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Comment by ianpurton | Hacker News Reader

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ianpurton

"The location and speed of all trains is also known."

Just need an app that alerts you to oncoming trains.

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It seemed obvious to me that your comment was a joke. Please continue this style of humor despite the other comments.

You got one inbuilt. It's logic goes something like

    if myself.is_near(train_tracks) and (myself.can_see(train) or myself.can_hear(train)):
        myself.risk_of_oncoming_train = True

risk_of_oncoming_train is a boolean? Sounds more like something that would be representing a chance, so I would be expecting something like a floating point number.

I was thinking that being hit by a train is a situation that I want a 0 probability of. So personally if the probability is non-zero I would immediately act to reduce it to zero. Hence a boolean does the job for me.

Apparently this doesn't work as well as you'd think. I just read a depressing article about the number of people that pose for photos on train tracks, when celebrating big life changes like marriage or graduation, and then get hit by trains.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/taking-ph...

An app would be a further distraction and would perhaps be detriment to what you want to achieve.

Or pay attention to the gates and lights?

yeah, an app for the car.

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