Interesting approach, thanks. Yeah, I don't mind a question and conversation like that to start things off. But I do think getting into something a little deeper (which you also mentioned) later in the interview is important, too.
The overflow thing would be about computing the median of some sub-range of a sorted array. It is an often-quizzed thing that comes up as an edge case in binary search of a large array, but could apply to anything where you need to select the middle element of a sub-range of an array and the sum of the start/end indices could overflow.
I think the lore is that it was a bug in Java?'s binary search lib decades ago?
Same. I think it's probably easier on a touch screen than with mouse, but I'm stuck on level 10 for now. Maybe it's intentionally frustrating. Need to finish this level to unlock the last number I think, but I guess I've I've sunk enough time into it and will let it rest there.
I'm aware of this to an extent. Do you know of any list of what degree of parallelization to expect out of various components? I know this whole napkin-math thing is mostly futile and the answer should mostly be "go test it", but just curious.
I was interviewing recently and was asked about implementing a web crawler and then were discussing bottlenecks (network fetching the pages, writing the content to disk, CPU usage for stuff like parsing the responses) and parallelism, and I wanted to just say "well, i'd test it to figure out what I was bottlenecked on and then iterate on my solution".