I started today off by sleeping in again, but, being the second Wednesday of the month, it’s Irresponsible Wednesday so that was okay. Matt very kindly messaged me to make sure I was okay. I arrived at Hacker School around 2:30 pm. Only five hours late…

I worked with Erik, Alex, and Matt on the Risk AI for a few hours – it’s working now, and by working I mean that we can get a couple of the AIs hooked up to a server, only to have them quickly crash because we built them without having a test platform. We got lunch at Getting Hungry, and chatted about Erik’s startup – Snowball. (Yeah, they’re website doesn’t say much).

We’re aiming to be done by presentation time tomorrow. I’m hopeful but not super optimistic. I’ll be devoting most of my time tomorrow to that.

After Hacker School was over at 6:30, I caught the 1 and rode it two stops south to a place called the Brandy Library, which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like – a bookstore turned bar/lounge with hundreds of different kinds of alcohol.

My mom’s friend from graduate school, Sam Medley, was there doing a tasting for his Kentucky Bourbon – Old Medley and Wathen’s Single Barrel aged. It’s delicious and very smooth. Sam was giving a sales pitch when I arrived, and kept looking at me like, where do I know him from? I introduced myself and he remembered me instantly – I did some web work for him a while ago. We chatted for a bit, and I may have got some consulting work with the person who was helping Sam with the tastings!

Brandy Library. Sam is in the left back corner.

I left after a bit so I didn’t get in the way of his sales pitches, but I the meeting was enjoyable (and great networking!).

Back to Hacker School for a bit afterward – I’m stuck on some collision detection for Space Adventure, so I’m hoping to pair with Mary on that tomorrow. I’ve updated the working copy at http://handprintgames.com. Basically it’s really hard to tell which direction you’re colliding with something in, especially on the corners.

Rode the train home, chatted with Greta and my mom, surfed the internet, sent some emails, and wrote this post.

I made an interesting observation while on the phone with my mom. I said, “I’m really excited for Hacker School to be over. Not because I want it to be over, but because I’m excited to be that much better at programming.”

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

I started out today pretty tired, but made it to Hacker School on time. I spent the day over at the old location after check-in since that’s where the Risk AI people were working. As usual, the last 10% is taking 90% of the time – we’re very close on many fronts, but it’s probably going to take us at least until the end of the week to finalize everything. I also made some excellent progress on my Space Adventure game – I’ve updated the work in progress on http://handprintgames.com. It needs a bit of help in the UX department, but I’m happy with how it’s coming along. (Hit “3” then “1” on the screen where you’re choosing the attributes, etc. if you can’t get past that). Still, of course, a work in progress.

Lunch with Peter Norvig and a couple of Hacker Schoolers including Joy, Martin, Matt, and Erik today – Dos Toros Burritos in the park. We mostly spent the time asking Peter questions about programming and stuff. He agreed that Python is a better language for AI than  Lisp, which, he says, was mainly chosen for AI because it was the most advanced language at the time, which allowed users to focus on the hard problems rather than implementing data structures.

When we got back, I worked a bit on projects, especially pairing with Mary, a facilitator, who wrote the Javascript engine that I’m using for Space Adventure.

I signed up for a 30-minute time slot with Peter, and asked him specifically about my school idea. I was pretty awkward about it, but he had some good things to say. I really just wanted his opinion on it, but I didn’t explain it very well. I’m still happy with the advice he had – basically what I already knew, but I think that’s good since it means I’m on the right track. The most interesting thing he had to say was that schools and online courses need to provide the ability for students to practice on their own, exposure to a community, and motivation to continue, either internally or externally.

He also wished me good luck and told me to keep him posted about it (yay!)

I think a lot of the people at Hacker School are a bit starstruck by him, which makes just hanging out and coding a bit awkward. I know tomorrow’s “office hours” list already has a backlog.

After a bit of work with Matt on a “really dumb” test AI for the Risk game, I took the 1 train to the Lincoln Center, where I entered the David H. Koch theater (yeah that Koch) and picked up my tickets for “Monkey: Journey to the West”. I grabbed some pics on the way in:

The entrance to the theater.

People milling around beforehand.

The upper floor of the theater.

I had seen an ad for the performance a few weeks ago and bought tickets to the Tuesday night performance, since I figured I would have the best chance of getting good seats – and I did – third floor, fourth row, right in the middle. I had a very nice, clear view of the stage.

The performance itself was very well executed. It was the story of Xi You Ji – Journey to the West, an ancient Chinese tale about a group of characters who travel to India to retrieve some sutras – which stars a young, innocent Buddhist priest named Tripitaka, and a mischievous monkey king named Sun Wu Kong (“Monkey who is aware of emptiness”).

The producers were the same as The Gorillaz, which was what prompted me to go in the first place – the music was a blend of ancient Chinese instruments and modern synth pop, and the characters were all extraordinary acrobats – lots of jumping, flips, rope climbing, and aerial silks. The costuming was very well done, and the scene changes were covered by animation from the graphics side of Gorillaz.

The performance wasn’t perfect – there were a few slips, goofs, and underdone acting, but the overall impression was excellent, the humor was well done, and the visuals were stunning. The final act – featuring a massive statue of Buddha, was extremely well executed.

Also: the entire thing was in Chinese, with English subtitles projected above. (supertitles?)

Returned home after stopping at Hacker School to pick up my laptop (they were watching Firefly). Picked up a 5-pack of beer, a bottle of hot sauce, and some green tea on my way home at 5th ave market.

Played SC2 with Ian and now it’s bedtime.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

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:

Tumblring

Eating Dinner @ Tumblr. From left to right: Mary, ?, Nina, Ian.

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

Imogen moved out of the apartment today, meaning that I am taking over her room. It’s a lot larger, and has two large windows that face what I assume to be south – I can see the Statue of Liberty off in the distance out of one, and the tail end of Manhattan out the other. It’s also not a shared room, which is nice in that I don’t have to worry about bothering a roommate when I’m up late at night.

I woke up just after noon and immediately began moving my stuff down the hall. I realized I was hungry after about an hour of that, and grabbed a vegetarian sandwich from Zito’s Sandwich shop. The guy who works there always puts on music from my past – lots of Blink 182, Green Day, etc. – Ought’s punk-pop. I had fun chatting with him just a bit while waiting for my sandwich. He’s 40, Italian, and very good-natured.

After Zito’s, it was back to work at the room. I don’t have much stuff here – just over a suitcase and a carryon’s worth, but I wanted to reorganize and search through it for my Raspberry Pi, which I’ve sadly given up on finding while I’m out here. It’ll probably turn up in Colorado when I move back, which is all the same to me; I don’t have a keyboard, monitor, or mouse for it out here.

I stopped by a store called Scardey Kat, which is a little shop that sells interesting things and is going out of business. Since they were having a 25% off sale, I stopped in and ended up buying some things – a new wallet, namely. My old one is holding up well, but as a trifold, it’s a bit thick for front-pocket wear, which I’ve taken to while in the city. More to stop worrying about pick-pockets than actually dissuade them.

I started working on Space Explore, which you can see a completely unfinished, and in fact barely started, version of at http://handprintgames.com. There’s not much to do yet – I think this is a fun project though and I’m interested to see how far I get before abandoning it. I’ve kind of accepted that fate for this project, and I’m taking it as an exploration in Javascript large-project structure more than anything. I chatted with Evan a bit right before bed about it, and we reminisced about how much we learned about text display from Terminal_.

Dinner was at Lotus, which is the Thai/Chinese place across the street. I have a standard fare there – a “classic” sandwich and a honey green tea bubble tea. Delicious, and a bit pricey.

Levi, Ian, and Broghanne came into my room (the one with A/C) and we played through a bit of Um – the space version. It was pretty good, Broghanne was new to TTRPG, so she was a bit tentative to play along, but Levi and Ian really got into it.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

Alice posted to the Hacker School mailing list last night about needing a windows computer to create a boot disk to restore her Windows 8 computer, which had died. I responded (or, actually, had Matt respond for me since we were drinking beer together and he was the one with his phone open) and said I would be in by 2pm.

So in by 2pm I was. Pretty much on the dot. I ended up getting about 13 hours of sleep last night, minus an hour or so that I was awake around 3am.

It was around 100 degrees Fahrenheit today in NYC, or, at least 90. Hacker School is well air-conditioned, as was my room last night – Ian, our guest for a few weeks, ended up sleeping on the floor in my room, since it’s the only one in the house with A/C. He was going to spend the night in the living room, but I offered him space on our floor. He declined at first, but I invited him to enter the room for a second, where it was a good 20 degrees cooler than the rest of the apartment. So he moved in for the night.

Since I lent Alice my laptop at Hacker School, I spent the afternoon talking with Martin and Alex about my idea for a school – which I’m planning on posting a lot about soon, so I won’t go into detail here. Alex and I ended up getting pretty metaphysical, whereas Martin and I chatted mainly about educational differences between here and his home country of Sweden.

I worked on the Risk AI for a bit once I had my computer back, and pushed some good commits. It’s coming along and I’m optimistic about having it done by Monday night.

Walked along a neat little restaurant-filled segment of Manhattan with Martin and chatted about programming while searching for a place to get dinner to-go. We settled on a place that did (Greek?) food, which was tasty, but we forgot to get the sauces so it was a little bland.

Took the train home, finally with my Kindle charged, which made the trip more enjoyable and productive (less Nethack).

It’s still a bajillion degrees here but I guess that’s NYC in the summer.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

Arrived at Hacker School around 10am, which gave me some time to surf the internet and work on the Risk AI server before meeting up with Alisa, Ian, Martin, and Matt for Dungeons and Dragons. I DMmed a short adventure in which the heroes, upon retrieving the treasure from a temple, are found by a group of Orcs who are after the same treasure. The Orcs were quickly defeated, but the troll that was chasing the Orcs took nearly all of the party’s resources to defeat, knocking two of them below zero HP (death is at -10). Afterward, we sat around for a while and worked on transferring our makeshift character sheets to real ones. We’re playing much more official version 3.5 now, instead of me making most of it up as we go along.

Afterward, around probably 7pm, Matt and I took the subway to Bohemian Hall Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, NY. We met up with some of Matt’s friends there (he’s from Astoria), but spent pretty much the entire time talking about Hacker School and ignoring his friends. I had two beers and some Klobasa, which was a beer too many for me, and I took the subway home and pretty much passed out on my bed at about 10:30. Yes I am that much of a lightweight, but I also think I hadn’t eaten enough that day.

I also think Matt and I could see (and hear) a police (shoot-out?) from the subway station in Astoria, but I can’t find anything about it on the news. Kinda scary?

From Manhattan,

–Erty

I started off my Fourth of July by sleeping in until 3pm. It seems that twelve hours is the amount of time I sleep naturally if I don’t set an alarm, which is okay with me – the only problem being that it’s hard to stay on a consistent schedule with a non-24-hour sleeping/not sleeping cycle. This is why I end up being nocturnal.

Pretty much everywhere was closed and I didn’t particularly feel like cooking, so I wandered across the street to the Thai place and got a sandwich and a bubble tea. Some Hacker Schoolers mentioned a meetup in Prospect Park, which is uphill from my apartment by just a few blocks, so I started walking. Not two blocks away from my apartment, I found a 2″ stack of comic books (spiderman, batman, x-men, etc.) on the ground on the sidewalk, obviously placed there for someone to take. There weren’t any rare or old episodes, but it seemed like a neat find so I took them back to my apartment, buzzing upstairs and getting Levi to let me in because my hands were full.

I tried my walk to Prospect Park again, and it was actually a 20-or-so minute walk. Still, the weather was very nice (in the shade) and I drank my bubble tea along the walk. What I didn’t realize is that Prospect Park is huge. I wandered for 10 minutes before realizing that I was going in the wrong direction, and then turned around and walked a half hour before finding Richard and his (Girlfriend?) sitting on the grass between baseball fields 1 and 2. We sat and chatted for a long while, and Ian, Martin, and Alex eventually joined us. All in all, we spent probably four hours sitting and chatting about various topics. It was incredibly nice out, and despite a few small, non-biting ants and beetles, there were no bugs or other annoyances.

At sundown, we walked through the throngs of people grilling near the edge of the park, where grilling is permitted, and I hopped on the F to 4th Av/9th st, which is close to my apartment. I bought some beer and ginger ale on the way home at a small market, and went up on the roof to see if I could see any fireworks. The neighbors from two apartments over were also on their roof, and they invited me over, so I hopped over (the roofs are connected), and hung out with them for a while. I met one guy, Dan, who worked in Finance, and we chatted for a bit – there were probably a dozen of the neighbors, in their mid to late twenties.

The beer I got (Shock Top Apple Something) was really awful and I’m probably just going to dump most of it, which is a shame. It was pretty much halfway between a apple cider and a beer, except that the apple flavor was that terrible fake apple flavor like in laffy taffy. Ick.

There were some good fireworks around the apartment – no professional shows except way off in the distance, but plenty of small, probably illegal shows. I hung out with the neighbors for probably an hour and a half before heading back inside, where I surfed the internet for a while before heading to bed.

I started off today by sleeping in a bit – I stayed up until 3am the previous night, and I knew there was no way I was going to get in to Hacker School on time (10:30), so I set my alarm for 11am. Got in to Manhattan around noon. Worked with Erik, Alex, Ian, and Matt on the Risk AI programming for a few hours before getting a late lunch at Getting Hungry. Returned to Hacker School and continued working on the Risk AI server. We’re still working on the main game server, although we’re hoping to have that done by Monday evening.

I tried to take a nap in the late afternoon, but Erik and Ian were working on the Risk program a couple of feet from the beanbag upon which I was trying to sleep, and I had too many ideas not to join in the conversation. I ended up not napping at all, and helping them with the Risk stuff.

There was a quick round of presentations by people who hadn’t presented before – including a game of Breakout ported one file at a time from Java to Scala (which has Java Interop), and a Pac-Man game with a level editor and guns (featuring sounds from old FPS games!).

After the presentaions, we were all invited to a alumni meetup at a bar called Fat Cat, which is less a bar and more a giant game space, with about two dozen pool, chess, shuffleboard, and ping-pong tables, along with a live jazz band and lounge space.

Peter Norvig, Bella, Nick, Travis, Nabil, and I walked over together, right about the time that it started raining torrentially. We stopped in at a pizza place and grabbed a slice since we were all getting hungry, and also to get out of the rain.

Fat Cat is all-ages (or, at least, 18+), which meant that the under-21s in Hacker School could attend. We played games and games of Bughouse (a chess variant with four players and two boards), and plenty of actual chess – some other Hacker Schoolers managed to get a pool table, and mostly I stood around and chatted with various Hacker Schoolers and Alumni.

After a few hours, a bunch of us left Fat Cat and walked across the street to a pizza place, and had a slice on our way to Mary’s apartment on the lower east side. On the way there, I got into quite a conversation with Sonali about my ideas for a school, and “nerd” culture and labeling. I’m hoping to write a blog post about my school in the next few days (I want to talk to Peter Norvig about it, too!)

Mary lives on the 6th floor, which was even hotter than our 4th floor apartment. I had one beer and stood in the stairwell where it was a little bit cooler. She had hooked up a Raspberry Pi to the door buzzer so that you could text a number and it would let you in, which was neat. After about 45 minutes, I left with Javier, Richard, and Laura, to catch the F to the R, which dropped me off about a block from home.

I arrived at my apartment to find Ian and Levi playing StarCraft 2, so of course I joined them for an hour or so. The internet started lagging out a bit, so I quit out and surfed the internet until I was tired enough to go to bed.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

I’m writing this the day afterward – you’ll see why.

Yesterday I woke up on time and took the normal route (R -> D) to Hacker School. There was a lady on the train writing what I could only describe as indecipherable scribbles on a page of paper, but she seemed to know what it said. I thought that was interesting and tried to figure out if I could decipher her code, but I think it was actually just really loopy cursive handwriting.

Hacker School started a bit slow after morning meeting, and I went to Jazzy’s for lunch, the usual egg cheese and ham sandwich, this time on a toasted roll, which was even more delicious than a bagel.

I had a short meeting with Mary around noon – the facilitators had requested that we all sign up for short meetings with them to just chat about how hacker school is going, etc.. I basically said that Hacker School is being amazing, but I’m finding it hard to be social since normally it takes me a while to come out of my shell (about 6 months) in a new social situation, but I’m “cramming” socially since I only have 3 months of Hacker School, and one of those is gone! Still, it’s being an extremely positive experience for me.

On that note: they’re accepting applications for the next batch! https://www.hackerschool.com/apply?r=top

At 2pm I met with a rather large group of people to start building an AI system for the game Risk. Rather, an AI competition for anyone interested. Essentially, there will be a central server which will run the games, and people can register a URL which points to an AI server which the game server will poll on each turn. Erik and I are the main leaders for the project, which is in python. I’m super excited about it. Ian, Matt, and Alex are the other main contributors to the project so far.

I ended up staying late with Ian, Travis, and Alex, and someone bought a bottle of Makers Mark, so we sat around and drank whisky out of the coffee mugs that are at the office for a few hours, watching bad Youtube videos and working on the Risk AI.

Eventually I took the subway home, and found that Levi had a guest from Boulder – Ian – over at the apartment, who will be staying with us for about three weeks. Levi’s girlfriend Broghanne (who is from somewhere British), Levi, Ian, Imogen, and I all hung out in the living room chatting about American history, science, and astrophysics until about 3am – hence the waking up late and not writing this blog post on time. It was very enjoyable to sit and chat with people about whatever topics came to mind.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty

Monday morning – I woke up at 8:30 to my alarm and got ready for the day. Took the R to Atlantic/Barclays station alongside my roommate, who happened to be leaving at the same time for Maine. Sometime in the next few days I’m moving down the hall to Imogen’s room, since she’s moving back to London. So it’ll just be Levi and I in the apartment for a few days.

Transferred to the D, which is my new route to get to school – it’s faster than the N, especially because the station in Manhattan for the D is much closer to Hacker School. The D also goes over the Brooklyn Bridge, meaning that there’s some sunlight and sightseeing on my way to/from Hacker School every day.

Well, “sunlight”. Today it was pouring rain in Manhattan – enough to warrant a weather alert on my phone (which somehow arrived even though I was in airplane mode!).

Spent the morning napping in a beanbag since I was too tired to work. Brandon Rhodes and Peter Norvig are our residents this week; the former is the author of some Python libraries and books, and the latter is a Google employee and one of the foremost AI researchers. I’ve been geeking out a bit about the fact that I get to work with Peter, and I noticed that he was about to go to lunch with a group of Hacker Schoolers. I had to go to the restroom after waking up from my nap and by the time I returned, they had already left. Ah well – I grabbed a hot sandwich at Pret and returned to Hacker School.

Decided to pair with some people for the day – Budgeted and NodeTag are getting bogged down in details.

I was about to put up a message about pairing on our internal chat application when Doron asked me to help him with a database project – he was testing various queries in SQLite and measuring their performance. He was noticing some weird behavior – when he executed a SELECT * FROM table WHERE unique_element = 'abc', it was performing the same as SELECT * FROM table WHERE unique_element = 'xyz', where ‘abc’ was at the beginning of the table and ‘xyz’ was at the end (and something else was the primary key). Since there was no index on unique_element, he expected the ‘xyz’ query to take longer. I came up with a few ways that the database might be optimizing, but in the end it turns out our sample size was probably too small and the difference was getting lost in the noise. We did learn, however, that trying to put 500k rows in a table with a unique element gets really really slow around the 10kth element – since each insert needs to check if there is already something with the same unique element in the table. Thus trying to quickly insert a bunch of rows quickly gets to O(n²). Lesson: don’t use Unique rows unless you really really have to. And then index them.

I pair programmed with Peter on a NumPy program to draw topological maps given a set of elevation data (Project idea: Do this for Minecraft!). A neat problem that I had just a few ideas on – turns out that tracing a non-convex hull is a hard problem. He messaged me later and seemed to have found a good library to generate the hulls for him.

Pair programmed with Michael for a while on an architecture for a full-stack web and iPhone app. Based on our conversation, I’m not sure he realized how large of a system he was panning on building. I wish him the best of luck in completing his project.

I got to talk with Peter Norvig for a while – he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt so I figured it was okay to call him Peter – about writing an AI for Risk (something I’m planning on working on soon) and also Genetic Algorithms, which was super neat.

Read up on Risk AI for a while, then took the subway with everyone to ebay for Brandon’s presentation on “Copernican Refactoring” – essentially, thinking about a problem as having a different center for a new perspective (i.e. the earth orbits the sun instead of the other way around, and this makes the math for the motion of the planets a lot prettier). It was a neat talk and it gave me some really cool perspective and problem solving ideas.

Afterward, I walked with Erik to Toys R Us and Barnes and Noble, where we tried to find a copy of the board game Risk. We couldn’t, so I took the N from Union Square to Atlantic/Barclays and picked up a copy there. Walked home and played some SC2 (0 for 3 🙁 ). Chatted with sleepy Greta for a long time, then went to bed around 1.

As you can probably tell from the length of this post, my motivation is quickly returning! I’m looking forward to working on the Risk AI today!

From Manhattan,

Erty