1582 articles
LC 503 Next Greater Element II extends the NGE pattern to circular arrays. Use a monotonic decreasing stack with a double-pass (iterate 2n) and modular indexing to handle wrap-around — a critical adaptation tested as a follow-up at every FAANG company.
LC 1167 Minimum Cost to Connect Sticks applies Huffman coding greedy with a min-heap. Always merge the two cheapest sticks first — a classic greedy pattern with a provable exchange argument that Amazon uses to test priority queue fluency.
LC 763 Partition Labels partitions a string into maximum parts where each letter appears in at most one part. Track the last occurrence of each character and greedily extend the current partition boundary — an elegant O(n) greedy interval merge.
Reconstruct a queue from height-position pairs [h, k] where k is the count of taller or equal people in front. Sort tallest first, then insert each person at their specified position k.
Maximise score jumping through an array where each jump covers 1 to k steps. Combine DP with a monotonic deque to find the sliding window maximum of recent DP values in O(n) time.