Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

sph

Crappy article, with no mention of which country each of this company is based. I've done the research for them:

* Nuri: Germany

* Klarna: Sweden

* Getir: Turkey

* Gorillas: Germany

* Zapp: Germany (unsure)

* Kry: Sweden

* Hopin: United Kingdom

FWIW, I've never heard of any of them. Sounds like they're all startups. 'Tis not a great time for startups, but I wouldn't cry for "the tech company layoffs have hit Europe" just yet. The whole startup market has been extremely overvalued for a while, a little downturn is not necessarily cause for panic, in fact might be healthy.

View on HN

Klarna is quite large, and I'm a bit surprised to see them on the list since I thought they were doing quite well and there's real economies of scale in their business (digital payments & financing). As for the rest, meh.

They had massive losses recently, I guess rising interest rates makes tough times even for loan sharks.

I think meh sums up this article pretty well.

Letting go of 10% of staff is bad but pretty common, it doesn't mean the company is going bankrupt.

Their USP is interest-free loans, I’ve used them for very large purchases for sheer convenience.

But as soon as the loan is not interest free any sane customer will just use their credit card and avoid the adjustable rate trap.

The customers who don’t have a credit card represent a whole different line of business and a shitty one in a bear market.

At least here in Finland Klarna engages in borderline-shady tactics. They use all the dark patterns you can think of to get your personal identity number even if you choose a payment method that doesn't require it, presumably to combine data from various sources. They skip the difficult identity-verification steps to make the checkout go faster, which of course means they can be easily used for fraud, and it falls to the unfortunate bystander whose identity was stolen to report the fraud and return the goods.

I and a lot of friends avoid Klarna checkouts to the point of choosing a more expensive shop or ordering from outside the country.

And they have done so for many years and seem to have a huge market share. I am suprised to see them characterized as a start-up. For me they are an established shady business I'd always avoid.

For those who don't understand the problem: The Finnish legal system does not understand the difference between identification and authentication: By using someone's national personal id you can make debt and the owner of the id has little chances of not having to pay it back.

Hopin is a virtual conference system ("conference" as in tech conference). It got a lot of traction due to the pandemic and seems very popular, and I've used it both as a guest and as a presenter.

However the system itself is kind of odd. They've taken the literal approach to tracks, sessions, backstage, etc. which has lots of drawbacks - eg. it's completely modal - you cannot be in two sessions at once or easily jump between sessions without everything resetting. You have no visibility of what's happening elsewhere: we had to station someone on the home screen to tell new visitors to press a particular session button because otherwise you wouldn't know where the action is happening. The interface is clunky in many small ways too - there is chat which is threaded, but it doesn't work like any other chat I've used. As a presenter it wasn't very clear to me when I was actually live "on stage".

So I don't think it's the pinnacle of virtual conference software. As with video conferencing, I think someone is going to find a formula one day which massively disrupts this space.

If you lived in a city where something like Gorrillas or Getir have a presence, then it’d be impossible not to know of them. They advertise like crazy and you see their delivery drivers and dark stores all over.

From Sweden. The two Swedish companies are very well known. Klarna specifically is huge.

Klarna manages Swiss e-post

I guess it's expected with Kry as the COVID industry is winding down.

I'm only using them now because the US still requires departure tests. But all European travel is easy now.

Zapp is a UK startup.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zapp-c764

My only insight is from what I heard in the all-in podcast. They were saying that the VC market is pretty much shut and this will likely be the case as long as the Fed is applying hard brakes on monetary policy, so loss making startups that relied on the next round of fund raising need to assume no more money for at least a couple of years, and restructure their burn rate to survive that long. Hence the layoffs.

One more data point, me. Never heard of any of the startups in the linked article. That one links another article about startups that are hiring. Among them I know Bitmovin (I didn't know it's in Austria) and Algolia (I didn't know it's French.)

Fwiw, I've heard of (not used, heard of) at least two of those in the UK - and not the one you say is UK-based.

I appreciate the economic sentiment of your comment. On the other hand it still sucks for anyone who got laid off.

Turkey is in Europe now?

Has always been.

Not physically, not politically, not culturally. In what way is Turkey in Europe?

Plays football and basketball in their European federations. Probably any other sport too. Apart from that I personally think of Turkey as Middle East, Asia.

Just look at them. Their skin being 1% darker than Greeks clearly means they aren’t European.

Physically due to it's geography(the arbitrary division of Asia/Europe aside, Turkey has a very significant population(over 10 Million people) on its officially European lands), culturally due to it's history(The Ottoman Empire has had its significant chunk in Eastern Europe), Culturally(Turks have quite an European culture despite the Islamic influence. That's what happens when you live for generations in Europe. Do I have to mention that the roots of many European cultures are in Turkey. Have you heard of Hagia Sofia for example?). The Turkish economy and Turkish institutions are deeply integrated with the European ones, that's still true despite the damage the Erdogan caused.

It's True that Turks are not much like the Germans or the Dutch but they are like the Greeks, the Spanish and the Hungarians.

The camels and the belly dancers are Tourist attractions. Not to be confused with how Turks live.

You mention the past. So many things have changed since then.

I am Spanish and I take offence at being compared to a Turk.

Turkey is a Muslim country that is completely placed in Asia with forced marriage and honour killings. There have been recent talks of bringing back the death penalty[]. Erdogan is the true face of the country despite the whitewashing that had been happening in the recent decades.

[]https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkish-leaders-agree-dea...

Turkey is not a muslim country but a country with majority of its population being muslim. Forced marriages and honour killings are illegal activities in the rural regions that are becoming thing of the past thanks to the active measures taken. Arranged marriages are still common in the rural parts but almost non-existent in the cities.

And no, Turkey has no death penalty. Politicians may say that they would re-introduce it when they speak to their extremist voters and they had the political power for a decade to re-introduce but they never did. Do you know why? Because it's an extremely unpopular among the Turks.

I think you need a reality check.

The fact that you are a self-admitted bigot (taking offense at being compared to any member of an entire group is the definition of bigotry)doesn't entitle you to change history or geography.

Turkey is geographically partly in Europe. Istanbul sits on the historical border between Europe and Asia, and there is a chuck of land west of Istanbul that is Turkish. In fact, there are parts of Turkey on the European mainland that are farther west than much of Ukraine or Moldova.

Islam is an important part of the culture of many European countries - Spain in particular has significant historical Muslim influence, especially in your architecture. Several majority-Muslim countries are firmly in Europe - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia. There are significant Muslim minorities in a few other countries - Bulgaria, Cyprus, Montenegro, Georgia. Even in Western Europe, there are significant Muslim minorities in many of the old colonial empires - France, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK.

Not to mention, Turkey is still a secular country, even if Erdogan seems poised to turn it towards fundamentalism unfortunately.

A man could have seen both the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the Moors being driven out of Spain in the same lifetime; yet you let the Turks take credit for the pre-conquest Hagia Sophia (which they didn't build), while also subordinating Spanish civilization to their Moorish predecessors.

I did neither of those things.

The importance of the Hagia Sophia being in Turkey is to remind everyone that that land is indeed part of Europe, and has deep cultural ties to other parts of Europe, even if it was later conquered by the Turks. Anyone claiming that Istanbul is not part of Europe has to also claim that Constantinople was not a part of Europe. Not to mention, the Turks borrowed a great deal of culture from the Byzantines whose land they conquered. It's not like they burned down their cities and killed all the people - the Ottoman Empire was to a great extent built around the legacy of the Byzantine (Roman) empire. Even ethnically, most Turks today are much closer to the Greeks and Romans living in Byzantium than to the original Turkish conquerors (who were of Mongol descent), at least in the western parts of the country.

The Hagia Sophia can also act as a nice symbol of this: it is largely identical to the church that emperor ~Julian~ Justinian commissioned (the last Roman emperor to ever hold Rome, though only briefly), but it has been repurposed as a mosque, with two minarets added and several parts of the church re-painted for Islamic sensibilities. An Islamic church built on the structure of the old Roman/Greek one.

As for Spain, the situation is similar: when the medieval Europeans invaded Spain and (re-)conquered it, they then borrowed quite a bit from the culture that the Moors left behind there, as is plainly visible in Spanish architecture of the time and later, even up to the present. Of course, the Moors themselves had been influenced by the Roman & Spanish culture that they found when they originally conquered the peninsula themselves.

Edit: small correction - Justinian conquered Rome and had the Hagia Sophia built, not Julian.

So you’re just going full mask off and telling us you’re a bigot? Spain being a major contributor to racism and not always considered white must pain you.

What an absolutely preposterous comment.

>Turkey has a very significant population(over 10 Million people) on its officially European lands),

Because of forced population transfers in the 20th century. European Turkey is no more European than the Falklands are Argentine.

>The Ottoman Empire has had its significant chunk in Eastern Europe

Yes, a loathed, parasitic, alien occupation, which was overthrown at the earliest opportunity.

> Do I have to mention that the roots of many European cultures are in Turkey. Have you heard of Hagia Sofia for example?

Are you insane? The Hagia Sofia was built by Greeks centuries before the Turks arrived off the steppe.

>they are like the Greeks, the Spanish and the Hungarians.

The Greeks Spanish and Hungarians would likely regard this comparison as insulting.

Lebanon is more European than Turkey is.

So? Peace in Europe is something unusual and we were lucky to have it from 1945 to 2022. The history of Europe is a bloodbath and the Turks took part in it. It's one of the reasons why Turkey is a European country, actually.

>Are you insane? The Hagia Sofia was built by Greeks centuries before the Turks arrived off the steppe.

Notice how the ancient Greek stuff is in Turkey now. Unlike the British, Turks did not move it. That's why I say the ancient European history is in Turkey, that's why Turkey is a European country.

Apart for the dominant religion, Everything about Turkey is European. Oh, and the dominant European religion has deep roots in Turkey and I'm not talking just about Hagia Sophia.

You should take a long vacation in Turkey. Huge enlightenment awaits you.

> You should take a long vacation in Turkey. Huge enlightenment awaits you.

Certainly not for people with a clearname online presence, as you will land in a Turkish jail. Huge enlightenment awaits you there.

Respectfully disagree. The line is not arbitrary. Turkey is the beginning of Asia geographically, culturally and historically. Hagia Sophia is not Turkish-made (obviously).They have an offensive military dogma towards all their neighbors and routinely fail every measure of "democratic" law. Erdogan still represents the majority and the government is in bed with the extreme right party. They invaded Iraq and Syria, they routinely suppress their Kurdish minority.

It's not Europe, as much as I wish it was

Can you give some arguments instead of statements? For example, maybe you can explain your reasoning why do you think that Turkey is geographically in Asia? Maybe you can explain why do you think that Turkey, the successor of an empire with more than 500+ years in Europe is Asian? A country deeply integrated with Europe is culturally asian?

Then we can see if you have a point. There's no use to disagree by just saying something different and give no reasoning.

And the "They invaded Iraq and Syria" statement is so ridiculous that I don't see point in arguing over it. If it's not clear, Google the topic and look closely at the dates of the military activities of UK/France/USA in these countries. You should also Google for George Bush and Tony Blair. Check out the British sentiment for Tony Blair's dealings with Bush. Look closely, why the British leftist are still bitter with Tony Blair's affair with George Bush? Look for videos of "Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf".

Boers have been in Africa for 400 years, so I suppose that makes them just as African as the Zulu?

Of course they are. There are a lot of Europeans that are descendent of Africans too. What's your argument here? Skin tone not satisfactory?

> They invaded Iraq and Syria

So have other NATO countries, so, if anything, I would say this makes them MORE European, not less.

Invading other countries? That’s as European as as you can get besides colonizing as a whole.

In bed with hard right wing? Welcome to a lot of Europe.

Suppressing minorities that aren’t white? Again. Welcome to Europe.

Failing democratic law? Welcome to multiple European countries.

You just gave the best endorsement for Turkey to be European. Unless the real truth is simply “not white” (to you).

The small chunk of land north-west of Istanbul is considered part of Europe. The rest is Asia.

Why are Europe and Asia considered two continents? I wonder if some people would love for Israel to be considered European…but of course not the rest of the area around it…you know why. Wink wink.

>Why are Europe and Asia considered two continents?

Because the ancient Greek cartographers thought they were clearly separated, and the convention just stuck. Of course its easier for us to see it differently with satellite imagery.

I was inferring modern racism is why it is nearly embedded into our culture. I don’t think so many people would have issues with Turkey being European if they were paler and Christian.

Well, partly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Turkey

The company in question does seem to be headquartered in Istanbul, on the European side of the strait: https://goo.gl/maps/23aKqwx2xRtdHU4A6

Constantinople

What do you mean? It hasn't been called Constantinople in a long time.

Just some joke. Constantinople was it's European name

Reply on news.ycombinator.com