Most common phone interview question at Google

Re:Most common phone interview question at Google by chrisseaton on Saturday May 02, 2020 @02:54PM (#23054010)

> This means is a magnitude faster than the previous one!

Is this right? It's a quadratic not an order of magnitude difference isn't it? And can you be an order of magnitude faster in an O notation expression anyway? Isn't an order of magnitude a coefficient? Don't we drop coefficients in O notation?

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Re:Most common phone interview question at Google by asdginioubnou on Saturday May 02, 2020 @03:07PM (#23054088)

It's definitely wrong. A lot of people use "order of magnitude" to just mean "a lot".

I always use the precise meaning. It might be better for me to say "factor of ten" rather than "order of magnitude" if other people don't always use the precise meaning.

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Re:Most common phone interview question at Google by fancyfredbot on Saturday May 02, 2020 @03:06PM (#23054086)

It's not wrong! For some value of N it is an order of magnitude faster. It's just a bit misleading.

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Re:Most common phone interview question at Google by eesmith on Saturday May 02, 2020 @03:12PM (#23054131)

For another value of N it's three orders of magnitude faster.

In the example case where s[0] == s[1], it might be an order of magnitude slower, if there's much object initialization for the lookup table.

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Re:Most common phone interview question at Google by stellalo on Saturday May 02, 2020 @03:05PM (#23054079)

> Is this right?

It's not right, indeed

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