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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   91 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for December 30, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Whenever I do coding interview training I have to brush up on min heaps and try to think of whenever I would could have used them and the answer is: never.

Deques on the other hand, maybe 7 times in the last 30 years. But it's never been performance critical enough to matter.

You'll see minheaps a bit under Dijkstra's algorithm in the networking and -adjacent spheres, but it's so well-known as the Default Solution for those use cases you're either going to have it under several layers of abstraction, or you're really doing something weird. I've had to hand-build it once, and I don't think the end product ever actually hit anywhere outside of a toy environment.

Oh. Okay I've used a min heap once in my life in that case. I somehow forgot. Probably because it was a pairing heap whereas all of the coding interviews that ask you to hand write one want to see an array based binary heap.

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