Highest Product of 3 (Practice Interview Question)

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Given a list of integers, find the highest product you can get from three of the integers.

The input list_of_ints will always have at least three integers.

Gotchas

Does your function work with negative numbers? If list_of_ints is $[-10, -10, 1, 3, 2]$ we should return $300$ (which we get by taking $-10 * -10 * 3$ ).

We can do this in $O(n)$ time and $O(1)$ space.

Breakdown

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Where do I enter my password?

Actually, we don't support password-based login. Never have. Just the OAuth methods above. Why?

It's easy and quick. No "reset password" flow. No password to forget.
It lets us avoid storing passwords that hackers could access and use to try to log into our users' email or bank accounts.
It makes it harder for one person to share a paid Interview Cake account with multiple people.

Solution

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Where do I enter my password?

Actually, we don't support password-based login. Never have. Just the OAuth methods above. Why?

It's easy and quick. No "reset password" flow. No password to forget.
It lets us avoid storing passwords that hackers could access and use to try to log into our users' email or bank accounts.
It makes it harder for one person to share a paid Interview Cake account with multiple people.

Complexity

$O(n)$ time and $O(1)$ additional space.

Bonus

What if we wanted the highest product of 4 items?
What if we wanted the highest product of $k$ items?
If our highest product is really big, it could overflow. ↴ How should we protect against this?

What We Learned

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Where do I enter my password?

Actually, we don't support password-based login. Never have. Just the OAuth methods above. Why?

It's easy and quick. No "reset password" flow. No password to forget.
It lets us avoid storing passwords that hackers could access and use to try to log into our users' email or bank accounts.
It makes it harder for one person to share a paid Interview Cake account with multiple people.

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You only have 3 free questions left (including this one).

Gotchas

Breakdown

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Solution

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Complexity

Bonus

What We Learned

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