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Hackerrank DMCA Notice
- dekken_ 5y agois there a better way to make these companies fail than just to not support the use of their tests during interviews?
- dotancohen 5y agoThe problem is with the laws, not with the companies that abide by those laws.
- jacquesm 5y agoIn this case the problem is with a company abusing the law, not abiding by it.
- pseudalopex 5y agoThe problem is with both.
- riffraff 5y agoto paraphrase a trite but true aphorism: "the things they do are not illegal" is a very low threshold for supporting a company.
- bbarn 5y agoIt's the only way, IMO. I am someone who tends to drift every few years from manager to individual contributor. Here's my take: As an engineer, I refuse to do tests and take home projects for interviews unless the company also offers to pay me for my time and the problem seems immediately relevant to the domain. There are few other fields one would ask to to perform your work product for them before hiring, and few that it would matter (being a chef is an example that comes to mind, but there are others I'm sure). As a manager, solving gotcha problems is rarely indicative of someone who will perform good at a development job. Give me someone who shows understanding of my stack via experience and understanding my business. These efforts to screen at this level by untrained people tells me the hiring manager is too disconnected from his hiring process, or just too lazy. All I want my HR team to do is scan resumes for at least some relevant experience before passing them on to me, and I provide them with plenty of examples, both on and off stack sometimes, of what that might look like. If I was going to suggest a take home project or a quiz app like this, I would already have dedicated enough of my time into vetting that person that I'd probably just invite them for an interview instead and do a live coding exercise with them.
- auslegung 5y agoIt would be a shame if thousands of people forked the listed repos and gists…
- sodality2 5y agoThey're all taken down already. Forks are a̶u̶t̶o̶m̶a̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ manually enumerated by the DMCA'er and removed
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 5y agoThere's one really good reason why you don't want centralized source code control handed off to some US corporation.
- ekianjo 5y agoYou don't need to put "US" there, government/corporation overreach is a thing in every country.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoMost countries couldn't care less about imaginary US property. The US forces them to care via trade agreements.
- elzbardico 5y agoIndeed, but they DO care about THEIR imaginary property, and because of that they usually don't need to be forced to enter those trade agreements as you seem to believe.
- marcosdumay 5y agoMost countries start to care very quickly after the US calls them and discuss matters. Any centralization is fragile. Github is more fragile than what is possible, but there is little point on improving that.
- footlose_3815 5y agoI bet half of HR’s questions are stolen from someone else anyway. I hope ppl who write coding questions for a living check their site out for stolen exercises they’re so concerned about.
- cute_boi 5y agoMost of them are simple modification of algorithm course like A star algorithm, DFS, BFS and they have gall to dmca repo. Idk how can HR is so spineless to report such DMCA. Companies shouldn't use such platform to write coding question.
- kamaal 5y agoIndeed. The standard practice while designing these questions is to take what already exists(Classic DS/Algo questions, questions on other OJ sites) and then add puzzle aspects to them, or a slight variation in the solution that involves a 'small trick' to it. Leetcode almost feels like the defacto question bank for people who want to do interview prep. People just take questions from there and add small variations to it. At this point in time this is worse than judging math skills by checking a persons memorisation of multiplication tables. Only people who ace these tests are unproductive at their current jobs, and spend whole days memorising these things. If you are hiring based on these tests. You are quite literally hiring wrongest possible people for the job. Nobody answering these questions are inventing novel algorithms for the questions asked.
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- cute_boi 5y agoBlocking entire repo for FindSubstring.java sounds a bit hostile? Also if the repo lets say contain general question like FindSubsring can they dmca whole repo. If I check on archive https://web.archive.org/web/20200921030437/https://github.com/arcturusInk/questionsAskedInInterviews/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200921030437/https://github.co... it doesn't look like this repo should be dmca ed.
- adrr 5y agoThey claim find substring question as their own art? I was asked this in the early 2000s and i am sure i asked this question to candidates in the mids 2000s. Someone should find proof of any early example they asked a candidate and DMCA hacker ranks cloud provider.
- formerly_proven 5y agoLiterally claiming copyright on this description for "find substring": "Given s and x, we want to know the zero-based index of the first occurrence of x in s" They also seem to claim copyright on renditions of "their" questions in various repositories containing interview notes in general, e.g. https://github.com/jayshah19949596/CodingInterviews/blob/master/Twilio%20Software%20Engineer%20-%20New%20Grad-Part-1/README.md https://github.com/jayshah19949596/CodingInterviews/blob/mas... There's also a number of URLs in here which have "leetcode" and not "hackerrank" in them. A sibling points out this golden nugget from the DMCA notice: "(the whole repository is infringing copyright as it contains the solution)" i.e. HackerRank is claiming that not only they own the copyright on "How to find the first occurrence of x in s?" but also every solution to that question, which is a completely ridiculous notion.
- imglorp 5y agoIs that a long enough sample for DMCA? That sounds more like fair use if it's only one sentence.
- forgetfulness 5y agoAny chance that it's an example solution copy pasted from their site?
- orlp 5y agoLooking through some of these URLs through Google cache, a lot of these contain verbatim copies of the problem text. Fair enough, legally speaking, if you are the copyright holder. However, in the DMCA itself HackerRank asks for the removal of entire repositories, claiming "the whole repository is infringing copyright as it contains the solution". This is a blatant lie, HackerRank is not an automatic copyright holder of any solutions to a problem they published.
- realce 5y ago> HackerRank is not an automatic copyright holder of any solutions to a problem they published That's an interesting point of view. You're saying the question text is copywrite-able but the logical conclusion of such a question is not?
- nikanj 5y agoThe same way you may copyright a writing prompt, but you won't automatically get copyright to stories inspired by said prompt
- nightcracker 5y agoCopying the question text verbatim certainly is copyright infringement (and I would guess unlikely to be fair use, but I'm not a lawyer). If you give the problem in your own words, it won't be, just like your solution isn't.
- thrower123 5y agoI bet Copilot will automatically solve most published leetcode-style interview problems. There's tens of thousands of repos out there.
- crossroadsguy 5y agoHackerrank also records videos and takes random screenshots of you when you are taking a tests. Unfortunately recruiters don’t inform about this in advance so that one could know about the privacy policy. When you are taking the test you’ve to give those permissions. I think those images can be seen by literally anyone at recruiting company (and then I guess at Hackerrank as well). edit: Context https://www.hackerrank.com/products/free-trial-search https://www.hackerrank.com/products/free-trial-search
- flippinburgers 5y agoTape over the webcam. Problem solved.
- fsflover 5y agoWhat about the microphone?
- josephcsible 5y agoProblem not solved. You won't get credit for passing the test if you do that.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago> Hackerrank also records videos and takes random screenshots of you when you are taking a tests. Isn't hacker rank a website? How could it possibly do that?
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- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- haaserd 5y agoLousy software platform backed up by legal action... The Silicon Valley story.
- _9rq6 5y agoGithub is a globally used site and US law takes precedence over all else. We need to decentralise the web.
- LinuxBender 5y agoThis has already been the case for git repositories since day one. What makes github unique is the workflow management for teams of developers. I think one of the issues is that people default to the easiest choice of using github or gitlab rather than self hosting their own system [1]. [1] - https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea
- trasz 5y agoThat's why the world needs platforms like https://gitee.com https://gitee.com.
- MadcapJake 5y agoHow will another centralized git host solve for US DMCA protection?
- yosito 5y agoHackerrank is a terrible platform.
- throwaway4good 5y agoIt is also a Y Combinator company: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/hackerrank https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/hackerrank
- jacquesm 5y agoYcombinator companies having some ethical challenges is nothing new either, unfortunately.
- lanecwagner 5y agoDon't use em.
- cannabis_sam 5y agoThe whole DMCA is an affront to humanity.
- vhold 5y agoThe DMCA is flawed, but even the EFF will defend the importance of the safe harbor it provides. https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca
- cannabis_sam 5y agoUnfortunately that’s an incredibly weak argument, since the need for safe harbors is a direct consequence of previous oppressive, draconian (and IMHO anti-humanity) legislation. I absolutely get why EFF is engaging with this from a practical perspective, but the longterm solution is to stop enacting insane and fascist legislation…
- cannabis_sam 5y agoLike, seriously you have no comeback…? Did you seriously think that flaunting EFF was enough…? I don’t get it…
- stillblue 5y agoThe Irony is amazing! So much stuff in hackerrank is copy/paste from other sites. And the site is super low quality to boot. This is pure wtfery.
- DeathArrow 5y agoI wonder if anyone took the time to fork the repos on another Git provider.
- DeathArrow 5y agoIf enough people will refuse to take Hackerrank tests, there will be no more Hackerrank, no more DMCAs. :)
- ldehaan 5y agoHacker rank is such a Joke. I'd never use them, and everyone I know who had used it found out that hiring people who call themselves Hackers because they can answer a quiz, aren't Hackers and suck in the workplace. ,........,........,........,........ Don't use these scammer companies, get someone who knows what they're doing to do your interviews. Or waste your money, you can do that too.
- olingern 5y agoIf anyone needed a lesson in bad PR for your company, here it is.
- wizardofmysore 5y agoCan we have something like github on top of bit-torrent?
- caymanjim 5y agoGitea is free. Host it anywhere you want. Invite anyone you want. You're still bound by the law somewhere, though.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoWe don't need git hosting at all. Git can be served off any computer with SSH access. You serve git off a raspberry pi. Github, gitlab, etc is just an overgrowth.
- jacquesm 5y agoGithub is, Gitlab is not because you can run it on-prem if you want.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoPoint is neither is even close to necessary using git. Git isn't a web application. It's a version control system.
- jacquesm 5y agoYes, but that's OT, the topic here is GitHub, not git.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoYeah, and my point is that it's mostly superfluous.
- jacquesm 5y agoYou are welcome to your opinion of course but Github has become a pretty essential part of the workflow for many projects, closed and open source both. That it is possible to work around that doesn't diminish that, it's just how people are currently using it. I would have preferred a much more decentralized solution, I always thought it was a mistake that the git core left room enough for the likes of Github to establish themselves as gateways to various projects.
- DarthNebo 5y agoWonder what percentage of the questions are genuine creations of Hackerrank & not just garbled up CS questions from other textbooks/generic code
- egfx 5y agoMy GitHub repo is on this list https://github.com/egfx/React-Leaderboard https://github.com/egfx/React-Leaderboard I was dumbfounded to receive this message yesterday. I made this project over 3 years ago and I didn’t even know about hacker rank at that time. This project was made because I was seeking a contract job and they asked me to create a leaderboard in react which i did with no code copying whatsoever. I implemented it in react hooks which wasn’t natively built into react so I used preact which had the newest feature set. If anything did hackerrank use my work to seed their tests? I see that as the likelihood. Also it could be because I used the text copy from the contracting job that asked me to create a leaderboard in the readme. In truth it could be either but this has become yet another pitch fork into a very difficult time where I have no job or money to do anything.
- egfx 5y agoBy the way if anyone reading knows about an opportunity for a frontend engineer please let me know immediately. But my only request is that I don’t participate in coding exams.
- jkeuhlen 5y agoMy company is hiring frontend engineers (React/Typescript stack), but we do have a technical coding interview. What exactly do you mean by "coding exams"? We have a ~2 hour, synchronous technical challenge that all of our engineers go through (as well as screening questions before that point). No leetcode style problems, no take-home tests though.
- game_the0ry 5y agoThis is funny. I take this as - folks pushed their hackerrank practice to share on github, and hackerrank is trying to stop github copilot from auto-filling answers to the question. It goes to show how useless hackerrank and leetcode type sites are. Also, if hackerank claims copywrite over answers, they can promptly go fuck themselves. Jokers. I really do hate hackerrank. Their platform is the worst for interviews, always buggy, autoformat and autcomplete never works, just an overall PoS. Update - reading the comments pissed me off even more. We as participants in the tech industry need to stop using hackerrank altogether, full stop, immediately. They're going after developers, their own target market, with threatening legal action - scumbag move.
- gopher_space 5y agoHackerrank is fantastic at filtering out companies I'd hate to work for.
- canyon289 5y agoMy blog is on this list. It was very surprising waking up on Saturday to learn my entire blog would be deleted for this, and I had 7 hours to fix it. Ended up using a repo cleaner to remove the file and i wasn't even sure it would be up today bit today but seems like I made it. I wrote the post 6 years ago when I was trying to break into a programming job. Turns out Hackerrank was worthless for that, and shifting my focus to OSS contributions was much more fruitful. Wrote a whole thread on twitter about it with more detail https://twitter.com/canyon289/status/1459524967306047494 https://twitter.com/canyon289/status/1459524967306047494
- oxfordmale 5y agoI noticed there are a few websites having found a work around for this by posting screenshots of the problem and solutions.
- srvmshr 5y agoAs a fun trivia: Today I learned Hackerrank, HackerEarth & CodeChef all started as Indian startups. They probably account for more than half of traffic by coders taking competitive programming as hobby. SPOJ, Codeforces, UVA are probably more algorithm focused (read: harder/complex)
- marcus_holmes 5y agoWhat problem are they trying to solve? "cheating" on HackerRank is trivially simple - just have a second computer that you can search for the answer on. Removing some of the github repos for this is really not going to solve that problem. But that's not really cheating. HackerRank is used to test programmers during recruitment, and I don't know a single programmer that doesn't search for an answer when stumped with a difficult question. Hell, it's Best Practice - why waste time thinking up your own (probably flawed) answer to a problem when there's an entire internet full of working solutions? As any experienced programmer knows, "google-fu" is an essential skill for a commercial coder. They should be giving points for "minimum number of searches needed to find a solution" on HackerRank, instead of trying to stop solutions being available. The problem here, really, is that using HackerRank as anything but an educational toy is universally stupid. But that would involve explaining difficult things to HR people, and that's a difficult problem that we can't search for an answer to.