Is Hungry Academy effectively an internship program that offers a guarantee of some dedicated training time instead of the intern being thrown to the wolves?
Our dream is that this program is "better than college." There are people out there that want to do what we do, we want them, so we need to help them build the skills to do it.
I hope non-engineers that you accept will eventually gain a solid foundation of algorithms, maths, notations, etc. But I've always believed that a setting like the one you seem to have created here is the right alchemy for building successful engineers.
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/14216183124/internship-or-...
I'd say Hungry Academy is definitely an apprenticeship.