alt Hacker NewsI actually disagree a bit. The whole premise of the story is that there are shortcuts indeed, when someone has the entire tech tree available at the push of a button.
The Romans were very capable engineers. If you give them a few key ideas and steer them away from dead ends, progress can compress a lot.
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Two things:
1) This idea has been debunked...a lot. The Romans were capable but they were nowhere near an industrial revolution
2) Necessity is the mother of invention. The Romans didn't really need an industrial revolution, or at least their power base didn't.
This is do-able, because it doesn't require much metalworking. This is technology from 1700-1750 or so, made from wood with a few metal bits. Roman technology was capable of that.
You certainly can avoid a lot of dead ends, but we're still talking about the span of at the very least multiple decades.
And the next question is practicality. You can make a steam engine demonstrator from bronze. But bronze was expensive, and of varying quality. So your engine will necessarily be low-power, and too inefficient for practical use.
But the economics don't work. A bronze steam engine would have been extremely expensive and it would have taken multiple attempts to work out the best alloy mix. Without refinement the result would have had a low power output and short working life.
Even if you have a blueprint, a bronze engine is still a major research project.