CodingHardcod-g222

Subject Stream processingLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Distributed systems · Algorithms & data structures interviewsIndustries Software development

Question

Given a stream of string items, return the k most frequent items. Order the result by frequency descending; break ties by the item string ascending (lexicographic). Return a list of [item, count] pairs of length min(k, number of distinct items). If k <= 0 return an empty list. The stream may be empty.

Implement

top_k_frequent(items: list[str], k: int) → list

Examples

in[["a","b","a","c","b","a"],2]out[["a",3],["b",2]]

What a strong answer looks like

State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.

Learn the concepts

Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.