hacker-school-wednesday-july-2nd-2014

I hope this will be my last post to subsymbol.org before I finish the moving and restructuring.

I had a very productive day, though much of it involved fiddly things, that don't necessarily show in the result.

I am disturbed to realise that we are nearing the end of the fourth week. I have recognised that I pinned a lot of hopes on Hacker School. I had this idea that here I could do everything I've always wanted to do, to make up for ten years of stagnating ideas, while devoting my life to family. This is, of course, ridiculous, so I'm glad I am finally noticing that I did that.

No, I can't make up for anything. The past is the past, and it was well spent. I would do it again.

In the present, I can still choose some things I like and do them.

Plan

Protagonist

  • Keep working toward the repair function, by adding functionality to mv and rm files and to manipulate the truenames directory.

Machine Learning

  • Study neural net backpropagation, and talk about it with my ML partner.

Blog

  • Work on porting to Nikola.

Actual

Protagonist

  • Implemented all the helper functions necessary for repair.
  • Put those into the command line interface.
  • Packaged it and put it on Pypi!
    • relearned how to use distutils, setup.py, and versioneer.
    • Got help chasing down a problem in my reStructedText that was preventing Pypi from rendering the README.

Machine Learning

  • Studied the backpropagation equations, and thought about them a lot.
  • My ML partner is a mathematician, and she helped me recognise that the gradient computations are really not hard, even though there is a derivative involved, and a lot of fiddly indices. It's much easier to grok if you abstract away the indices and look at the larger picture.
  • We went over the code again, this time specifically at the backpropagation part, and I had a strong desire to try implementing it in a more functional way.

Blog

  • Figured out how to import from Blogger (but not the comments).
  • Figured out how to make a Nikola site that isn't a blog.
  • Had a really hard time putting these together, and still haven't completely succeeded. Thus another day of hosting here.