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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, look up plainly difficult on youtube. He has more videos on train crashes than I’ve seen, and I’m embarrassed how many I’ve seen. Here’s one to get you started: https://youtu.be/VV2rIHEp5AM?si=sSBT9s49PqbLTGbt

There are a lot of safety lessons embedded in these videos, which is why I like them. I also did a double take when I heard "semaphore"; its history goes back far longer than the ~century of software engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore

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Oh you silly duck! Semafor is a common word in a handful of other languages for things like traffic lights and such. I had to do a double take when I first saw it in a programming class.

Also hope you’re doing well it’s been a minute since our paths crossed on gdnet.

"Semaphore" is (old) Greek and means "sign (sema) bearer (phore)", and actually the meaning in railways and computing is more or less the same: in computing, a semaphore signals if a resource is in use; in railways, the resource is a segment of a railway line, and the user is a train.

It does the same role in plain roads between pedestrians, cars and similar vehicles.

The basics of mutual exclusion algorithms were developed for railway timetabling and track signalling.

No cause is known yet, but based on the videos, what’s the most likely reason for crashes? Bad tracks? Some human error resulting in collision?

I don't want to speculate on this crash but my mental model for these things is that there's always a handful of factors that all align and converge to create an accident. Some factors are deep-rooted - and point to decisions made years ago - sometimes related to company culture. Theres always an element of operator error: someone ignored something due to inattention or sleepiness.

What's the befit of speculating at this point? Let the investigators investigate, and hopefully some lessons will be learned.

Social? A lot of the bars/restaurants people go to in the morning for coffee/breakfast usually have news on the TV, and people usually talk with each other when big news happens.

This morning, big debates about what happened, whose fault it is, how safe/dangerous trains are, anecdotes from the past and jokes. Somber but lively discussions. Benefit is social cohesion with your neighbours and compatriots :)

In Spanish a traffic light it's called a semaphore too.

In Slavic countries as well. Traffic lights for cars as well as for pedestrians.

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