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Comment by fhsdfgdv | Hacker News Reader

talking on an iPhone, by yourself, especially late at night, then you're asking for trouble.

Please don't apply your standards other cities of the world. What you described does not happen in my (capital) city. In fact if you drop something, you will likely get it back.

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He said in a dodgy area.

Pray tell what is this magical city you live in that does not have a single dodgy area.

If by dodgy you mean areas where people regularly steal and harass, then no, we don't.

OK, I'll rephrase to "a lot of other cities in the world" - London, New York, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, Rome. All of them have their fair share of dodgy places that you should approach cautiously.

What city do you live in, by the way? The only city I know of deservedly with this reputation is Singapore.

> Warsaw

I'm deliberately singling this one out as a point of pride:

Where in Warsaw can't you walk down the street reading your iPhone?

I'll concede pickpocketing can be an issue on buses, and racism is very much an issue in present times. Issues with muggings, though?

I didn't get mugged, but I was getting a coach to Radom, and the bus station didn't feel like a crime-free paradise. That said, I've spent quite a bit of time in Poland as well (mostly in Kaszubia), and the only trouble I had was in Krakow (and it was me being stupid that led to it). So no complaints about Warsaw at all, just pointing out that most of the time, I didn't feel any more or less safe in Warsaw than Rio.

Under USSR rule, many cities like St Petersburg were extremely safe and children would roam the streets even at night.

They indeed would roam the streets, but to claim safety you need reliable statistics which didn't exist in USSR. So, your safety claim is likely overstated

I can't think of a place in Ottawa that I wouldn't feel comfortable wandering around late at night with my phone out.

I'd say the same for Vancouver or Victoria.

too many bicycles are stolen in vancouver to wholeheartedly agree with you on that one.

Property crime is commonplace in Vancouver, given that we've always been the heroin capital of North America. Violent crime like muggings, however, are very rare. The addicts are not confrontational.

I grew up in Ottawa and was going to try and name a place but couldn't think of one either.

Yet to find a dodgy area in Singapore. I think they don't exist.

One of the smallest and most richest countries in the world, the city of Rio de Janeiro is bigger in size and in population, just the city.

Not even Geylang?

Not even Geylang. It has more character than the rest of Singaporean neighbourhoods for sure but hardly qualifies as dodgy. It's tame compared to even the best parts of Johor for example which is just across the water.

Singapore, probably.

I'm not sure about the tone of that message, but I have lived in several cities where this was the case: Oslo, Singapore, Helsinki, Stockholm come to mind as places where even “dodgy” areas have had until recently very little instances of systematic robberies.

Can't say about the others, but I didn't feel much safer in Stockholm when I worked there for a couple of months in 2005. I didn't think it was particularly dangerous, but I would say the same of Rio.

I probably should have referred explicitly to that experiment: http://www.rd.com/culture/most-honest-cities-lost-wallet-tes... It came out when I was living in Helsinki, and my colleague first concern was to find out what could have happened to the twelfth wallet. I asked if anything would come back intact, and their response was telling: “Not phones. If a phone is found lost, I would upgrade software: you don’t want to risk security. Then find the owner.”

One anecdote that might be telling: someone left their wallet in front of me in Stockholm metro. I was concerned, trying to imagine a way to get it back to him; the Swede sitting opposite me was surprised that I didn’t know I could hand it to any employee of SL safely.

The chance to be involved in an armed robbery are small in every big city in the world. Based on anecdotes people will always over or under exaggerate the chances.

Just to give a counter example: I lived in Brussels, Philadelphia, Oslo, Sao Paulo... the only place about which I have a first hand "armed robbery" story was in Oslo of all places: a coworker got actually shot in the back when he bravely (but stupidly) turned his back and said "no, you are not going to shoot me".

He was lucky and was only a couple of weeks out but he carried his X-rays of the bullet with him because nobody would believe him otherwise.

Most if not all of Switzerland is the same.

There are still some incidents that happen from time to time. In Geneva I've heard of someone going out for a smoke from a hotel accros from the main train station, and getting everything robbed; I've also heard of someone being beat up to the point of loosing an eye in Nyon (a town near Geneva). We also had the famous case of a guy who picked up hitchhikers, assaulted them before killing and abducting their bodies. Did so 11 times before he got caught [0].

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Peiry

That's a far cry from being unsafe cities :)

Sure, there are isolated anecdotes like the ones you quote - but there is not a single area of either Geneva or Nyon where I wouldn't walk around with an iPhone at night (I grew up in the Nyon region, then moved to Geneva's as a teenager FWIW). The worst that you can expect is someone trying to sell you drugs, or begging, or getting into a drunken argument (like basically anywhere in the world where humans live)

Not to mention, that's probably the "worst" region of the country - I live in Bern now and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would not bring your iPhone back to you should you leave it on the sidewalk at night.

This must be Scandinavia...

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