Hacker News Reader

Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why this is on hacker news, other than the fact that an epic athlete will be stripped of his honor and have an asterisk next to his name. In the footnotes it will say, "See Barry Bonds"

But his excellence and story is what we all pay to see. We don't really want to know. And who's to say those that receive Armstrong's awards weren't doping, too? Not trying to dismiss the situation, but PEDs are absolutely saturating ALL of sports today, no exceptions.

EDIT: Armstrong's response http://lancearmstrong.com/news-events/lance-armstongs-statem...

View on HN

We spend our lives devising novel, elegant optimizations to complex systems and we call this hacking. Most people partake in novel, powerful biological augmentation and we call this medicine. Interestingly, in the realm of competitive, physical human achievement we call it cheating.

Consider that as computing becomes more ubiquitous and personal, as technology merges with medicine, as we move past augmented reality and pacemakers into the cybernetic age of the next 50 years, this is very much the future of hacking.

From the opposite side, consider how storage could soon be DNA, computation could soon be artificial neurons, and how computer vision could be lab-grown retinas. Still not seeing the convergence?

By the end of our lifetimes, the business of bio-ethics and optimization will become very, very relevant.

It's similar to what we said when MJ died: we feel a kinship of spirit with someone who hacked. Instead of hacking technology, he hacked himself. And there's a certain question about how far you'll go to pursue perfection.

I hold out hope that Armstrong will be exonerated by history, since he's chosen not to do it himself. I wish we were all upvoting his response, which is much better.

I'm also confused why this is on HN.

In any case, considering many of those races happened over a decade ago, it's hard not to agree with him that it seems like a witch hunt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com