[HN Gopher] Shavarsh Karapetyan
___________________________________________________________________
Shavarsh Karapetyan
Author : handfuloflight
Score : 190 points
Date : 2025-01-10 21:53 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've added that post to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. Thanks!
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Yes. More like this please handfuloflight. A hero story really
| sets the day up with positive vibes.
| dkga wrote:
| Beautiful.
| Flowsion wrote:
| 3 separate incidents and he put himself in harms way each time to
| save others. What a wonderful man.
| anordinaryham wrote:
| 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.)
| p-e-w wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| huijzer wrote:
| 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...
| n4r9 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Incident? It was colonial genocides with red decorations.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Sure. Didn't mean to downplay it.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| > 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_193
| 0%E2%80%...
|
| [3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-
| incident...
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is this where that saying about not laughing at the
| circus after serving in the (Soviet) Army came from?
| Unbefleckt wrote:
| Is this why induatrial accident porn always seems to be from
| China? I just assumed it was a numbers thing.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| right? i'd be kinda wary about hanging out with the guy =)
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| small scale catastrophes are not that rare, most of us just
| duck away from them. It takes some special mindset to run
| towards danger.
| simultsop wrote:
| I was wondering if he's a new startup founder :/
| dang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| bitbasher wrote:
| I'm torn, either this guy was in the right place at the right
| time or things seem to keep happening around him. I'm not sure if
| I want him near me at all times or never at all.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-14 23:01 UTC)