That's great, but it's really just desiderata about you and your personal situation.
E.g., if a HN'er takes this as advice they're just as likely to be gated by some other interviewer who interprets hedging as a smell.
I believe the posters above are essentially saying: you, the interviewer, can take the 2.5 seconds to ask the follow up, "... and if we're not immediately optimizing for scalability?" Then take that data into account when doing your assessment instead of attempting to optimize based on a single gate.
This is the crux of it. Another interviewer would’ve marked “run on a local machine with a big SSD” - as: this fool doesn’t know enough about distributed systems and just runs toy projects on one machine
Exactly!!! This is an interviewer issue. You should be guiding them. Get the answers for each scenario out of both sets of interviewees and see if they are facile enough to roll with it. Doing a one shot "quiz" is not that revealing....
So give both answers. Itd would happen all the time in college, or in a thesis defense, where one disagrees with the examiner and one finds oneself in a position of "is this guy trying to trick me!"
Give both answers, and explain why the obvious "hard" answer is wrong
Agreed. I don't really understand the mindset of someone who would consider this sort of hedging a smell. A candidate being able to take vague requirements and clearly state different solutions for different scenarios is an excellent candidate. That would be considered a positive signal for myself and pretty much all the interviewers I've worked with.
E.g., if a HN'er takes this as advice they're just as likely to be gated by some other interviewer who interprets hedging as a smell.
I believe the posters above are essentially saying: you, the interviewer, can take the 2.5 seconds to ask the follow up, "... and if we're not immediately optimizing for scalability?" Then take that data into account when doing your assessment instead of attempting to optimize based on a single gate.
Edit: clarification