Hats off to Vivek.
However, I still think it's a damn shame that HackerRank needed such a high-profile incident before reconsidering their shady arrangement involving probably-automated DMCA takedowns against GitHub repositories. Either they didn't know what that would incur on open source repositories hosted on GitHub and other platforms, or they just didn't care about it as long as it wouldn't cause a huge fuss for themselves (which it did in this case).
As a YC backed company, it seemed like almost everything on HackerNews was known about within the company when I was there.
This could just be another case of a problem being solved by hitting the news and making enough waves.
Sure they did the right thing, but it was still their active wrongdoing and I won't attribute their reaction to them being decent people. I'm tired of all the DMCA abuse, and reverting it for once isn't worthy of special praise. It makes HackerRank better than other DMCA abusers, but DMCA abusers they still are.
To me it looks like a well calculated PR action. I'll change my mind when they make it up to other teams they wronged.
It felt like many on HN didn't buy it either, and it is a pattern seen so often with many a company.