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Interview Problem

This interview question was asked by Google

How would you defend the company against an antitrust case by the Department of Justice?

Just kidding…. here’s the actual Google interview question….

Given an array of elements, return the length of the longest subarray where all its elements are distinct.

Example

Input - [15, 11, 23, 15, 2, 23, 4, 11]

Output - 5, since the longest subarray of distinct elements is [15, 2, 23, 4, 11]

We’ll send a detailed solution with test cases tomorrow, so make sure you move our emails to primary, so you don’t miss them!

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Industry News

United States DOJ has filed a lawsuit against Google

The United States Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Google. The focus of the lawsuit is narrow, and it focuses on Google’s relationship with distributors.

More specifically, how Google is paying distributors for them to set Google as the default search engine.

These are called tying arrangements, and Google has such deals set up with

• Apple, LG, Motorola, Samsung

• AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon

• Mozilla, Opera and UCWeb

Where all these platforms have Google search (and other G-suite apps) set as default.

The Department of Justice claims that these tying arrangements have created a strong disincentive for the distributors to switch default search engines. 

It creates enormous barriers to entry for small startups who want to innovate in search, but can’t afford the multi-billion-dollar contracts that Google has set up. 

Google argues that this lawsuit is deeply flawed, and they say that these are just examples of Google promoting their business, something that every other business does. It’s similar to a cereal brand paying a supermarket to stock the cereal in a prime position on the shelf.

Google asserts that customers choose to use google, as they can easily download their choice of apps or change their default search settings in a matter of seconds. Competition is just a click away.

Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung, passes away at age 78

Lee Kun-Hee is credited with the transformation of Samsung from a maker of televisions and microwaves to the world’s largest manufacturer of smartphones, televisions and memory chips.

He first joined the company in 1966 and worked within various divisions in the company. In 1987, he took over as chairman of the company, after the death of his father (Lee Byung-chul, the founder of Samsung).

From the beginning, he believed the company was overly focused on quantity rather than quality and demanded that executives “change everything except your wife and kids”. He refocused the company on innovation and on quality, even if it meant lower sales.

The shift worked tremendously, as Samsung is now one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. However, Lee Kun-Hee doesn’t come without controversy.

He was convicted twice for corruption and tax evasion, but he was pardoned on both instances. At the time of his death, he was the richest person in South Korea with a net worth of over $21 billion dollars.

Previous Solution

As a refresher, here’s the previous question

Given an N x N matrix, rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. You cannot use any extra space!

Example

Input - [

[1, 2, 3],

[4, 5, 6],

[7, 8, 9]]

Output - [

[7, 4, 1],

[8, 5, 2],

[9, 6, 3]]

Solution

Unfortunately, this question is akin to one of those “brain teaser” questions. Either, you’ve seen the question before and can solve it immediately, or you’re going to spend the next 15 minutes staring at the example test case going “uhhhhhh”.

If you’re in the second scenario, your best bet is to right down a bunch of examples and try and see if you can find a pattern somewhere.

The way you solve this is to 

1. Transpose the Matrix

2. Reverse the rows of the transposed Matrix

That’s it!

Here’s the Python 3 code with testcases.