How I won money programming – meet EmotionBot

For LiveChat .txtless hackathon we’ve built a thing. It’s an auxiliary bot detecting emotions in chats to make chats more fun or get some statistical insights.

You can test it on our team page: https://kf-labs.github.io/

We’ve placed 3rd, won $500 per team member & backpacks: https://youtu.be/bvLHLY7lTFk?t=364

I wrote a python server (using Flask) for interfacing with the LiveChat API and handling chat webhooks and passing chats to emotion classifier that Enrica prepared, squeezed it on a minimal instance on Google Cloud (after all I’m in the performance business) and then for like a week edited the video for the contest. Very refreshing and rewarding to do things I never did before and build something that exists on its own.

Now we’ll try to get it admitted to LiveChat app marketplace and see if any company wants to pay for it 😉

CODE OF KUTULU @ Codingame

Why play games when you can write bots to play them? Join me at: https://www.codingame.com/contests/code-of-kutulu

Once again I’m taking part in CodinGame online contest, this time in Lovecraftian theme ending on June 25. You implement a bot that is supposed to play in game run on Codingame site against other bots. The game is about explorers trying to survive the longest in a dungeon before losing their sanity.

I already did get to silver leagues in other games like Ghost in the Cell (while refreshing my C++), Code Royale (Dota-like game, worked on my Python3 skills). In Code Royale I played with strategy pattern, so that I could easily change the behavior of bot and started using this lisp-like predicate construct to help me pipe a lot of conditions easily and read-ably:

def dt(cond, l, r):
    x = cond is True
    print(str(x), file=sys.stderr)
    if x:
        return l
    else:
        return r

This time I also want to setup my deck to be able to run games offline for faster feedback and potentially play with some better algorithms.

Best players create simulations of the game, often re-implementing it for performance reasons. Being able to simulate the progress of the game they apply Mini-maxes, Genetic Algorithms, Neural Networks and other fancy things to select the best moves. This is in line with what Elon Musks OpenAI owning Dota2 single-player is about:

edit: nice deep dive into properly approaching this kind of contests: https://github.com/Manwe56/competitive-programming/blob/master/docs/advices.pdf
edit2: This post comes down to two songs by same guy:

3 courses start today

I just enrolled for:

• Comic Books and Graphic Novels
• Computer Architecture
• Statistics One

which all start today or tomorrow. For sure I’ll drop of some of them but they sound to cool to miss out totally. So far I completed the Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship and Startup Engineering (this one without submitting the final project though) and – I know it sounds totally cliché but it’s the truth – really widened my horizons. Brain needs practice too 😉

Update: Sticked only to Statistics. The course shows how you can get from research data to real conclusions. Computer Architecture course was too low level and the Comic books one was a roman literature course in disguise!

Ultimate computer chair – DXRacer

Cyber-immersion station. Can you find the rabbit?

The chair shipped in just 2 days and took 20 minutes to assemble (excluding the time to put ice on hurt hand due to improper handling of the backrest spring and the time to squeeze the bulky box to a sedan).

I had a ‘comfortable’ computer chair before but the synthetic material rubbed up and I kept bending down while on it since the backrest was poorly profiled. Knowing some alternative high-end (or rather high-price) chairs I set out for a search of chair noble of my bottom. Spending whole weekends on Coursera hurt my back so far so I was determined to go for the pricey chairs.

Two of my colleagues broke their Markus IKEA chairs so they were of the list. Quickly I stumbled upon the DXRacer and anything remotely good was 2x the price so I looked no further.

Don’t buy this Markus chair – it breaks

The box was quite heavy and bulky so I you’re a kid or small frame it is best to get some help with it. The contents scared me a bit. I have to many IKEA furniture upon installation of which I said too many curses. Luckily the installation process was quick and most of the screws and details were already in place.

And then I sat down.. Immediate relief and feeling of money well spent. Why, oh why had I not bought it earlier!

Apart from being very comfortable (back and head cushions included) you can adjust the angle of the back down to total flat, which is really cool. Up and down adjustments are standard, there is the tilt mode and armrest level. Sadly you can’t adjust the angle of the armrest.

Despite being made in PRC the chair is of fine quality. The making of the chair, the backrest and the bottom is even more detailed and cool than you see on the pictures.

I bought the D-series model OH/D91/N and the bottom is a bit to long for me so if you don’t have long legs or thick bottom I would recommend the F-series. And I do recommend the DXRacer chair 🙂

Edit: after publishing this I got more reports from my friends on those IKEA Markus chairs braking down.