Isn't that a bit of strange question to ask if you wanted someone to explain hash tables? If I brought in a candidate to interview for hash tables, I would prob

Isn't that a bit of strange question to ask if you wanted someone to explain hash tables? If I brought in a candidate to interview for hash tables, I would probably expect them to already have a base covering hash functions. Otherwise, if you go down this rabbit hole, how deep does your knowledge about the basics have to be? Do you need to know every possible hash function? Their tradeoffs? Their probability distributions? The uses for each? Implementation details?