Ask HN: What is the least probabilistic event that has happened to you?

Hmmm. Good question. I can think of a couple:

1. I was accused of a crime once. Hired a lawyer, and planned to go to court and fight the charge (I legitimately wasn't guilty of anything, not that that really has anything to do with the story). Anyway, on the day I'm supposed to go to court the first time, I get a phone call about 7:00am. It's my laywer's office. They say that my lawyer has had a medical emergency and is in the hospital, and to go to the courthouse and request a continuance on that basis. So I go to the courthouse, they grant me a continuance, and I go home. This is all on a Friday, mind you. Later that weekend, Sunday night I think, a buddy messages me on IRC and says "Hey, what was your lawyer's name again?" I tell him, and he responds "Yeah, I thought so. I just saw on the news: he died this morning."

That led to all sort of interesting complications, but everything did work out in the end, and the charges were eventually dropped. But the whole ordeal cost me a lot of $$$ and the stress probably took a couple of years off my life.

2. I was driving a fire engine to a call one day, when the dispatcher called us to say we could cancel the call. I stepped on the brake pedal to start to turn around and go back to quarters... and the pedal sank all the way to the floor. No brakes. Luckily this was an older truck with a manual transmission, so between using the engine as a brake and using the manual parking brake, I was able to get it stopped with no harm done. The really low probability part is that we got word to cancel while we were on a nice, straight, long stretch of empty road, where there was plenty of time and room to maneuver. Had we run up on an intersection... well, no question we'd have crashed. Whether or not anyone would have been injured or killed is another question.

I had 3 or 4 other "near misses" during my firefighting days as well, where my surviving was a low probability event. But yet, somehow, despite all that, here I am.

> Ever won a lottery?

No, but I consider lotteries to be a tax on people who don't understand probability and expected payoffs, so I don't play.

I’ve had a series of least probable things I think… I fell head first onto concrete when I was little and got knocked out cold. But did ok. A few months later I got stabbed in the ear, and managed to survive albeit a little traumatised by the experience. A little while after that, I got hit by a car, and was up walking the next day. The doctors said it’s because unlike a lot of kids, instead of curling into a ball to protect myself from impact, I actually stood upright and took the impact in my femur, which didn’t break. It was badly badly bruised and it still hurt to walk, but I was all good. (I think I only stood upright because I froze in fear and so henceforth did nothing to protect myself instead of trying to run or hide or whatever).

>Ever won a lottery? No, but I won an all expense paid overseas holiday, and I also got gifted $25,000 for a surgery I needed, that I couldn’t pay for myself and that insurance wouldn’t pay for.

itym "most improbable"

got shot once, barely broke the skin.

I was riding a bike down a common trail through the woods. Someone else was shooting cans with a .22 and hadn't paid attention to the trails coming into the clearing behind their target.

their bullet bounced off the ground, hit me in the kneecap and inner thigh. knocked me off the bike just from the kick to the leg and the surprise. I jumped right up and smacked the snot out of the kid and then realized i was bleeding a little. The bullet was barely stuck in the wound. i gave it back to him as a lesson in gun safety.

just a hair of difference in timing or alignment of any element could've made that nothing at all or fatal. catching a bullet without getting hurt? not even a believable story.

Love at first sight. Never believed in it, always thought it was a bizarre quasi-spiritual or at best naively romantic notion. It happened. Married 17+ years so far, together longer than that, things are good. Weird.

I was driving home from a friend's house one night down an empty suburban side street. I stopped at an intersection to mess with my phone for a second, although there was no stop sign there.

A car full of teenagers blew past down the cross street with their headlights off at a very high rate of speed, presumably for the adrenaline rush. If I hadn't stopped they would have creamed me on the driver's side.

I'll never forget the look on the face of the girl in the back seat. Sheer terror at the realization that we all nearly died.

During the depths of COVID boredom, i beat my wife in the card game War in one round. (!)

the thrill of the last couple card flips were definitely fun, but after it wore off, the sadness of having beat lottery-like odds with no lottery-like payout to greet me set in.

im my mums only son...its not just improbable, but anybody who ever had a chance of being so is not here to explain it