Peter Hagen

I write games so ugly that I am showered with contempt, and yet I make money! I’ll have a full, lifelong career! If I can have so many flaws and still succeed, you can too!

Figure out what you are really good at doing. Sell that.

Make your dream real.

Get it out the door, whatever it takes, whatever corners you have to cut. If you’re better than me... See more

A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g. Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my experience using them for several years for long-term memory: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to learn certain topics.

Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced... See more

Code wins arguments. If we tested a feature and didn’t like it, we rebuilt it until we landed on the best version. For some surfaces, like the activity feed, we rewrote it three times before we finally landed on an implementation that felt good enough.

Ben Smith, who ran BuzzFeed News during the height of the Twitter era, describes the moment in simple terms. The platform “was a kind of central, essentially elite conversation where political and tech leaders and journalists and activists and others talked to one another,” he says. “It was never complete or ‘real life,’ but it was actually a more... See more

Adriene, who is just one person, is beating the largest Yoga Magazine in the US on every single metric. She is more popular, she has a much better model, and she can charge 10 times the price. Unlike traditional publishers, she doesn't have a problem attracting young people to her channel.

So, if Yoga Journal came to me to ask: "Hey Thomas, we have... See more

The OpenAI chief executive officer planned to spin up an AI-focused chip company that could produce semiconductors that compete against those from Nvidia Corp., which currently dominates the market for artificial intelligence tasks. Altman’s chip venture is not yet formed and the talks with investors are in the early stages, said the people, who... See more

So How Can You Survive?

Simple. You provide something nobody else can ever provide. Something cool and distinctive that people will rather pay money for your game than get someone else's for free.

Consider me. I'm an OK programmer. I'm not good at art and visual stuff, and I haven't been since I was a kid.

But I can write well. I make good settings... See more

People are the most engaged in an activity when they feel like they are highly skilled at it, and are using that skill to confront a great challenge.

That sets down the most essential considerations for designing good gameplay:

1. It has to present a challenge that the player can meet.


2. The player has to be able to get good at it.

The second part is... See more