Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whatch 1789 days ago
Shouldn't it be 380 distinct people?
1 comments

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.