Being a student at Hacker School, “Monday” is pretty much the best day of the week. Not only do you get to go back to Hacker School, but there’s a whole four days of Hacker School to look forward to. Mondays are also the talks by the residents, accompanied by dinner. Pretty much the best.

I was up late last night, probably until about two a.m., talking with Greta and Evan, and working on Space Adventure. Even so, I fell asleep with the window open, and woke up to a cool breeze and nice sunlight – perfect.

The building company has closed half of the Hacker School floor for reconstruction, so about half of us are in space donated by The Ladders, who appear to be some sort of job searching company. The space is nice – large windows, good outlet coverage, although a bit loud or overly quiet at times. I hung out for about half an hour before Alex and I walked back to the old space to work with Ian and Erik on the Risk AI.

I got a sandwich and black iced tea from Pret – I plan on drinking a lot more tea as soon as I can remember to buy some on my way in to Hacker School.  Worked on Risk interspersed with Space Adventure throughout the day. I have to watch a talk by Peter Norvig before I can talk to him, which I really need to do before he leaves on Thursday to go back to Google.

Paired with Sam and Julie for a while on a python sound generator – turns out an 8-bit sample doesn’t sound as good as a 32-bit sample…

We were getting close on the Risk AI when it was suddenly time to walk to the Tumblr offices, to attend a talk on Natural Language Processing by Peter Norvig. There was pasta and soda and beer, including Blue Sky Black Cherry Cola, which is pretty much my childhood.

Some pics:

The talk was good, and technical – how to do spell check and word splitting given a giant amount of data (google’s n-gram lists). Basically, use probabilities to figure out what the word should be.

Stuck around for the Q&A, then took the N home and called my dad while walking from Barclays Center.

I did manage to leave my power cord at Hacker School, so I’m writing these blog posts with my screen at half brightness and my laptop on power-saver mode. I’m exited to see what happens tomorrow!

From Brooklyn,

–Erty