How to get 5 highest values from a hashmap?

Question

I have a Hashmap that links a zipcodes stored as keys and population stored as values in a hashmap.

The hashmap contains around 33k entries.

I\'m trying to get t

Answer 1

How would you do this without a computer, with just a piece of paper and a pencil? Pretend you had a stack of index cards that had numbers on them, and it was your job to find the 5 highest numbers. How would you do that? Write down steps that somebody else could follow to achieve the goal, and when you have those steps written out, you'll have an algorithm that you can start thinking about implementing with code.

You say that a single maximum is easy, so do it exactly like you would with a single maximum, but keep track of the five maximums instead. An array of maximums might be helpful here.