside independent benchmark evaluations as they become available.
xAI introduced Grok 4.5, positioning it as its most capable model for software development, agentic workflows, and technical knowledge tasks. The announcement highlights benchmark performance, large-scale training infrastructure, improved token efficiency, competitive API pricing, integrations with Grok Build, Cursor, and productivity tools, and states that EU availability is expected in mid-July.
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🔧 FTC Settlement Grants John Deere Owners the Right to Repair
The agreement marks another major step for the right-to-repair movement, extending its impact beyond consumer electronics into agricultural machinery.
The FTC and attorneys general from five U.S. states reached a settlement with Deere & Co. requiring the company to provide diagnostic and repair tools to equipment owners and independent repair shops. The agreement resolves an antitrust case alleging unfair repair restrictions, prohibits retaliation against independent repair providers, establishes 10 years of compliance oversight, and requires Deere to pay $1 million toward enforcement costs.
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