Month: June 2013
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HS Day 20: Sleeping In (Again)
I seem to have a problem with Thursdays – I woke up around 1pm today and didn’t get in to Hacker School until 2:30. I had planned on actually being social and joining some people for lunch today as well, which I was sad to miss. Nobody in particular, but I’ve been eating a lot…
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A Fix for Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe?
A few days ago, Ben Orlin of mathwithbaddrawings.com posted Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, which described a nested game of Tic-Tac-Toe – In lieu of describing the game again, I’ll direct you to his post if you haven’t already read it. The problem with UTTT is thus: the Orlin Gambit is too strong, and Ben admits it in his later…
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LACE: Latency-Aware Collision Engine in Javascript
Code for this is at https://github.com/ertyseidel/collisions Motivation In a multiplayer game, it is useful to be able to do collision detection on the server, to ensure that your players aren’t cheating or moving incorrectly. When we take latency into account, and the other myriad problems that can come about when we deal with packets, this problem…
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HS Day 19: Nearing Success. Also, Internet.
Started the day on time at Hacker School, in a new morning meeting group: Russel, named after Steve Russell, the inventor of Spacewar!, one of the first videogames. He also did some of the first implementations of LISP, way back in the day. Thomas, Nina, Carl, Tom, and George will be the new faces I…
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Keeping track of your competency as a programmer
Especially for Hacker School students, but really for anyone: If you’re looking for a way to discretely measure your progress through Hacker School, check out the following resources: Programmer Competency Matrix This one especially is a good way to measure yourself. Programmer Competency Matrix rebooted, which is the same thing but extended. Signs you’re a…
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HS Day 18: Debugging and Poker
Spent a while on the phone with Time Warner Cable last night before going to bed. Since rent here is under what I had budgeted, but the apartment doesn’t have internet (I’ve been using my phone), so tomorrow between 2-4, I’m getting 15MBps internet installed. Still well within my budget, and now I can play…
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HS Day 18: Collision Detection
Woke up this morning around 10:30, which is of course when I’m supposed to be at Hacker School. Emailed Nick to tell him that I was going to be late, and started heading into the city. The R seems to be running express these days, so the trip was a lot shorter than usual. I think…
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HS Day 16 & 17: StarCraft
By combining two days into one post, I’ll be able to catch up to today and be back on schedule for blogging! I mentioned in my last post that I fell asleep without setting an alarm (on purpose). It was very nice to sleep in, and I woke up around 1 of my own volition.…
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HS Day 15: The Postal Service
Today started out okay but ended up excellent. I intended to go to a tech talk in DUMBO, which is in north Brooklyn, but ended up sleeping through my alarm. I was supposed to be at Hacker School at noon to run a D&D campaign, but missed my stop on the subway and ended up…
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HS Day 14: Thursday
I’m writing this on Friday, because somehow I managed to not blog yesterday! This will be a short post so I can get on to Friday. Took the R into Manhattan in the morning and arrived at Hacker School right about on time. Gave a presentation on MySQL and relational databases to a group of interested people…