
Show HN: Would You Survive the Titanic? - aliabd
https://www.gradio.app/hub/hub-titanic
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thesagan
I likely wouldn't survive. I would've been confident in the ship, and the
crew's countenance.

The ship sank very slowly at first. No reason for panic, if things are just
still. I would've known about watertight doors, and how ships haven't really
sunk from iceberg incidents.

Plus, there's a wireless on board, and we're in a busy shipping lane. Plenty
of time to get help. Plenty of lifeboats, too. We can offload people onto
another ship and row back for more.

Hey! Look, lights right over there. I can almost make out portholes. They can
get over here if things get ugly.

The list to port seems to be the big problem. They'll just use the bilge
tanks, maybe. I barely perceive the downward list, since the ship is so long,
and we're up so high. (I guess I'm in first or second class.)

The officers are so calm. Things are orderly. Capt. Smith seems calm. The band
is playing. Damn it, let's get this pumped out and be on our way!

Some time passes, suddenly the ship feels like it's lurching down,
perceptively. Wait!!! I run up to the front of the ship, and see water coming
over the bow! Hell! The crew didn't give us any indications things were this
bad.

I look behind me. Lifeboats are almost gone. Everyone else notices what's
suddenly happening. It's 2:00 a.m. We're sinking. Suddenly we feel the list
downward, the port list being gone.

Wait! Where'd that light go? Weren't they coming?

It's too late. The crowds are surrounding the last lifeboats. I panic and run
aft.

~~~
tialaramex
> Plus, there's a wireless on board, and we're in a busy shipping lane. Plenty
> of time to get help. Plenty of lifeboats, too. We can offload people onto
> another ship and row back for more.

FWIW You probably shouldn't realistically expect to offload large numbers of
people to another vessel at sea, that is extremely hazardous. It was hazardous
in 1912 and it's still dangerous in 2020.

If you're at sea and the master expects the vessel to reach a port, even if
it's badly damaged, they will resist trying to evacuate passengers because
they rightly expect some of the passengers would be injured or even killed in
the attempt.

An uncontrolled fire, which is one of the worst problems you might have at sea
short of actually capsizing†, is still not enough for a master to conclude the
passengers must evacuate if it seems possible to reach a port instead. The
intention will be - unless it becomes apparent this is impossible - to make
for a port and keep passengers from inhaling smoke or burning to death
meanwhile. Despite being unable to extinguish the fire your fire fighting
teams may be able to buy you enough time to reach port.

Passengers often think of lifeboats first when anything goes wrong (perhaps
partly because of the famous Titanic disaster in fact) but they are almost
never the right choice, in fact Titanic probably harmed maritime safety to an
extent by putting lifeboats top of mind for the general public.

† Titanic happened very slowly, but this is by no means the rule. And if a
ship capsizes quickly lifeboats do you no good whatsoever. The Herald of Free
Enterprise had about 90 seconds between the crew first realising there was a
serious problem and the ship laying on its side - that wasn't even long enough
to understand the situation and make an SOS radio call, let alone order
passengers into lifeboats.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
> Passengers often think of lifeboats first when anything goes wrong (...) but
> they are almost never the right choice

What would typically be the best choice? (I had no idea there was a choice)

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rotifer
The site kaggle.com runs machine learning competitions, one of which is
"Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster" [0].

I haven't looked into the site myself; I learned about it from David
Spiegelhalter's book "The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data" [1]. The
competition's problem of predicting who would have survived the disaster
provides much of the motivation for the chapter "Algorithms, Analytics and
Prediction".

In that chapter he applies "classification trees" to the problem, talks a bit
about ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves, the problem of over-
fitting, and other issues.

(Overall, I thought it was a good, well-written popular math book. A bit more
technical than average, but definitely not a textbook.)

[0] [https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic](https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic) [1]
[https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/294/294857/learning-from-
dat...](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/294/294857/learning-from-
data/9780241258767.html)

------
codetrotter
Might also be worth mentioning how much a GBP in 1912 is equivalent to today.

According to a random page [0] on Google, £100 in 1912 is equivalent in
purchasing power to about £11,497.41 in 2020.

[0]:
[https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1912](https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1912)

~~~
ellsthrow
Good to know I'd survive through not being able to afford a ticket!

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ketanmaheshwari
It was not clear to me what the Fare (British Pounds) means. As a user of this
simulation, am I supposed to know how much fare I paid?

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aliabd
Well, how much would you pay? This unfortunately is not adjusted for
inflation. Maybe a better slider would be economy, first class, etc

~~~
ZinniaZirconium
I'm a stowaway.

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lultimouomo
Is it just me or the fare variable mostly does not work I get one result with
0 Pounds, and an other single one for all values >0

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corin_
I found the same, might be a bug or could be that the data used (at least for
your and my demographics - I'm 30/male) only differentiates between paying
customers va crew?

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xvector
It would be nice to see the distribution behind the numbers alongside the
actual "survive/perish" graph.

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ornxka
Unfortunately it seems to have been hugged to death...

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aliabd
Fixed now :)

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tiagorbf
Can you achieve more than 50% surviving rate?

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helb
it gives me 50/50 for a 30 year old woman (regardless of fare), and the
survival rate grows when i decrease the age, even to 82 % for 2-5 year olds

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sindaccos
horrible UI on mobile for the sliders and the screenshot does not look good at
all

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aliabd
Thanks for the feedback, we’re still nailing down mobile responsiveness!

