Hacker Remix

Shavarsh Karapetyan

203 points by handfuloflight 1 week ago | 24 comments

dang 5 days ago

The submitted URL was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan but we changed it to https://grantland.com/features/the-plunge-shavarsh-karapetya... because in-depth specific articles are preferable to generic wikipedia.org submissions. (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for past comments about that)

Interested readers may want to look at both, of course.

johnfn 5 days ago

This is a rare case where I think I preferred the Wikipedia article - the neutral, impassive retelling of events somehow makes more of an impression on me, whereas I don't like so much the breathless style of the new article.

dang 5 days ago

Ok, I'll go with your take and restore the submitted URL. Sorry for the churn everybody!

(I still want to build URL aggregation eventually, so the community can curate sets of URLs about a story rather than just one.)

p-e-w 5 days ago

Probably the most amazing thing about this is that he found himself in or near THREE highly unusual incidents in a span of 11 years: Two catastrophic bus accidents and a burning building. I don't know any other person for whom this is true, except of course those whose jobs by their nature involve regularly confronting such incidents.

huijzer 5 days ago

Armenia at the time belonged to the Soviet Union. To me, these examples emphasize again how truly dysfunctional that system must have been.

p-e-w 5 days ago

Are you suggesting such incidents were commonplace in the Soviet Union, to the extent that a person could expect to just stumble upon multiple of them in a few years? That would certainly surprise me.

Etheryte 5 days ago

This is often the case, whenever a topic like this comes up, people who have grown up in the civilized world struggle to comprehend the absolute tragic comedy that the Soviet Union was. All of my older relatives have similar stories to tell, the ones from the army are even more outlandish.

selimthegrim 5 days ago

Is this where that saying about not laughing at the circus after serving in the (Soviet) Army came from?

huijzer 5 days ago

I've seen a lot of work from Stephen Kotkin over the Soviet Union and it wouldn't surprise me. The Soviet Union went through three major famines between 1932 and 1947 [1]. As is often the case, the situation was worse in states that were ruled by the Soviet Union than in the main country itself. For example, the Ukrainian Famine was much worse than the famine in Russia (Russia population grew in this period while the Ukrainian population declined) [2].

I can't find statistics on mortality in Armenia for the 1980s period, but I think it's fair to say that it probably was similar to some modern corrupt regimes like Congo or South Africa. For example, in these countries, the annual death rate from road injuries in 2021 was around 40-50 per 100,000 people [3]. So that means that over a lifetime of about 50 years, a person on average has a chance of (50*50) / 100 000 = 2.5% on dying from road injuries. For comparison, this rate is 4 times higher than the US and 13 times higher than Western Europe. If you then are someone who is outside a lot, then yes I would say it's not unthinkable to be near multiple fatal accidents in one lifetime.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

331c8c71 5 days ago

> For example, the Ukrainian Famine was much worse than the famine in Russia (Russia population grew in this period while the Ukrainian population declined.

It is disingenuous to speak of Russia as a whole here. A number of regions in Russia were severely affected as well as parts of Kazakhstan [1].

> I can't find statistics on mortality in Armenia for the 1980s period, but I think it's fair to say that it probably was similar to some modern corrupt regimes like Congo or South Africa.

It is right there in the link [3] that you provided. 12.5 per 100K per year on par with Monaco (12.4) and Finland (12.8) and almost two times less than US (22.9) (all in 1980).

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%...

[3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

n4r9 5 days ago

Life in Soviet states was totally different before vs after Stalin's death. Neither were great, but my impression is that the grim incidents of the 1930s and 40s were something that the Soviets were desperate to avoid repeating.

InDubioProRubio 5 days ago

Incident? It was colonial genocides with red decorations.

n4r9 5 days ago

Sure. Didn't mean to downplay it.

Unbefleckt 5 days ago

Is this why induatrial accident porn always seems to be from China? I just assumed it was a numbers thing.

0xDEADFED5 5 days ago

right? i'd be kinda wary about hanging out with the guy =)

InDubioProRubio 5 days ago

small scale catastrophes are not that rare, most of us just duck away from them. It takes some special mindset to run towards danger.

moralestapia 1 week ago

Thanks for sharing this story, what an amazing guy.

Wonder if he would be the kind of persons that would put out a comment like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629179

dang 5 days ago

I've added that post to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. Thanks!

nonrandomstring 5 days ago

Yes. More like this please handfuloflight. A hero story really sets the day up with positive vibes.

Flowsion 5 days ago

3 separate incidents and he put himself in harms way each time to save others. What a wonderful man.

anordinaryham 5 days ago

when the paragraph about the asteroid named after him arrived right after detailing those 3 bold acts, I really thought it was about to say he dove into outer space and diverted a deadly asteroid from hitting the earth (and while doing so he caught an infection of St Bonbon's Itch, and was hospitalized for 13 days.)