It's a good story. From a naive distance (the only perspective I have to offer), coal mining is equal parts romantic and disgusting. We can worry all we want about sitting at a desk all day long, but our life expectancy has to be considerably better than a coal miners.
I do wonder if such stories become less likely (more difficult) over time. Ever watch the movie The Aviator? Average movie, but what struck me in that movie was that you had someone who knew nothing/little about planes, learn to fly, build planes and build an empire on them. Try to do that today. The cost of entry, the licensing, the vastness of knowledge..forget about it. You could probably spend your entire life learning about a single little widget.
Software is crossing that same chasm. Simple "i could have done that" ideas aren't as frequent as they used to be (although mobile computing has rejuvenated this many times over). Building software is becoming increasingly complicated. You can't beat facebook without being better than facebook, you can't build source hosting without beating github. You can't build a mobile phone without copy and paste (well...at least, you can't really sell one...).
It's always the new emerging discoveries that are easier to get into. This is why software is crossing the chasm- it is leaving/has left the new emergent status.
Bioengineering, purported to be the next wave, seems to be continuing this tradition, though not entirely dirt cheap to enter.
If everyone believed what you are saying then nothing would get built. It's easy to think creating/inventing things was so much easier back then. Think of how famous I could be if I lived hundreds of years ago. I could easily invent the light bulb, radio, motors, computers. Hell kids today are building these things right! The concepts are so simple, everything was up for grabs back then!
Only they weren't. As vain as we want to be the truth is we haven't reached any kind of technological limit. Creating stuff is as hard as it always was. Hard.
The facebook thing is a bad one. It's been mentioned time and time again that Zuck could have said the same about myspace...
Github also a bad one. They are a TINY. Github is awesome, I love them, but they are TINY. I think ruby and javascript are the most popular languages on github. Yet php is the most popular language on the internet. Point being, github is tiny, HN is tiny, Rails is tiny.
Feel good about all the opportunities that exist out there!
Do you really believe that for all fields? Or just for software development?
I have to absolutely totally disagree with you if you are talking about all fields. Licensing, regulatory and insurance costs alone prove a significant barrier to entry. I also think that as a field matures, so too does the body of knowledge and the amount of time required to become an expert in said field increases. Look at how much more a doctor, lawyer, or account needs to know today than they did 100 years ago.
I also think this is unavoidable in software..though I might agree with you that we aren't there yet? However, whenever I hear someone say "Well, X didn't have those features either when they shipped", I always cringe)
Building grand idea software is complicated with a high cost of entry.
However the next great thing will come from someone who started off as a static site than added PHP (or whatever), then added more then grew to a grand piece of software.
There is a market out there for that little static site, and with stamina that site will grow. You can't do that with aviation.
With software, with websites, you don't have to deliver the end product right away. You can grow into the space. Even facebook did that.
The story is not as improbable as it sounds at first. To be clear, he was not a coal miner, but an electrician in a coal mine. He said he started work at 6am, but ended at 1pm. This is not too bad actually. In communist Romania, miners were actually one of the envied professions: high salaries and bonuses, feeling of camaraderie, celebrated as heroes of communism, early retirement (with a relatively large lump sum in the end). Mining was of course very dangerous and demanding work, but as an electrician in a mine, one would get most of the benefits without most of the dangers.
Electrician's workshops, as any workshop during communism, really, were hotbeds of what we would call today hacking. With low quality equipment but plenty of raw material, people would use their inventiveness to produce whatever the work required and whatever they or their extended families could use at home. Also they would fix tv's, radios, make antennas, etc. The mindset formed in this way is not too far from a programmer's mindset. (Remember, that at the time, there weren't too many programmers, even in the West.) Also, I've seen some very elaborate devices for grilling steaks and sausages (still in operation today) that people made in their free time at work some 30 years ago in some machine factory. As the communist economy was tanking, people could pretty much do whatever they wanted at work. Some people developed skills they could later use after the change of regime, others turned to alcohol out of boredom, some did both.
Just to add some background... Otherwise very nice story and kudos to Mircea.
ADD:
With the risk of idealising communism, there is another benefit many people got from it, and that is a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. Seeing all the mechanisms of state propaganda, many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising, political campaigns, media, etc. The dark side is that a significant portion of that generation have become conspiracy theorists.
many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising
I've often wondered about that, traveling in Eastern Europe, are people there really less susceptible to brands? McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola, etc...
Not sure, but whenever it is in the news that something in fast food or in cola is found to be harmful or addictive or whatever, the reaction of most people is never outrage but more like "no kidding, what did you expect" :)
ADD: also, some people would go like: "OK, this is probably nothing new. Why was it in someone's interest to report this news now and whose interest was it."
I don't think so. After the collapse of Eastern Germany there was a rush on the western brands that were unavailable throughout the separation. Now there's a nostalgia for some of the old eastern brands that got wiped out.
I think brands are orthogonal to the question of propaganda in repressive systems. In fact, one of the main points of a brand in a free market is a kind of promise of predictable minimum quality. In a closed market that doesn't really work because brands don't compete and the feedback loop from the customer is broken.
We have 35 upvotes for this story, 30kB for the content... say 100 visitors (a 3:1 visitor-upvoter ratio is more than generous). Is it normal for the resulting 3MB traffic spike to suspend a shared-hosting account? It just seems too bad to be true!
I'm the owner of this website and talking about the numbers. It was about 2000 visits until my account was suspended. And after redirection to http://ennovates.wordpress.com/ visits were 1900 there till writing of this comment. so 44 upvotes and around 4000 visits.
Thanks for the actual figures, and sorry for my poor estimate. So the load was 60MB instead of 3MB. Just out of curiosity, was your account rightly suspended? What quota applied?
I worked for a chap in Yorkshire who had been a miner and had lost his job in the Thatchers war against the miners. He'd taken his redundancy money and taught himself to program.
Awww.. I didn't even realize that i made it to the top page of HN. And off-course this happiness came with a sad news that my shared hosting account have been suspended. But I've redirected this link to my Wordpress.com blog. You can read on there...
27 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadI do wonder if such stories become less likely (more difficult) over time. Ever watch the movie The Aviator? Average movie, but what struck me in that movie was that you had someone who knew nothing/little about planes, learn to fly, build planes and build an empire on them. Try to do that today. The cost of entry, the licensing, the vastness of knowledge..forget about it. You could probably spend your entire life learning about a single little widget.
Software is crossing that same chasm. Simple "i could have done that" ideas aren't as frequent as they used to be (although mobile computing has rejuvenated this many times over). Building software is becoming increasingly complicated. You can't beat facebook without being better than facebook, you can't build source hosting without beating github. You can't build a mobile phone without copy and paste (well...at least, you can't really sell one...).
Bioengineering, purported to be the next wave, seems to be continuing this tradition, though not entirely dirt cheap to enter.
Only they weren't. As vain as we want to be the truth is we haven't reached any kind of technological limit. Creating stuff is as hard as it always was. Hard.
The facebook thing is a bad one. It's been mentioned time and time again that Zuck could have said the same about myspace...
Github also a bad one. They are a TINY. Github is awesome, I love them, but they are TINY. I think ruby and javascript are the most popular languages on github. Yet php is the most popular language on the internet. Point being, github is tiny, HN is tiny, Rails is tiny.
Feel good about all the opportunities that exist out there!
edited to add: For some motivation, here's what a solo modern inventor can do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen
I have to absolutely totally disagree with you if you are talking about all fields. Licensing, regulatory and insurance costs alone prove a significant barrier to entry. I also think that as a field matures, so too does the body of knowledge and the amount of time required to become an expert in said field increases. Look at how much more a doctor, lawyer, or account needs to know today than they did 100 years ago.
I also think this is unavoidable in software..though I might agree with you that we aren't there yet? However, whenever I hear someone say "Well, X didn't have those features either when they shipped", I always cringe)
However the next great thing will come from someone who started off as a static site than added PHP (or whatever), then added more then grew to a grand piece of software.
There is a market out there for that little static site, and with stamina that site will grow. You can't do that with aviation.
With software, with websites, you don't have to deliver the end product right away. You can grow into the space. Even facebook did that.
Electrician's workshops, as any workshop during communism, really, were hotbeds of what we would call today hacking. With low quality equipment but plenty of raw material, people would use their inventiveness to produce whatever the work required and whatever they or their extended families could use at home. Also they would fix tv's, radios, make antennas, etc. The mindset formed in this way is not too far from a programmer's mindset. (Remember, that at the time, there weren't too many programmers, even in the West.) Also, I've seen some very elaborate devices for grilling steaks and sausages (still in operation today) that people made in their free time at work some 30 years ago in some machine factory. As the communist economy was tanking, people could pretty much do whatever they wanted at work. Some people developed skills they could later use after the change of regime, others turned to alcohol out of boredom, some did both.
Just to add some background... Otherwise very nice story and kudos to Mircea.
ADD: With the risk of idealising communism, there is another benefit many people got from it, and that is a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. Seeing all the mechanisms of state propaganda, many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising, political campaigns, media, etc. The dark side is that a significant portion of that generation have become conspiracy theorists.
I've often wondered about that, traveling in Eastern Europe, are people there really less susceptible to brands? McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola, etc...
ADD: also, some people would go like: "OK, this is probably nothing new. Why was it in someone's interest to report this news now and whose interest was it."
I think brands are orthogonal to the question of propaganda in repressive systems. In fact, one of the main points of a brand in a free market is a kind of promise of predictable minimum quality. In a closed market that doesn't really work because brands don't compete and the feedback loop from the customer is broken.