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Comment by rvivek | Hacker News Reader

Hello again, Vivek, founder/CEO here. In the interest of moving swiftly, here are the actions we are going to take:

(1) We have withdrawn the DMCA notice for sympy; Sent a note to senior leadership in Github to act on this quickly.

(2) We have stopped the whole DMCA process for now and working on internal guidelines of what constitutes a real violation so that these kind of incidents don't happen. We are going to do this in-house

(3) We are going to donate $25k to the sympy project.

As a company we take a lot of pride in helping developers and it sucks to see this. I'm extremely sorry for what happened here.

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Hey Vivek,

I have received fake DMCA requests from WorthIT Solutions, Pakistan that you guys seems to have hired. It is sent for a simple blog entry discussing about programming algorithm!

I recommend training them or replacing them.

I guess it is pretty much perjury penalty risk free to make such DMCA declaration from outside of US:

>Declaration: I have taken fair use into consideration. I have a good faith belief that the use of the copyrighted materials as described above is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Unfortunately, that penalty has no teeth, regardless of where the filer is.

It would probably be prudent to withdraw your other DMCA notices until you figure this out. You're being given the benefit of the doubt, and the other counternotice on Github doesn't exactly portray you in the best light either.

It would probably be prudent to withdraw all existing notices, never submit one again, and send donations to every single project you have ever sent a DMCA notice to, and do everything in your power to get all content re-instated, everywhere.

You aren't even really a content company, this is such a bad look. Your value is in your network of people, not in the content.

Without a discussion of how/why you thought this would be a good idea and how this has been happening on an ongoing basis, we can't really accept your apology.

Regarding (3), are you going to make similar contributions to all of the other projects that you have issued unjustifiable takedown notices? As I see it, the only reason you are making this contribution is because you got called out in public and you are getting free PR.

Proportionate contributions to other projects and individuals would go a long way to showing that you are not just playing lip service to your admission of wrongdoing. You have hurt a lot of people, and you need to make amends for your shenanigans. At the very least, you need to comp any legal fees incurred by your actions.

Hello Vivek,

Personally I like Hacker Rank and consider it a good way to learn about new algorithms but at the same time I do not like the style of interviews that require it and it makes me wish I could leave the industry because it's a waste of time for people with a lot of practical experience and who have a good portfolio of apps/sites they've created.

That said, I would recommend not doing DMCA at all unless it's really serious. Sounds like your company has a lot of problems with this. Think StackOverflow, there are plenty of sites that copy it but I'm not aware of them going after anyone. If anything all the copying of a site makes it more of an authoritative source because a lot of people reference it.

I flat out refuse to be interviewed using it and if the company doesn’t drop the requirement, I drop them.

Same here, know lots of developers in the same boat.

HackerRank - the #1 way to find developers with zero self respect

also the #1 way to weed out self important idiots.

bad hacker rank tests are bad, but not all hacker rank tests are bad.

You don't have to insult people to get your argument across.

Could just say, for example, you don't think it's a disrespect to oneself to attend Hacker Rank tests and explain why.

it's fairly simple, at some point you have to evaluate somone technical skills to make sure they are suitble for the job, and well designed tests do that.

There is an abundance of bad tests out there, but blanket statements that you won't use a tool that is used for assessing candiates is just as rediculas as saying you won't give apply to jobs that ask for your cv to apply.

Well no, if a company is happy to pay six figures but lacks the desire to spend an hour or two pair programming or even just creating a tech test, their priorities are all wrong and I don’t want to work for them. Hiring is about people and not robots, so using automated tests like Hacker Rank that almost always have zero bearing on how a problem would be solved in a real environment is a testament to a lazy hiring process and an extremely poor reflection on the company. Don’t try to automate something that should intrinsically involve human interaction.

Comparing it to a CV is a false equivalence because it takes me O(1) effort to make and CV and O(n) to do some stupid timed algorithm test for every company that is interested in the value of my labour.

I understand why you're getting downvoted but I have to say that I agree with the gist of what you're saying. We use HackerRank mostly just to package a problem set and put a timer in place for upload, nothing more clever than that, so if someone pattern matched "HackerRank test" to "disrespectful" I would think of that as a severe red flag and move on to another candidate.

There are many "in good faith" steps that both parties must do in the interview process, wherein if either party drops the ball it really makes sense for both parties to cut their losses and move on; which I believe is what you are getting at.

> it's fairly simple, at some point you have to evaluate somone technical skills to make sure they are suitble for the job, and well designed tests do that.

There is employment contract for a trial period, because you only know how good coder is when they face real problems/code. Writing sort algorithms on white board might look cool, but in real world you will search internet for best algorithms for your case, look up generic one, so you will not make a trivial error writing it from memory, or just use equivalent of std::sort.

These kinds of tests can be easily cheated and they are a poor predictor of the quality of an engineer work in the real world.

I'd rather not work with people selected this way. There are plenty of companies using much better filtering processes.

You can call me whatever you'd like, but I'm a service provider and I have no obligation to offer my service to anyone.

StackOverflow contributions are (thankfully!) licensed under the very permissive CC-BY-SA license. I suspect the sites ripping them off are not infringing copyright.

>"As a company we take a lot of pride in helping developers and it sucks to see this."

I don't understand this because as others on this thread have pointed out you have done this before.

Further isn't much of your own content just plagiarized from other people's previous FAANG interviews?

I've never used HackerRank as I view it as something of scourge on the industry but I will probably go to extra effort and recommend to other that they not use it either.

Wow! Guess we will never know if this would have happened if it did not make it to the front page of HN.

Also @dang, has this post been pinned at the top of the page for everyone to see.

Edit: guess it's not..

Upvote it for the algo even though it doesn't make sense.

Don't upvote. They're only doing this for PR. Let their reputation be judged by their real world acts, not their marketing.

Or better, downvote it.

Hi Vivek, why was the DMCA filed in the first place?

Reading elsewhere in the thread it looks like they have been relying on firms in Pakistan and elsewhere to scour the internet for strings that appear in Hacker Rank and submit DMCA takedowns when they find these strings elsewhere. This becomes awkward when it is in fact Hacker Rank that copied the strings from the source they are DMCAing.

They should probably never send a DMCA again. It's political suicide in this industry anyway.

We really need a strikes policy for DMCA submitters built into the legislation. Like submit three dubious claims, and you lose your copyright. I've been saying it for literally 15 years.

That is how business is run in the US, but not exclusively. They don't want to have dirty hands and hired some company with specific profile to do this job for them. They took a time to find company like this. This is not an unexpected accident. And when things become hot, they blow some money to shut other mouths.

Shady practice for the bad people who got caught several times. Taking responsibility for them will be ceasing whole business. Just stop doing bad things.

>Reading elsewhere in the thread it looks like they have been relying on firms in Pakistan and elsewhere to scour the internet for strings that appear in Hacker Rank and submit DMCA takedowns when they find these strings elsewhere.

Who ever thought this was a good idea? Those firms and the "monkeys" they hire have an incentive to send takedowns everywhere to make it look like they are "doing something".

But since there are no consequences for sending them to the wrong places, I guess they don't care much.

Except hitting HN frontpage

"As a company we take a lot of pride in helping developers"

Oh really? You: commoditize humans by reducing them to a score, you: destroy their public contributions

Sounds like you're a pretty terrible dev advocate. You should be ashamed to show your username and affiliation on HN.

Nice I suppose these were the pointers given to you by your PR team? What prompted (2) after all this time, considering there are previous instances of HackerRank acting hostile?

I presume making the first page of HN was the prompt.

Would you have done it had it not come to HN's attention? Don't bother answering this, it's rhetorical, and I'd expect a lie for an answer, anyway.

You've abused many other projects, some linked in the comments here, but you only seem to act when there's sufficient apparent public outrage.

As far as (2) is concerned there is only one solution

1) register the copywrite of the tools you have written inhouse for hacker rank and 2) ONLY issue DMCA claims based on your registered copywrites.

The questions and peoples answers to them are not something you should EVER have even considered issuing takedown notices for.

"For now" isn't enough, it needs to be "for good."

Curious how things got to the point where it took public outrage on HN to move the needle on this issue. Legal department going crazy with stuff without you realizing it maybe?

Repentance was the last thing I expected to find in here, and it did go a long way towards lowering my blood pressure.

Please don’t ever use DMCA in this way again. Even if it were somehow borderline justifiable, your users will be motivated to lambaste your company into oblivion, and to wish non-existence upon your company. Probably not the best posture for anybody concerned.

I hope other companies take note as well.

Mate its not repentance, its just his PR team.

Dmca as process should be stopped, you buffoon

It is better to stop doing business. I guess!

> Hello again, Vivek, founder/CEO here. In the interest of moving swiftly, here are the actions we are going to take:

So you are taking action only after news spilled all over the internet? So I can assume that if no one(in internet terms) known about it (as described in links pointing to other DMCA cases), you would do nothing to remedy your illegal (from moral stand point of view, no real one) actions.

It's only illegal if you get caught and find someone willing to prosecute you. Also if penalty for breaking law is a fine, then this law only applies to poor people.

You are not really sorry and will do this again. I won't be using HackerRank for my recruitment purposes.

Thank you for stepping up and taking this seriously and quickly helping to restore the SymPy Documentation to the internet.

And what are you doing about this one? https://gist.github.com/TheRayTracer/baafd4a9eea152d1911c5f5...

“For now”

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