Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews

blog.bytebytego.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 82 posts

Re: Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews

#31

Post by jtchang »

First time I saw geohashing. Can't this result in some lopsided squares? The way it is described has a standard rectangle projection. But those are inaccurate due to the earth being spherical. So the areas on top and bottom will be much larger.

To be fair I've heard of most of these in my career but they are fairly specialized. If you are conducting a system design interview and expecting the candidate to know one of these I'd suspect there is a bit of bias there (unless that is their area of study).

Re: Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews

#35

Post by pcthrowaway »

earth2mars wrote: post #27

author wasted some stars, not an optimal algorithm :). He defined only 1, 3 and 5. he could simply used 3 stars

The difference between 1 star and 5 stars on a 5-star scale is greater than the difference between 1 and 3 on a 3-star scale

Re: Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews

#36

Post by naniwaduni »

patrickthebold wrote: post #25
madelyn wrote: post #5

I feel that if more interviews involved this sort of algorithm instead of the ultra-niche / only situationally useful, there would be way less opposition and much more signal. At work, I have written and then used a bunch of these in production, just for the narrow scope of things I work on. Might be indicative of me being in a bubble though. Please, ask me to make a bloom filter or show how consistent hashing enable…

TBH reversing a string is probably harder than the others if you consider how strange unicode is.

It's less that it's "hard" and more that it's generally not a sensible operation unless performed on known well-restricted domain (or if you're up to flipping an image of rendered text, I guess).

Re: Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews

#37

Post by bigbillheck »

jtchang wrote: post #31

First time I saw geohashing. Can't this result in some lopsided squares? The way it is described has a standard rectangle projection. But those are inaccurate due to the earth being spherical. So the areas on top and bottom will be much larger. To be fair I've heard of most of these in my career but they are fairly specialized. If you are conducting a system design interview and expecting the candidate to know one of…

> So the areas on top and bottom will be much larger.

Should be fine in practice, not much demand there.

Re: Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews

#38

Post by sitkack »

sulam wrote: post #26

I would add CRDTs to your list. They are a tool that, when they're applicable, are almost magical. Overview link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...

You could include CRDTs and operational transform under the same section.

Re: Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews

#40

Post by nicwolff »

sulam wrote: post #26

I would add CRDTs to your list. They are a tool that, when they're applicable, are almost magical. Overview link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...

They have OTs in last place, maybe CRDTs would have been next...
Post reply on HN