4 ms·

Shavarsh Karapetyan

204 points by handfuloflight 2y ago

moralestapia 2y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629179
- dang 2y ago
  I've added that post to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. Thanks!
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Yes. More like this please handfuloflight. A hero story really sets the day up with positive vibes.
dkga 2y ago
Beautiful.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Flowsion 2y ago
3 separate incidents and he put himself in harms way each time to save others. What a wonderful man.
- anordinaryham 2y 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.)
p-e-w 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
    - huijzer 2y 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_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor [3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incidents https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...
simultsop 2y ago
I was wondering if he's a new startup founder :/
dang 2y ago
The submitted URL was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan but we changed it to https://grantland.com/features/the-plunge-shavarsh-karapetyan-heroic-rescue-armenia-trolleybus-ussr-history-finswimming/ 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&query=by%3Adang%20wikipedia%20submissions&sort=byDate&type=comment 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 2y 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 2y 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.)
bitbasher 2y ago
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.

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629179

dang 2y ago
I've added that post to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. Thanks!
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Yes. More like this please handfuloflight. A hero story really sets the day up with positive vibes.

dkga 2y ago

Beautiful.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Flowsion 2y ago

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

anordinaryham 2y 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.)

p-e-w 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
  - huijzer 2y 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_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor [3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incidents https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

simultsop 2y ago

I was wondering if he's a new startup founder :/

dang 2y ago

The submitted URL was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan but we changed it to https://grantland.com/features/the-plunge-shavarsh-karapetyan-heroic-rescue-armenia-trolleybus-ussr-history-finswimming/ 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&query=by%3Adang%20wikipedia%20submissions&sort=byDate&type=comment 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 2y 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 2y 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.)

bitbasher 2y ago

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.