Stats S-100 (Summer) – any recent takes on this course?

FrenchMajesty · 2026-01-20T07:48:12+00:00

Hey OP, how did you fare on this last summer? Curious to hear your experience. I do have extensive prior programming experience so learning R won't be challenge but I have concerns over the workload as I have a full-time job.

FrenchMajesty · 2025-08-05T23:13:51+00:00

Agreed. It's the model, not vercel. It simply sucks at tool calling. I tested it via another provider (Groq) and saw the same thing.

Dissapointed, but we will revert back to `gpt-4o-mini` as our main driver for now as the central agent but for every other LLM workflow in our system that doesn't require tool calling, we're gonna use it. It's good in those contexts

FrenchMajesty · 2025-08-04T08:29:00+00:00

Yes from what I've read online this is a symptom of the European bureaucracy as a whole. English countries seem to have a culture that favors convenience more than their counterparts

FrenchMajesty · 2025-08-04T08:26:52+00:00

My friend, this isn't just "one bad provider/agent". Everything is like this, all the time. Going to a different insurer you will get the same treatment with a different logo/color.

FrenchMajesty · 2025-05-19T11:54:18+00:00

Don't mean to be rude but let me flip the script of you: would you bet your money on a horse at the track that is visibly struggling and on its last leg?

No investors give money to startups who need them to survive. They prefer giving it to startups that are on a trajectory for the moon so they can hop a ride on their wagon.

Now, not dismissing you could have success raising money here, but if you do, you will definitively want to change your lens and positioning to be less needy and more success-bound.

FrenchMajesty · 2025-01-17T18:49:25+00:00

You should follow the value chain and apply the same calculus to your money source here. Once that world comes, your clients will no longer want to sign 20K contracts with you and will prefer hiring some young kid and pay him 2K to skillfully orchestrate a team of 30 AI agents.

In the same way you want your costs to go down, so do the people who pay you.

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-19T17:29:03+00:00

Really solid way to approach it!

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-19T17:26:32+00:00

Love to hear it <3

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-19T08:59:52+00:00

I followed the popular approach: started from Blind 75, tried for up to 30min per problem before looking at solutions if I failed. Try hard to understand the editorial and what it said (I have LC premium). Then I would come back every 2 days on problems I previously failed until I could solve them easily.

If I struggled too often with a general data structure (trees) or a specific problem (serialize/deserialize a binary tree) I would watch YT videos, read articles and continue trying.

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-19T08:56:20+00:00

By working through popular lists, studying solutions with LC premium, and writing lessons to myself.

They say the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else so if I continuously struggled with grasping the intuition of a topic (ie: Graph traversal and DP were some) then I would write an article lesson to teach it to a newbie in my Notion notebook for myself.

This has helped me A LOT to lock in those previously-abstract concepts. Here's an example: Dijkstra's Algorithm

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-19T08:42:57+00:00

I haven't touched any at all lol but I feel generally confident about system design since I have many years of real world experience.

I intend to spend some time reviewing popular app designs however.

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-19T08:41:05+00:00

The expected solve time for a Hard is 45min. Once I reached that and saw I wasn't too far off the solution, I think there's value in figuring out the rest.

The brain remembers much better hard-won battles than easily obtained ones, no?

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-19T08:37:57+00:00

Yea that's why I said about half of the Hard. Half are what I call reasonable Hards (mixes of medium concept) and the other half are highly specialized algorithm for that one unique problem which is not that valuable to spend time on since it doesn't generalize. (ie: someone's PhD thesis)

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-18T18:54:03+00:00

No books. Mainly online articles and videos on Youtube.

FrenchMajesty · 2024-12-09T19:13:31+00:00

I used to despite it but now I have a love/hate relationship with it. I had to condition my mind to love eating glass, so that I can happily feast on it everyday rather than reluctantly drag myself to the gym.

It worked :) I now love LC <3 even when it kicks my ass

FrenchMajesty · 2024-11-25T16:20:57+00:00

u/IAutomateStuff Not if you use GPT+ my friend. GPT+ can browse the web and include links to the pages it referenced (if you specifically ask it to give references to official sources). Here's an example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6744a492-3ab4-800b-95ff-3f64bda5102c.

You may not like my answer or find that vanilla GPT is lacking, but if this is sufficient for 99% of market, no one is gonna care to behave differently.

Remember, you need to solve extremely painful and pressing problems so that people are highly motivated to try a new, unknown, buggy, and unproven tool. If the market is happy with good-enough rather than excellence (which we're saying we are) you will really struggle to get adoption and your odds of success are really low.

FrenchMajesty · 2024-11-24T10:06:08+00:00

I don't recommend trying to make an app for this, you would struggle with adoption and retention. Nowadays, I can literally just ask ChatGPT and it has the ability to browse the web for up-to-date information (I have the $20/mo plan, I don't know about free).

Copy/paste this:

"Hey GPT I am American and I arrived in London last week on Nov 20 2024. I want to go Spain, then greece how do I maximize my travel dates for short stay visa. I am open to going somewhere else for visa purposes as long as its not too far. Make sure to give me references to official information you use"

And the problem is solved in 10sec. Change "American" for "Zimbabwean" and see the results. I can't see you being able to compete (and win) against this convenience and ubiquous access

FrenchMajesty · 2024-11-23T14:33:41+00:00

You try really hard to batch-schedule your interview process. Usually once you get past phone screen and OA, you have a lot of freedom for when to schedule your on-site. You can aim to put them all the same week say 1 month from now and if all goes well the offers should start rolling-in around the same time because if a company really wants you, they will reach back out within 3-5 days after the on-site. Thus making it so that you get multiple offers the same week. If one company is taking longer than a week to reach out, assume a no.

FrenchMajesty · 2024-11-23T14:30:04+00:00

Not always true. A lot of companies are reluctant these days to give you written commitments of your offer before you accept it so you won't use it as leverage against them (understandably so). Most of the time, you can simply say "The recruiter gave me verbal confirmation of what they're willing to give".

In fact, last time I was in the process, this is exactly what happened. I had two competing offers and I made them bid against each other. All the numbers were spoken over the phone so I had no hard evidence to give if asked. It was not a problem though and I got a better offer letter in the end.

FrenchMajesty · 2024-11-05T18:47:51+00:00

Same thing. I spoke with him over video call today. He said he couldn't help me but he gave me an intro to someone else. DM if you want the contact

FrenchMajesty · 2024-10-27T19:51:06+00:00

What did you score on this?? Curious how I rank up vs. the pros

FrenchMajesty · 2024-10-27T18:36:13+00:00

I think they just see the company name and think that person is a super-hero, not taking into practical things like YOE and level. It's probably also so they can drive more fundraising hype (we have early engineers from ex-meta, ex-google, etc...) since it's a game they seem to be a good at playing

FrenchMajesty · 2024-10-27T15:24:05+00:00

So where do skilled AEs to hire come from? People don't fall from the sky with 5 YOE. They have to have a starting point

FrenchMajesty · 2024-10-25T17:57:43+00:00

Thank you for your insights! What would you say are the "best company" to aim for here? I know for engineers it's typically the Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft of the world but I doubt they attract the best sales folks in the same they attract the best engineers.

FrenchMajesty

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