Context: I had a good night’s sleep before returning to this. Then I logged back into Google Foobar to do the challenge. Here is the first look at Google Foobar challenge. These are common commands to interact with Google Foobar.

• ls: list directory contents [dir_name]
• cd: change directory [dir_name]
• cat: print file [file_name]
• edit: open file in editor [file_name]
• ⌘ + S: save the open file [when editor is focused]
• verify: runs tests on solution file [file_name]
• submit: submit final solution file for assessment [file_name]
• request: request new challenge

What is the first Google Foobar challenge?

This is the Level 1. The challenge is simple, isn’t it? (except it’s too long, hehe)

readme.txt:

Commander Lambda’s minions are upset! They’re given the worst jobs on the whole space station, and some of them are starting to complain that even those worst jobs are being allocated unfairly. If you can fix this problem, it’ll prove your chops to Commander Lambda so you can get promoted!

Minions’ tasks are assigned by putting their ID numbers into a list, one time for each day they’ll work that task. As shifts are planned well in advance, the lists for each task will contain up to 99 integers. When a minion is scheduled for the same task too many times, they’ll complain about it until they’re taken off the task completely. Some tasks are worse than others, so the number of scheduled assignments before a minion will refuse to do a task varies depending on the task. You figure you can speed things up by automating the removal of the minions who have been assigned a task too many times before they even get a chance to start complaining.

Write a function called solution(data, n) that takes in a list of less than 100 integers and a number n, and returns that same list but with all of the numbers that occur more than n times removed entirely. The returned list should retain the same ordering as the original list - you don’t want to mix up those carefully-planned shift rotations!

For instance, if data was [5, 10, 15, 10, 7] and n was 1, solution(data, n) would return the list [5, 15, 7] because 10 occurs twice, and thus was removed from the list entirely.

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solution.solution([1, 2, 3], 0)

solution.solution([1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5], 1)
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How did I solve the first Google Foobar challenge?

This challenge is a dime a dozen. I know the purpose of this challenge is just to help you to get used to verifying and submitting the solution. 7 days for this challenge is too generous. Feel free to explore and enjoy the new feeling, admiring the beautiful google site you’ve never seen before. LOL

Ok, let’s start cleaning up the tasks for the minions…

Damn, it failed! fail for what? I don’t know why does it rain fail 🤔

Hmmm, seem it’s not as simple as I thought it would be, I tried looking around, and everyone has the same answer as me but they passed and I failed???

Google Foobar doesn’t tell we what the testcases are. So I tried to steal their testcases by sending the requests to my server with testcases data.

When the solution is run by command verify solution.py, it sends the arguments to my server, So I can check the logs on my server.

Expected logs will look like this: GET /?data=1,2,2,3,3,3,4,5&n=1 But NO, Google Foobar knew we were going to do it, so they blocked outbound requests already.

Stuck in finding a testcases, I don’t know what to do now, just trying to submit again: Boom, It passed. What?… I don’t know, Just the same code as before, but it passed. haha

Then I run submit solution.py to submit the solution. That’s all for the first Google Foobar challenge.

solution.py:

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from collections import Counter


def solution(data, n):
    counted_data = Counter(data)
    return [k for k in data if counted_data[k] <= n]