leetcode day 29 – seriously? k closest points

I was going to go to bed after the 01 matrix, but I couldn’t resist peeking at the next one.

Given a list of [x,y] coordinates, return the k points closest to the origin, rated “medium”.

I read it over and thought, you just need to compute the distances for each point, sort by distance, and then return the first k items. Am I reading this wrong? Is it harder than this? Am I missing something?

So I read it over again. No, no weird input or output format. No tricky limits or ranges.

Shrug, okay.

// Convenience structure to make it stupid easy.
type point struct {
    x int
    y int
    dist float64
}

func kClosest(points [][]int, k int) [][]int {
    // this seems like I'd sort the points by distance and return the
    // slice containing the right number of items...and yeah, that was it.

    // Create a slice to put the points and distances in.
    distancedPoints := []point{}

    for i := 0; i < len(points); i++ {
        // stash coordinates
        p := point{
            x: points[i][0],
            y: points[i][1],
        }
        // Go's sqrt wants float64, so convert the coords to float64
        // and do the calculation that's even spelled out in the description.
        X := float64(p.x)
        Y := float64(p.y)
        p.dist = math.Sqrt(X * X + Y * Y)
        // All saved together.
        distancedPoints = append(distancedPoints, p)
    }

    // sorted in increasing distance...
    sort.Slice(distancedPoints, 
        func(i, j int) bool {
            return distancedPoints[i].dist < distancedPoints[j].dist
        })

    // Take the first k points. We create and return the new slice
    // because we have to get rid of the distance.
    out := [][]int{}
    for i := 0; i <= k-1; i++ {
        out = append(out, []int{distancedPoints[i].x, distancedPoints[i].y})
    }

    // That was it. Really.
    return out
}

I really don’t get why this is a medium. I did have to check the type on Math.sqrt, and double-check the sort.Slice syntax, but in terms of what to do, this is not a medium.

97th percentile on speed, 28th on memory. I suppose you could sort parallel arrays for memory savings, but why bother? It just makes the code more complex without adding a lot of value.