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Comment by trevor-e | Hacker News Reader

The article is really well written and has amazing design, but honestly does not seem very helpful. Isn't most of this learned in the first year of university? Who is the target audience in that case? Given the title, I hoped to learn some lesser used data structures rather than what a pointer is. With that said, I do look forward to future articles!

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Author here :) Thanks for the note--this is interesting.

Target audience is folks who never learned this stuff, or learned it but forgot it. Interesting to hear you had a different assumption from the title.

If you want something trickier, check these ones out:

https://www.interviewcake.com/question/stock-price

https://www.interviewcake.com/question/swift/find-duplicate-...

> Target audience is folks who never learned this stuff,

But then why would they be interviewing for a coding job anyways? Shouldn't a coder know what's a RAM, and that it's different from secondary storage??

I'm thinking a lot about folks who come out of coding "boot camps." Those folks for the most part have /heard/ of "RAM" and "disc," but might not know why they both exist and what each one does.

I would not want to hire anyone who doesn't have _some_ idea of what these things are, and how they work.

Then presumably you're able to appreciate the value in someone explaining it to them in a blog post.

I suggest that you market the series in a different way, perhaps "An Introduction to Data Structures", or something along those lines. Out of all the bullets in your outline you really only cover lists (random access, linked) and hash tables as actual data structures. That's partly why I expected a totally different article based on the title.

You could argue that the others are technically data structures, but I'm willing to bet most people will assume your standard list, map, heap, trie, tree, graph, etc. It's kind of like saying "Calculus for AP tests" and then only covering algebra up to Riemann sums.

Thanks for the links, I'll give them both a shot.

edit: just remembered that Calculus isn't on the SAT :)

Iiiiinteresting.

Definitely agree that the first half of the article isn't exactly data structures yet.

But I just struggle with calling something "An inroduction to X." Have you ever heard "an introduction" and thought "oh, that's what I need!" I picture a super-dry textbook. Or one of those YouTube videos that promises to teach you how to do a thing but starts off with the person saying, "Now, before we get started..." and talks about nothing for 5 minutes before actually teaching you the thing.

I really enjoyed "Find a duplicate, Space Edition™", unfortunately I needed the last hint before finding a solution that doesn't modify the original array.

Suggestion: Don't show hints for steps I already skipped. I stopped at "We can do this without destroying the input.", but had to scroll through all the hints before reaching the one I needed.

Good idea!

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