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I did not consent on my HN data being used by entities other than HN[1]. Please remove all my comments and data from this dataset. [1] As per HN license: https

I did not consent on my HN data being used by entities other than HN[1]. Please remove all my comments and data from this dataset. [1] As per HN license: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

austinjp 2y ago
Yep indeed, same here. I know "me too" comments aren't generally acceptable here, but I think the wholesale pillaging of the web for LLMs etc is way out of hand.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Back in the day, we called that "indexing" and it was fundamental to making the web in any way usable; without search engines, the whole thing was data with no ability to locate it. I don't know precisely what changed that people decided that analysis is a bridge too far.
neutralino1 2y ago
The original dataset is located at [1] (not our HF account). HN data is directly available via the HN API [2]. The privacy policy you point to does not cover HN posts. [1] https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenPipe/hacker-news https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenPipe/hacker-news [2] https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
- GeoAtreides 2y ago
  Well, then the original dataset should also remove my data. Just because it's there doesn't mean it's there legally. It covers all User Content, which is comments and post titles (I think) at a minimum.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    That policy explicitly excludes HN comments.
  - maleldil 2y ago
    From your link: > Hacker News Information: If you create a Hacker News account (ID and profile), we do not collect any Personal Information unless you choose to provide your email address and/or information in the "about" field (“HN Information”). Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Correct. I'm a little surprised people don't know the ownership story on HN. Didn't it raise questions when they realized they can't delete their posts without mother-may-I'ing the mods? HN is pretty up-front that when you post here you are providing them content for free to more-or-less consume as they please.
      - GeoAtreides 2y ago
        I disagree on the up-front... front. Neither of the things you mentioned are made clear when signing up for an account.
        Jerrrry 2y ago
        The onus is on you.
thenewnewguy 2y ago
You did, although I have no idea if OP is an affiliate of YC (IANAL but maybe you could argue the public API is a form of sublicensing the data?): > By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
- GeoAtreides 2y ago
  > Y Combinator and its affiliated companies My data is licensed only to Y Combinator and its affiliated companies (I would have prefer it to be licensed it only for news.ycombinator,com), not any other rando that can access it via a browser or an API
  - daemonologist 2y ago
    Sematic (OP's employer; rebranded to Airtrain?) is a YC company. Not a lawyer but I assume that would be included in "affiliated" since YC presumably has some ownership of them. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airtrain-ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airtrain-ai
    - GeoAtreides 2y ago
      Welp, there it is then. If they are YC affiliated, nothing I can do. But I do feel saddened and personally betrayed; I thought the licence I gave to YN was just for news.ycombinator.com to store and show my comments, not for any other purposes. Silly, silly me.
      - senordevnyc 2y ago
        All HN did do was store and show your (public) comments. What this other company did with that (public) data seems to me to be a separate issue that you should take up with that company, just like the fact that your public comments (which you explicitly gave permission to HN to show) have been indexed by Google, Bing, and probably thousands of other spiders, bots, scrapers, etc. I'm curious how you expected this to work. Like if you only give HN permission to store and show your comments on the public web, then somehow no other entity out there will be able to do anything with them?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
donpark 2y ago
That's a contract between users and HN. Airtrain is a 3rd-party. If HN API exposes personal information publicly through their API then there is a problem. And AFAICT the only way for HN to prevent user comments from being used by 3rd-party is preventing access to those comments, meaning a) sign-up will have to be more stringent and b) visitors will have to sign-in just to read (or scrape) comments.
- senordevnyc 2y ago
  And that doesn't really prevent anything, it just (mildly) slows it down.
renewiltord 2y ago
This is pretty clever. Reminds me of Larry Philpot's time-bomb CC-licensed images https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flaming_Lips.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flaming_Lips.jpg You put things in a place with an expectation of a certain standard of use and then go after people hammer and tongs with a strict interpretation. Sometimes, the strict interpretation need not be valid. You can just shake them down.
Lerc 2y ago
If they are an entity other than HN, how can they act upon this request when the request is itself data on HN?
olivierduval 2y ago
Actually, another problem might be GDPR: I have found my username... and that is a clearly a PII because it's directly and univocally bound to me I dont really care (for now) about this... but on the principle, I'm a bit fed up too by companies just crawling anything to train anymodel without any care about the datas, the people that produced them, and the consequences on people's life. Maybe I could use the new European AI Act too (https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/fr/high-level-summary/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/fr/high-level-summary/) ... although I'm not sure because I didn't read it yet
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  I look forward to the not-too-distant future where the EU protections grow stronger and places like HN have to respond by banning all European users lest they run afoul of a draconic legal framework. It'll kill a lot of experiments (Mastodon immediately comes to mind; can't be pulling comments from other people's servers if those comments are attached to personal data like the commenter's username, right?).
  - olivierduval 2y ago
    Well, maybe you should think about the real responsabilities: Europe make laws in reaction to ABUSES. So dont blame Europe for the legislation, but the abusers that made this legislation mandatory to defend european citizen ;-) Actually, Europe is so slow that a lot of experiments may take place. And there wont be any legislation if there no abuse... It took a loooonnnng time for Europe to react to Facebook, Google & co abuse with users datas. Same for OpenAI using a awful lot of copyrighted material without giving anything back... So thank'em for Europe legislation :-)
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
  I'm not up on the nuance of the GDPR, but has it been tested that your public profile name - which you set knowing it will be displayed publicly - is PII? I'd be very surprised if that were the case.
  - 2y ago
eddd-ddde 2y ago
I am an entity other than HN. Am I not allowed to read your comments? Am I not allowed to learn from reading your comments?
- GeoAtreides 2y ago
  You are allowed all rights given to you by (copyright) law, while respecting the YC license: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

austinjp 2y ago

Yep indeed, same here. I know "me too" comments aren't generally acceptable here, but I think the wholesale pillaging of the web for LLMs etc is way out of hand.

shadowgovt 2y ago
Back in the day, we called that "indexing" and it was fundamental to making the web in any way usable; without search engines, the whole thing was data with no ability to locate it. I don't know precisely what changed that people decided that analysis is a bridge too far.

neutralino1 2y ago

The original dataset is located at [1] (not our HF account). HN data is directly available via the HN API [2]. The privacy policy you point to does not cover HN posts. [1] https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenPipe/hacker-news https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenPipe/hacker-news [2] https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API

GeoAtreides 2y ago
Well, then the original dataset should also remove my data. Just because it's there doesn't mean it's there legally. It covers all User Content, which is comments and post titles (I think) at a minimum.
- vidarh 2y ago
  That policy explicitly excludes HN comments.
- maleldil 2y ago
  From your link: > Hacker News Information: If you create a Hacker News account (ID and profile), we do not collect any Personal Information unless you choose to provide your email address and/or information in the "about" field (“HN Information”). Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Correct. I'm a little surprised people don't know the ownership story on HN. Didn't it raise questions when they realized they can't delete their posts without mother-may-I'ing the mods? HN is pretty up-front that when you post here you are providing them content for free to more-or-less consume as they please.
    - GeoAtreides 2y ago
      I disagree on the up-front... front. Neither of the things you mentioned are made clear when signing up for an account.
      - Jerrrry 2y ago
        The onus is on you.

thenewnewguy 2y ago

You did, although I have no idea if OP is an affiliate of YC (IANAL but maybe you could argue the public API is a form of sublicensing the data?): > By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.

GeoAtreides 2y ago
> Y Combinator and its affiliated companies My data is licensed only to Y Combinator and its affiliated companies (I would have prefer it to be licensed it only for news.ycombinator,com), not any other rando that can access it via a browser or an API
- daemonologist 2y ago
  Sematic (OP's employer; rebranded to Airtrain?) is a YC company. Not a lawyer but I assume that would be included in "affiliated" since YC presumably has some ownership of them. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airtrain-ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airtrain-ai
  - GeoAtreides 2y ago
    Welp, there it is then. If they are YC affiliated, nothing I can do. But I do feel saddened and personally betrayed; I thought the licence I gave to YN was just for news.ycombinator.com to store and show my comments, not for any other purposes. Silly, silly me.
    - senordevnyc 2y ago
      All HN did do was store and show your (public) comments. What this other company did with that (public) data seems to me to be a separate issue that you should take up with that company, just like the fact that your public comments (which you explicitly gave permission to HN to show) have been indexed by Google, Bing, and probably thousands of other spiders, bots, scrapers, etc. I'm curious how you expected this to work. Like if you only give HN permission to store and show your comments on the public web, then somehow no other entity out there will be able to do anything with them?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

donpark 2y ago

That's a contract between users and HN. Airtrain is a 3rd-party. If HN API exposes personal information publicly through their API then there is a problem. And AFAICT the only way for HN to prevent user comments from being used by 3rd-party is preventing access to those comments, meaning a) sign-up will have to be more stringent and b) visitors will have to sign-in just to read (or scrape) comments.

senordevnyc 2y ago
And that doesn't really prevent anything, it just (mildly) slows it down.

renewiltord 2y ago

This is pretty clever. Reminds me of Larry Philpot's time-bomb CC-licensed images https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flaming_Lips.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flaming_Lips.jpg You put things in a place with an expectation of a certain standard of use and then go after people hammer and tongs with a strict interpretation. Sometimes, the strict interpretation need not be valid. You can just shake them down.

Lerc 2y ago

If they are an entity other than HN, how can they act upon this request when the request is itself data on HN?

olivierduval 2y ago

Actually, another problem might be GDPR: I have found my username... and that is a clearly a PII because it's directly and univocally bound to me I dont really care (for now) about this... but on the principle, I'm a bit fed up too by companies just crawling anything to train anymodel without any care about the datas, the people that produced them, and the consequences on people's life. Maybe I could use the new European AI Act too (https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/fr/high-level-summary/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/fr/high-level-summary/) ... although I'm not sure because I didn't read it yet

shadowgovt 2y ago
I look forward to the not-too-distant future where the EU protections grow stronger and places like HN have to respond by banning all European users lest they run afoul of a draconic legal framework. It'll kill a lot of experiments (Mastodon immediately comes to mind; can't be pulling comments from other people's servers if those comments are attached to personal data like the commenter's username, right?).
- olivierduval 2y ago
  Well, maybe you should think about the real responsabilities: Europe make laws in reaction to ABUSES. So dont blame Europe for the legislation, but the abusers that made this legislation mandatory to defend european citizen ;-) Actually, Europe is so slow that a lot of experiments may take place. And there wont be any legislation if there no abuse... It took a loooonnnng time for Europe to react to Facebook, Google & co abuse with users datas. Same for OpenAI using a awful lot of copyrighted material without giving anything back... So thank'em for Europe legislation :-)
averageRoyalty 2y ago
I'm not up on the nuance of the GDPR, but has it been tested that your public profile name - which you set knowing it will be displayed publicly - is PII? I'd be very surprised if that were the case.
- 2y ago

eddd-ddde 2y ago

I am an entity other than HN. Am I not allowed to read your comments? Am I not allowed to learn from reading your comments?

GeoAtreides 2y ago
You are allowed all rights given to you by (copyright) law, while respecting the YC license: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/