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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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sandworm101

>>Archery, too, is fringe and unexciting

Lost me there. Archery is infinitely more exciting than many Olympic "sports", curling included.

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Clearly you're not from Saskatchewan

sigh it's not a Saskatchewan Ricky, it's a Samsquanch!

Well, I am currently standing in Manitoba. Portage le prairie.

The beauty of archery in Saskatchewan is that you get to go hunting way earlier in the season than you do with a shotgun or rifle. That means that hunting season doesn't interfere with curling season :)

I disagree there. Curling has tons of strategy associated with it (“chess on ice”) I’ve never seen in archery. In fact, curling is kind of like archery but you can knock opponents arrows around the target...

Am I missing something with archery?

> Am I missing something with archery?

It involves weapons, and weapons are exciting?

See also: that cross-country-skiing-with-rifles winter olympics event thingy

Biathlon ;)

edit: (I love the winter games)

Most Olympic sports are fringe and unexciting. Really, who cares how fast somebody runs/bikes/rows X meters?

Who cares what some author or poet decided to write? Who cares what some scientist found? Who cares what food tastes like? Who cares what article someone posted on Hacker News? Who cares about the bug you fixed? Who cares what software exists?

We can all live without any of this, but why?

Not really comparable, art and code are generally original. Transposing competitive sports to software would be as if everybody competed year after year to see who implemented the best and fastest quicksort in C in the shortest amount of time for instance. It's not usually about expression, it's about perfecting something until you're the best at it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that although like the parent I can't say that I find that particularly interesting myself.

Oh I don't find sports interesting at all either, though I would argue that people do in fact try those sorts of competitions in coding. My beef with parent is the notion that this stuff is objectively pointless somehow just because _we_ don't find it interesting.

It's almost as if... as if... people like different things and have different opinions, isn't it?

Millions of people around the world care. That's why we have the Olympic Games.

Damn, questioning the utility of pan-european institutions is dangerous around here.

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