Q: In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.
[234, 140, 29, 61, 116, 256, 183, 137, 255, 265, 245, 122, 200, 63, 50, 155, 28, 154, 39, 271], k=17
A:
255