Five Year Mission | Hacker News Reader

Five Year Mission

simblob.blogspot.com

103 pointsguiambros22 comments

This is incredible work. Bret Victor's as well.

Somehow I'd never seen Amit's work before, and Bret's only very recently—despite being inadvertently bitten by the same bug as both of them a couple years back. Granted, a conservative estimate puts either of them as being about five hundred times more productive than myself.

Bret's work in particular is humbling. The "explorable explanations" concept was something I'd given a lot of thought to, and it turns out Bret had dedicated an entire article to elucidating it back in 2011, years prior.

Perhaps the greatest irony of being obsessed with accelerated learning is that while you're trying to build the tools or technology to enable it, you find yourself wanting the very thing you're building. e.g. "I could build my magic learning computer much more quickly if only I had a magic learning computer!" While this is frustrating, it at least serves as constant validation, as you try to force yourself to pay attention to some dry, overly-verbose reference on a particular subject.

This guy's stuff is phenomenal. I regularly consulted his hexagonal grid guide when doing certain simulations. Hope he doesn't give up completely.

Amit is indeed phenomenal. It seems like I've been reading his stuff since forever. To me he's one of the guys who made the internet interesting and useful. And it seems to me that everyone at least mildly interested in creating games must have read his hexagonal grid articles!

I used it for a GPS coordinates game grid.

Couldn't have done it in the timespan available otherwise.

In confused. Is the blog Amit's full-time job? I thought Red Blob Games shipped games and this was something they did on the side.

I love the blog. I love every time a new post comes out. But this reads as of 2016 was a total failure where nothing was produced and no goals achieved.

How did Amit live over the past 5 years? Did he have no income? Did he do non-developer work making Red Blob Games just a part time endeavor?

I'm confused. :(

This stuff is very impressive, but why is there nothing in here about revenue? I would be really worried if I spent five years on something(s) that didn't significantly improve my financial security. I'm sure not everyone shares my priorities, but I'd guess this one is fairly common. Maybe this individual is already set on that front and I'm simply not aware of the context, but his concerns about the stability of the gaming market suggest that this is not the case.

At the very least, it is an amazing thing to have on his resume.

One can get amazing things on one's resume and make money at the same time. :)

Amit was a very very early employee at Google.

Well, that answers that question.

Do you have any sources for this?

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/

There's no mention of Google at all there. While the seventh employee at Google was indeed someone named Amit Patel, I'm having a very hard time linking the identities together.

Update: I wasn't able to associate any online identity information with the Amit Patel that was Google employee #7. Best I could find was references to a venture a few years back called Sunfire. Pretty sure he isn't the Amit Patel of Red Blob Games and Stanford fame. The latter probably threw off a lot of people, since Stanford CS and Google often go hand-in-hand.

There's even another Amit Patel that currently works at Google, but he's a supply chain guy.

As another thread confirms, it must be a quite common name:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13319232

Can I email you instead of posting publicly?

>I would be really worried if I spent five years on something(s) that didn't significantly improve my financial security.

Fortunately, not everybody feels like that.

money can be exchanged for goods and services

Goods and services are not all there is in life.

Money can't be exchanged for lost time (e.g. due to making money), strained relationships (e.g. due to making money), dreams not followed (e.g. due to making money), etc.

So one has to strike a balance, and doing stuff as a hobby, without making anything money-wise, is a totally acceptable balance if you have your basic expenses (rent, food, etc) covered.

OP wrote "financial security," not "enormous sums of money."

Yes, but OP also wondered why a random person will spend time studying and reporting stuff on his blog, if they don't make money out of it.

I didn't worry that he spent time studying. That is awesome! I worried that there was nothing about revenue. And I acknowledged that there may be more context (ex. the author is already independently wealthy, or the blog covers only non-commercial work).

I'd count contributing to a retirement account a basic expense. The more money you make, the more you can contribute to your retirement account. Together with market returns it kind of makes sense to work a lot now to work very little in the future.

Again, it's a tradeoff against your dreams - if you work a lot now to work very little in the future, you may find yourself too old and weak in the future to finally do the things you always wanted to do.

Keep it up, and get a new mission! :-)

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