Hacker Cinema
Field of Dreams
1989 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
Ray Kinsella is an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice telling him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. He does, but the voice's directions don't stop -- even after the spirits of deceased ballplayers turn up to play.
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22 comments on Hacker News
This is kinda way off-topic, but that feeling of the "bringing back" something that had been lost to time that Field of Dreams provides, I get the same thing from the movie Midnight in Paris. Like a literally palpable warm, comforting, everything-is-alright feeling (mostly from the Salvador Dali encounter).
Great movie! So many big named actors in it! The director also did Field of Dreams!
> Field of Dreams
This movie probably caused double or triple digit millions of wasted investments by small business owners when it put the wrong idea in to their head.
I always think of Field of Dreams. He was incredible in that role. He holds that movie together.
The first thing that comes up for me when I hear his name (after Star Wars) is Field of Dreams. He made me laugh out loud more than once in that, my favorite baseball movie.
> I highly doubt the son of the owner of Henrysburg Chevrolet in Henrysburg, Georgia is going to bring anything to the table that a startup in San Francisco needs
And what is it that you think this hypothetical startup actually needs? The most motivated janitor money can buy?
> You have no idea if dad knows anything about business.
A magnate that knows nothing about business? That doesn't make any sense. A magnate is literally characterized by their involvement in business. Perhaps you mean that mom could be the magnate instead of dad? There was nothing to suggest that she isn't the magnate. It was never specified.
> And if he does, you have no idea if dad taught any of it to kid.
And? You're not hiring the kid for his business acumen. You are hiring the kid for their mediocre capabilities in whatever work you need done and using them as a connection to get in touch with the magnate of the family.
A slightly better worker isn't significant like you make it out to be. In fact, even if you do find the 'magical rockstar', chances are they'll quickly move on to the next job anyway, and then you're back to dealing with mediocre. May as well design the company around mediocre from the start. Let's be real: Startups are generally not attractive places to work as compared to the alternatives the best of the best have in front of them. If the 'rockstar' really, truly, wants to live the startup life, they are going to start their own and eat your lunch in the process.
> And if he did, you have no idea if any of it is relevant to developing biotech software.
But the advice of a welfare parent is? There are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds that is who you are choosing?
> Nobody in the company is going to care about dad's connections to the dude that runs Henrysburg Laundromat.
Except for the person who actually has to make the business a success, not just collect a paycheck and get a new job if the business fails. They don't get to sit around writing code all day. They have to actually get out there and meet people who will move things forward.
I get it, Field of Dreams is a fun concept... for a movie. But that's not how things work in the real world. Simply building it is not enough. Business is, at the end of the day, about people.
RIP Ray Liotta. Enshrined in movie greatness for Goodfellas, but delivered memorable moving performances in Blow, Field of Dreams, No Escape, and so many others. Piercing eyes. Deep voice. Grateful for the opportunity to have watched his work.
I’ve seen most of the movies and could only guess a few, usually by identifying some specific image in the poster and then deducing the movie, like the ghosts and library for Ghostbusters. Some did a better job of getting the look and feel down, for example I said Forest Gump for Field of Dreams, which are pretty similar.
The saying from the movie Field of Dreams, wherein a mentally ill man hallucinates a voice telling him to build a baseball field for ghosts.
The quote is only applicable to people who are building baseball fields for ghosts.
Very well said. The 30 minutes after my Dad passed from cancer were overwhelming. I explain it as having all the good emotions turned off and all the bad ones turned up to 11. Like when you’re at a concert and it’s so loud that your ears start buzzing from the overload.
I’m used to the world without him now but I feel the same irrational frustration as the author seeing people the age he would be now and thinking “why did you get to live and he didn’t?” There are so many things I would like for him to have seen, things that he wanted for me that came true.
It’s strange how some of the grief never leaves and pops up unexpected. I got all teary watching Field of Dreams after probably 25 years...a fun movie when I was a kid but as a grown up the tension between fathers and sons.
A lot of us make the mistake of waiting for the “right” idea until we decide to pursue something. Huge mistake.
Joe Gebbia put it nicely by making an analogy to the “gym of entrepreneurship.” Building a startup is one of those things that you need to work to get better at over time. Not many founders have many regrets but when they do express regrets it’s usually them wishing they had started earlier. Here’s Joes quote from his interview with Tim Ferris.
“People think we woke up and Airbnb was just created out of thin air. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that we’ve talked about today, it’s that there’s a long lineage of trying things, bumping into walls, getting rejected, failing, reframing that failure into learning, and trying to continue forward.
And so, by the time Airbnb came around, it was like I’d been in the gym of entrepreneurship for many years. So, it’s like you don’t wake up and just run a marathon all of a sudden. Nobody does that. You train for it. So, by the time it’s ready for race day, your body is conditioned for it. Your muscles and your system – everything is ready for you to go run 26+ miles.
I think entrepreneurship is the exact same way. I think it’s a misconception when people look at the magazine covers and they read the stories of a successful company and they think, “Wow, the people who started that, they built it and everybody came.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. I think “Field of Dreams” is probably the worst movie to ever happen to entrepreneurship. It created this idea, like, “Oh, wow, if you build it, they will come.” I can tell you, if you build it, they don’t come.
It takes this incredible perseverance and sometimes irrational belief in yourself to bring something to life in the face of lot of adversity and a lot of people saying it can’t happen. So, I hope if there’s any takeaway from the stories that I shared today, it’s that the simple act of spotting an opportunity, coming up with original solution and then taking that third, hardest step of putting something into the world, of trying something, putting your idea into practice – it doesn’t have to be the big idea.
It’s just about being in the gym and doing a rep, the gym of entrepreneurship, doing curls or something. It’s just getting in the habit of those three things. You spot an opportunity, you come up with an original solution, and you put your idea into the world. And the more you can do that, the better you are at spotting the next opportunity. Airbnb just happened to be a part of the lineage of all the things I’ve told you that happened before it.”
There still persists this idea that all you have to do is "built it, and they will come", a la Field of Dreams (1989).
First off, that's not the right quote. It's "If you build it, HE will come." He being "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, a baseball playing ghost. And if you're basing your marketing strategy on baseball playing ghosts, you need to go back to school. Ghosts don't have any money, they can't buy your product. Baseball playing ghosts didn't even fund the REAL field of dreams, just down the road from me where they filmed the movie. The movie itself brought popularity and prosperity to the field, and since the movie was almost 30 years ago, the field is fallen on hard times.
But lastly, and this bit of insight came from my grandmother: It never amazes me when people offer something for free, and then get mad when people take them up on that offer. You did it. You chose to make it free to use. You put a tip jar out on the counter, sure, but ultimately the thing is free with no strings attached.
Correct. A lot of disaffected programmers think "marketing" is a dirty word and they will have no hand in it. It's a type of magical thinking that forgets the movie Field of Dreams ("if you build it, they will come") is about a literal miracle. There's really no such thing in the real world.
"Advertising" open source projects doesn't typically involve taking out ads on Facebook, but you still need to perform the marketing task. Get out to events and stand up as a speaker--event organizers are always desperate for content. Write blog posts. Make videos demonstrating how to use your tech.
If you don't care about growing your project beyond yourself, sure, feel free to skip these things. But if you're really serious about growing your project, it should take about half your total time on the project.
There is no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". I mean, the movie "Field of Dreams" was about a literal miracle, after all. Open source software takes just as much marketing and "sales" to convince people to use--say nothing about contribute to it--as proprietary software.
There is also the TV-series "Halt and Catch Fire".
Slightly related movie suggestions, based on their interruptive theme: "Field of Dreams", "Moneyball", "The Wolfs of Wall Street"
I believe the movie Field of Dreams existing had the single most detrimental effect amongst app developers and executive producers than any other movie, because they keep thinking if only they build a good app, then the audience will come to them. NOT TRUE.
If you build it, they won't come. That generally only happens in Field of Dreams the movie. It's all about marketing. Putting your App inside the App Store alone isn't good enough. It'll get you some sales possibly but if you want to rocket your growth, you need to be more strategic about marketing.
Having said that, I don't see any real compelling reason why I would personally want your App. If you're going to compete with other reading Apps, whats your advantage? Do you even have a small number of people who love your App who can help drive feedback and promote the App without being asked (this is one of the first steps for any entrepreneur).
As for docs and tutorials, I wrote one myself for the PSF Sprints group at http://docs.pythonsprints.com/python3_porting/. Brett Cannon just came out with http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/pyporting.html a few weeks ago. Both of these docs have a references section which lists a number of other porting guides that we borrowed from.
Library support is so-so. It's actually surprising how many libs out there could be have an initial port completed in an hour. I would encourage anyone to look at a dependency of theirs, run it through 2to3, then see what it does. Sometimes it's as easy as making a few fixes and it runs fine.
Obviously there are complicated projects out there where this isn't true, but I don't think there needs to be any distinction between amateur and professional porting levels. Just go for it. As I said in another post, taken from the movie Field of Dreams: "if you build it, they will come."
If you can do it based on your dependencies and your time, I don't see why you wouldn't, given the following:
* It's easiest to do when you don't have a wide range of versions to support. If you want to support 2.6, 2.7, and 3.x, writing a single codebase that supports both versions is not really that hard. It gets harder the wider your range gets, but it's not impossible. For example: if you need 2.4-3.x then you don't have the `as` statement, so exception handling is tricker across all versions.
* Run your code through `2to3`, it probably works. A lot of people are surprised at how close they are to working under 3.x, enough that there are some projects which successfully keep the codebase under 2.x and port to 3 via 2to3 only at release time.
* You need good test coverage to have a successful port. Period. This is one of the barriers a lot of people see to porting -- they need to stop and build up tests before they can even think about moving forward.
The initial effort in porting turns a lot of people off, as does the ongoing maintenance, especially when there's no audience for it, but as with the movie Field of Dreams: "if you build it, they will come". We need more projects to be proactive and spend a little time if they can...enough that the PSF will fund porting sprints (see www.pythonsprints.com)
Sure, but the movie was called "Field of Dreams." I.e. he was motivated by dreams.
Why not convert it into a community-powered video translation site (and possibly add subtitling capabilities- allow users to enter text to display at bottom)? Also, why not market the kids and teenagers that want to do MST3000-like overdubbing? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000 )
You might have trouble getting people to pay for it, but maybe you could convert to a non-profit if the goal was to provide tools to help the blind, the deaf, or to translate important works.
A big problem I see with the site now is that there is nothing on the front page that says what it does. You can't expect it to be content driven before people understand what it is or why they should be adding content. Also, how and where were you marketing it? Web apps aren't like the game from the the movie "Field of Dreams". If you build it, people only come if they know that their work will not be wasted. You should have the app say that it will reupload the edited video to Youtube, Vimeo, etc., and that its purpose is just simple Saas video editing for translation (and perhaps subtitling).
Do not be fooled by the field of dreams. It was a movie. You have to do much more than build it before they come.