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Ironically, Klarna, a Swedish-founded company, is pretty big in the BNPL market

according to https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-buy-now-pay-later-wave...

"In Sweden, home to BNPL provider Klarna, installments accounted for 23% of e-commerce transactions last year."


Klarna is huge in the UK too.

I'm inclined to believe another commenter who suggested that millennials and younger don't really like credit cards, and this is a different way to get a similar thing – better cash flow.


Sorry, I should have said Germany instead of Europe since the European market is pretty diverse.

The German word for debt is schuld(Schulden), which has the same meaning as guilt and is associated with something bad.


Unsurprisingly, the same word in Swedish is skuld, with the same double meaning.


As an Australian living in Germany I've got to point out that finances in Germany are just as dysfunctional as Australia. Just in completely opposing ways. Both are a burden on sustainable growth and development.

For some examples of Germany's issues it's worth looking at the weak state of retail banking (Deutsche Bank / Commerzbank proposed merger), and the financial scandals.


The Germans are so spooked by debt they rather hand the debt to weaker countries even though the German economy can sustain much higher debt levels than their neighbors. It's completely backwards.


Zoox was acquired by Amazon last year.


https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/141888964970820813...

this tweet says it's BS (they validated the japan sample)


According to the Tweet, the leaker provides a claimed data sample that is a list of phone numbers without any additional information.

A list of 3.8 billion phone numbers that simply exist is useless. The leak would only have value if the numbers were associated with some identifying information.

If it’s really only phone numbers, I wonder if it’s a leak or if someone brute-forced all possible phone numbers against a ClubHouse API that leaked information about whether or not the number existed in their database.


If Clubhouse can’t detect >3.8B erroneous requests and shut down that API/microservice, that destroys my confidence more than a data breach.


Clubhouse didn't have 3.8B users.. why would they have 3.8B phone numbers?

This whole thing seems made up.


Because they encourage users to upload their contacts so they can connect them on the platform. At one point when it was invite-only these uploaded contacts were the only way to invite friends.


A fair share of my phone numbers are bogus(old numbers, info I store as a phone number even if its not) so the db extracted from here would be dubious


Last I heard, they had around 10M users. Since they employ the, what I would consider, dark pattern of heavily encouraging folks to upload their contact list, that comes out to an average of 380 people per person. Given the Clubhouse user base demographics, I find this at least plausible.


I'd say it's even more of a dark pattern than that. They didn't encourage me to "upload my contact list" but rather "give access to my contacts" (or something like that) Perhaps the difference is trivial in how it's coded yet even though I've removed their access to my contacts, they still have my contacts. I think they should have to delete them whenever I remove their access, or not even upload them in the first place but just read them when necessary.

Also, some apps seem to do this with photos, asking for access, does anyone know if these apps also upload all of one's photos once the user grants permission on iOS?


> does anyone know if these apps also upload all of one's photos once the user grants permission on iOS

That would eat up a lot of bandwidth. I suspect someone would notice it. An app could extract a lot of information from the metadata though, assuming it had access (I'm not sure how permissions on iOS work currently). It could also potentially run facial recognition algorithms locally (not sure how well that would work in practice though).


I really like that point about the bandwidth and also about the metadata and facial recognition.

I guess I just wish we had more insight into what info companies take and how, permissions on iOS and Android seem to be getting more granular and yet still seem quite broad to me.


I’m particularly fond of iOS’s new “selected photos only” setting, but apps really don’t support it well in general (so I chose not to use them anymore). Instagram used to support it decently well, but in a recent update they removed the “select more” button and my usage of Instagram has dropped dropped dramatically since.


I mean, I like it in theory, however I find it can be really cumbersome. I don't see why they can't just have me open my "pick a photo" browser on iOS without needing access to the photos. Seems odd that choosing photos from the OS can't just be the default option.


When an app first requests access to photos, it’s one of the options listed in the system permissions dialog, so it’s virtually the default. The problem isn’t that, it’s that once you’ve picked the “selected photos only”, apps can choose to make it a pain to pick additional photos if they don’t add a UI element for it. Given that Instagram had it before and then removed it, I can only assume that the real reason is to try to coerce users into granting all access (nice try FB, but not going to happen for me!).


Oh wow I didn't know this. From what I see on iOS, IG still lets me Manage>Select more photos, whereas WhatsApp has a tiny "You've given WhatsApp access to only a select number of photos. Manage" at the top.

So now I've set all to Selected Photos and will just click manage and add extra photos when I need them. So much easier than I had thought, thank you!!


> From what I see on iOS, IG still lets me Manage>Select more photos

Weird! That option is missing from mine as of about a few weeks ago when doing a normal post. Stories’s picker gives me the option to “Manage”, but no where can I find the option for normal posts as of the last app update. Would you mind sharing a screenshot? I’d love to see if our UIs are different in some way. My contact info is in my profile here if you prefer to share privately.


Ohhh, no I hadn't looked there. I just checked my normal posts function and it also does not let me "manage photos.

Where I originally found it was in the messaging feature of IG.


Hadn’t noticed it was in messaging still. Guess that’s another avenue to add more selected photos. Really b/s on them imho.


That would only be true if it were 380 _unique_ contacts per person. Surely there is significant overlap from user to user.


See my reply to sibling comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949879


Shouldn't it be 380 distinct people?


Not necessarily. Do we know every single number in the 3.8B is unique? I’ve seen zero proof of that, but maybe I missed it.


I'm pretty sure that would qualify as the number being "made up".

If anyone disagrees, I'm happy to sell my database of 100B valid phone numbers.


> I'm pretty sure that would qualify as the number being "made up".

Not necessarily. Let me give you an example, if there’s other metadata included with a specific contact list entry, it would be valuable to have duplicate numbers, as that extra metadata could then be leveraged potentially.


they didn't "validate" anything, they just opened the csv. also i'd be interested in their take on the second column, that looks like clubhouse's scoring system (which they ran without telling anyone, likely for marketing purposes, according to this* article). if so, you can in fact tell which numbers are more significant than others.

*https://futurezone.at/apps/clubhouse-leakt-38-milliarden-tel...


Hmm, so the "highest" numbers would be publicly-knowable numbers anyway (because they are the numbers to dial and contact the government/customer service of a private company).

If this is only a list of numbers and their relative popularity, the best you can do is accusation of adultery (and even in that, you could say that you're "popular" because coworkers also store your numbers).



> "I can think of a number of countries who would love to convince Amazon to modify Facebook Messenger to bypass end-to-end encryption, for example."

How exactly can this be done?


Well, if you can modify the client, then you simply, dont encrypt the messages.


If it's an important meeting, it's expected that you've gone through previous reviews with other people who would've given you that feedback

If there are issues that have not been caught until that important meeting, you'll get feedback to come back with the concerns addressed


You are right that HM have little influence, you "hire for Amazon", not for any specific team.

And with the process changes in the US (and EU), candidates are now given the option of picking the team they want to join (which can be different from the interview-HM's team).


This needs to be upvoted a bit more. The article is clickbait, and most comments in this thread reflect how effective it is at it.

The hiring process for corp employees makes the practice the article is claiming very, very, very hard to do.

There's bar raiser, there are 2-3 additional interviewers, and the hiring manager. The initial voting process is blind. The HM would need to be very very good at convincing the BR+others in order to hire a candidate that they don't want (this is assuming no one wants the candidate).

Plus, there are a bunch of other incentives countering you to hire someone that you don't want - it costs money, it eats up your allocated headcount, and it's going to take a while for you to onboard the new hire, which is going to eat up your team's bandwidth.




I always found it curious that Whitney would associate herself with Badoo, but I guess that's business as usual.

Pre-Tinder, Badoo was a fast growing dating app that was shady af, full of dark patterns on the site/app - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sexual-network [2011]

Then this came out a while ago, and I can't say I was surprised how the founder is portrayed https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2019/07/08/exclusi...

(and I would also not be surprised at all if I found out that Bumble's data was being sold to others - AFAIK no signs of that currently happening)


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