The man who singlehandedly carved a road through a mountain

I will grant that if the quote applies anywhere it applies here. </pedant>

You want to have TWO videos running in parallel because the captions cover the whole video at times.

Also, I noticed that he's wearing some sort of white "bandana" with writings, can anyone care to translate it if it's readable enough from one of the pictures posted above?

--- Improved phrasing.

If you look at the Wikipedia page on Tall Tales, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_tale, it even has him marked as being based on a historical indivdual.

(that road featured in BBC's Top Gear about a year ago)

A "normal" pay would probably have been closer to half a dollar to a dollar per day (if even that), 300 days a year or so. So we're talking $3000~$6000 total, tops.

This is basically a big straight trench, so you could probably have done it in a few days or weeks with an excavator. An excavator rental costs between 800 and 3000 a week depending on the excavator class (size and engine power, minis in the 15-40hp range will be at the lower end, the stuff you can see on construction sites will usually be in the 150hp range and closer to the higher third, I'm excluding the ridiculous stuff such as the CAT 6090 or the baggers which make sense in neither scale nor cost for this comparison)

So the purely monetary cost would probably be about the same if you had an excavator close-by which you could rent (and you were a skilled operator).

edit: actually for that kind of works you'd probably use a backhoe loader rather than a straight excavator, but the costs should be in the same range

edit 2: but to answer the question as asked, it would be way cheaper to use even a full-blown set of heavy earth-movers (and crew) than to pay the guy $10/h, 10h/day, 300 days/year for 22 years (which would cost $660k)

40 hours/week * 50 week/year * 20 years * 10 $/hour= = 400000$

I have to admit though, that my first thought on the story was: "Why build the road? Just move to the city!"

In this case, I admire the endurance of this man and pity the destiny of his wife. But in general, the process of bringing more and more infrastructure to ever more remote place is what destroys the natural environment of this planet. I strongly believe in the efficiency of density and scale and that humanity should limit them self to cities. Leave the rest of the planet to other species!

I'm reminded of a more modern context in the shape of the Craigslist/Padmapper debate, one guy may have built a new Craigslist right now and is out there signing up people one or two at a time to post on it, and in 20 years that person may carve a new path into classified listings. But who really thinks about embarking on tech projects these days which might take 20 years?

Why do some people try to denigrate something which is wonderful with smart alecky comments.

While the comparison is mostly metaphorical, often metaphors are more on point than any 1:1 comparison.

A lot of hacker news is about accomplishing goals that others would tell you is impossible or not worthwhile. This article is meant to inspire to you to keep dreaming. It's one thing to climb a mountain for someone, its a whole other feat of accomplishment to carve a hole through one. The determination this guy had should be taken as a lesson; not in hacking, but in attitude and life and then applied to hacking.