I have now had one-on-one meetings with six of my Hacker School "batchlings" — brothers and sisters in the impending batch — to begin building personal relationships before the madness of meeting 50 new people all at once, which starts in three days. Establishing individual edges ahead of time seems a useful preparation for learning the whole order(2\^6) graph at once.
A returning member of batch[4] invited us to meet at Union Hall, a bar in Brooklyn. It was a longish trek for me and I couldn't set out until I had finished with the course I am teaching. But I did get there, and after the usual unpleasantness trying to interact in a dark place with noise all around, the group of perhaps eight or ten of us settled in a quieter nook. Then it was possible to have mostly audible conversations and even to see the expressions of the people who were speaking.
I'm impressed at how interesting and pleasant everyone seems to be. And I got home well after three. Very glad I went — eight to ten people is still a manageable number to meet at one time.
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