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Comment by mlucero | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article but I wish it would have also included advancement in area of steroids. We live in an era where drugs fuel a significant part of professional sports. Top tier athletes also have top tier drug regimens and their "doctors" have found ways to 'hack' the testing. It's an area that the media isn't open about discussing but it is there with the millions of dollars at stake.

I know I'm leaning heavy on the sports side of the article but this isn't all a result of refining the skills required for sport. They are also faster, stronger, and recover more quickly because of the drugs athletes take.

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The way you phrase it makes it sound like it's somehow wrong for athletes to improve in all areas of their sport except when it comes to using performance enhancing drugs? That's like saying a Vim user should not be allowed to use certain plugins, because: because we decided it's not allowed. End of conversation.

The reason players 'hack' the testing is because they either (a) believe other players are doing the same, or (b) other players are _actually_ doing the same, so it's another variable that has to be taking into consideration if you want to 'be the best'.

It seems like he's talking about doping, and there is a big difference between doping and using a plugin.

Few years ago I heard someone (like doctor or someone related to the field) talking about it, and he said there are 3 conditions for a drugs to be considered as a doping product. The main one being "put the user's health at risk" (another being "enhance performance" and I don't remember the third one).

I don't think you can die using a plugin.

I agree. A better comparison would be coders (or academics) who use Aderall or some similar 'brain doping' to achieve performance enhancements vs those who don't. There are whispers that it's an issue in academia, especially among those competing for tenure.

> This is a great article but I wish it would have also included advancement in area of steroids.

My thoughts exactly. I was a great fan of professional cycling when I was a kid (I still follow it, mostly for the scenery nowadays), so much so that as an Miguel Indurain fan I still remember the 8-man chase in the 1996 Tour de France that saw his reign end (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xsXthk4YIo). Each and every one of those 8 athletes from that legendary chase has been proved as being doped sometimes during their career (and most probably they all were doped during that stage). It has not been proved yet, but it's an open secret that Indurain itself might have been a doper, and even Merckx. This ruined professional cycling for me.

Two years after that 1996 Tour the Festina scandal started and at least cycling did try to make itself clean. The same cannot be said of football, where it's absolutely incredible how players like Messi and Ronaldo can play 60+ matches per year at such a high level, consistently. By "incredible" I mean "more than human".

You might be interested in this New Yorker article then: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/09/man-and-superma...

Who gets to define what "human" is?

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