Hacker News Reader

micvon People killed by terrorism per year in western Europe 1970-2015

Bollocks. Some slip through, but vastly more attacks are stopped unless you think all of the people in prison for terrorism offences are a fiction.

micvon People killed by terrorism per year in western Europe 1970-2015

All of these can be true without changing my point. The security services have grown vastly more capable through experience and advancement in tech which results in modern terror groups failing vastly more often than not.

The IRA were vastly more capable than the Islamic terrorists we face in the UK today, but they never had to face a security service as well equipped to deal with them.

micvon People killed by terrorism per year in western Europe 1970-2015

http://metro.co.uk/2017/05/25/five-terror-plots-thwarted-sin...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/28/britain-foil...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-westmi...

It's a pretty constant news feature.

micvon People killed by terrorism per year in western Europe 1970-2015

I can't edit, but states on terror deaths in the UK are hilariously skewed by how much harder they are to pull off now than they used to be. We pretend the problem is no big deal because bombs don't go off that often, but for every one that gets to the mass-murder stage there're probably at least a dozen that flunk out early.

The low, low price for this is our inching ever closer to police state status. No big deal, right.

micvon People killed by terrorism per year in western Europe 1970-2015

I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but in the UK the only thing keeping us from numerous terror attacks per year is the panopticon we've allowed our security services to build. They are stopping numerous attacks every year. This doesn't feel like a win to me.

micvon Apple's cash hoard swells to $246B

The amount of money involved in an Apple takeover now would be beyond enormous. Even assuming they paid no premium on the current share price whatsoever, which is rather unlikely, they would have to stump up $500 billion or so. I strongly suspect it would be the largest such deal ever made though I'm too lazy to look it up.

micvon When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners

Eastern European states fill that role in the EU, though I'm not sure how great the scale of that is.

micvon Chrome 55 chooses HTML5 over Flash by default, drastically reduces RAM usage

They seem to have at least made iPlayer available without Flash now. That was a nice surprise.

micvon The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline

I couldn't agree more with this. I generally prefer command-line tools like vim and gdb, but for getting a view on things like file history or browsing the output of tools like callgrind? GUIs are the way to go. Horses for courses.

micvon $12M stolen from 1,400 convenience store ATMs across Japan in 2 hours

I'm not sure it's population density or at least not that alone. There are parts of the West with comparably high densities, especially in large cities, and covering your face is generally frowned upon.

I suspect that the cultural focus on cleanliness has a lot to do with it, but given that it's Hacker News there may be someone with a more exact idea of the origin.

micvon LogMeIn acquires Lastpass

1password for Android is free for the basic edition. The Windows & OSX bundle doesn't cost anything like $80 ($42 atm).

micvon How Swift is Swift?

I'm a decade in. I know what you mean about complex hierachies, but inheritence is a very, very dangerous tool; you either take the time to review the results, or you suffer the consequences. That's where the review by senior developers comes in. You learn or you don't. Who would want to work with devs who don't?

micvon How Swift is Swift?

Anyone who inherits from a class and accidentally overrides a method is a hopeless case or a newbie needing basic review from a senior dev. The bugs are on them. They can either test that their inheritence works, learn from the mistake, or they can piss off and find a new career emptying bins, flipping burgers, or whatever they fancy that doesn't involve making sure that what they just did will work beyond the immediate function.

micvon Dell XPS 13 Review

Fair enough, but if someone's producing terabytes of data I can't imagine that they'll be satisfied with any laptop's storage for too long.

micvon Dell XPS 13 Review

If, after years of trying, OEMs still can't produce a trackpad on par with Apple's offerings, that's on them, not their potential customers who are turned off by the absence.

micvon Dell XPS 13 Review

What are your usage patterns?

I've found 256GB to be a bit of a sweet spot. I can't get everything I would ever want on the disc, but it's enough with maintenance and uninstalling things I'm no longer using to any great extent. And the performance advantage of an SDD is so ridiculously nice that I would never give it up for a bit of extra convenience.

If you're doing things that are seriously space heavy like video editing, you'd probably need an external storage source to make up the difference. But for coding and general use, I find it to be more than enough.

Saying that, I'm sure there are developers out there who couldn't live in 256GB. I'm not sure how common they are but I'm sure they exist.

micvon AnandTech Acquired by Purch

Anand has left to work at Apple. How could he hold onto ownership without everyone and their dog bringing up the obvious conflict of interest every time the site gave a good review to Apple or a bad review to one of Apple's competitors? I've already seen people complaining about it on places like Reddit.

micvon Facebook's std::vector optimization

EA open sourced parts of their in-house STL. A Github clone can be found at:

https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL

I haven't looked at it myself but it might be an interesting start for those interested.

micvon It's Time to Kill Surface

Refusing to buy more from the company that sold him a pig in a poke is really the only useful recourse he has in our society unless he has an Internet megaphone to fall back on. Money talks and all that.

micvon Common LibreSSL porting mistakes

Stuff like this is why you need fresh, objective eyes to review critical code. It's too easy to miss things when you're deep in the weeds.

micvon Female Founders

Y'know, for a company that deals with funding founders to do their work, founder relations sounds like a pretty important job to me. Someone has to keep an eye on where that money's going. Maybe that's just naïve on my part but it sounds like it should matter a whole lot to keeping the enterprise going.

micvon Google Now's smartphone is the real deal

You should be able to get the first by setting an appointment in your google calendar. It certainly gives me a heads up for traffic when I set things in there for destinations it recognises.