3 ms·

From YC /legal > Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create de

by 6thbit 7mo ago

From YC /legal > Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part Not to pretend this isn't widely happening behind the curtains already, but coming from a "Show HN" seems daring.

Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
I can't comment on what is legal, but I very much dislike the idea that my comments are the property of Y Combinator. I assume that by writing here, I am putting information out into the world for anyone to use as they wish.
- stackghost 7mo ago
  HN/YC cares more about community aesthetics than your right to be forgotten. Try to have your account and its contents deleted. The best I was offered for my 2011-vintage account was to randomize the username, and the reason I was given was that browsing and old thread with a bunch of deleted comments "looks bad".
  - Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
    I agree with this policy, deleting comments isn't fair to all the other people who replied to that comment. I don't see how this goes against what I said?
    - stackghost 7mo ago
      I was responding to your statement that you don't like that your comments are the property of YC. I was elaborating on how they hold our content (that we author) hostage because it looks pretty. Not wanting your comments to be property of YC but then also being okay with them refusing to delete your content doesn't make sense to me. Those seem like fundamentally-opposed viewpoints. Now I'm thinking about it, I wonder what they do with GDPR deletion requests?
      - Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
        I don't want Y Combinator to be the gatekeeper of who can see and use my comments. I think they should belong to everybody.
      - wzdd 7mo ago
        If comments here were for anybody to use as they wish, then anybody could use them for whatever they liked and (thus) YC could refuse to delete them. Being okay with both of those doesn't isn't a fundamentally-opposed viewpoint. One is a logical consequence of the other.
- hnfong 7mo ago
  AFAICT, you retain the copyrights to your comments, but YC has a license to essentially do whatever they want with them. So, you could additionally give a license to the world to use your posted comments freely. That doesn't mean HN can't add terms to say clients can't copy the site as a condition for use.
- YVoyiatzis 7mo ago
  Your comments, yes. But the contextual thread as a while, no.
NewJazz 7mo ago
Quite relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
keepamovin 7mo ago
I did a show hn a month or so back like this: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/ https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308 https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook The mods and community had no problem with it Differences: Sharded SQLITE, used bigquery export, build script is open on GitHub, interactive “archived website” view of HN, updated weekly (each build takes a couple dollars on a custom GitHub runner)
- tamnd 7mo ago
  @keepamovin thanks, your project was a big inspiration for this. I built my own pipeline with a slightly different setup. I use Go to download and process the data, and update it every 5 minutes using the HN API, trying to stay within fair use. It is also easy to tweak if someone wants faster or slower updates. One part I really like is the "dynamic" README on Hugging Face. It is generated automatically by the code and keeps updating as new commits come in, so you can just open it and quickly see the current state. The code is still a bit messy right now (I open sourced it together with around 3.6M lines across 100+ other tools, hidden in a corner of GitHub, anyone interested can play Sherlock Holmes and find it :) ), but I will clean it up, and open source as clearer new repository and write a proper blog post explaining how it works.
  - keepamovin 7mo ago
    Wow tamnd that is lovely to hear. I’m so glad you told me it was an inspiration. Your big download plus quick refreshes is smart. Is your Background in data/AI? Because i don’t know much about huggingface beyond its a hub for that.
    - tamnd 7mo ago
      Connecting directly with the author of the project that inspired me is awesome. Let's collaborate and see how we can make our two projects work together. DuckDB has a feature that can write to SQLite: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/sqlite https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/sqlite. Starting from Parquet files, we could use DuckDB to write into SQLite databases. This could reduce ingress time to around five minutes instead of a week. If I have some free time this weekend, I would definitely like to contribute to your project. Would you be interested? As for my background, I focus on data engineering and data architecture. I help clients build very large-scale data pipelines, ranging from near real-time systems (under 10 ms) to large batch processing systems (handling up to 1 billion business transactions per day across thousands of partners). Some of these systems use mathematical models I developed, particularly in graph theory. Happy to chat.
admiralrohan 7mo ago
Then why does the API is available for hackernews? If nothing is allowed to be copied legally. And why this post is approved as "Show HN" if it's illegal? Don't get the reasoning here.
krapp 7mo ago
This site offers a public, non rate-limted API. IANAL but I'm reasonably certain that's authorization for anyone to use the data as long as they do so through the API. It certainly isn't the case that you need explicit legal permission to use Hacker News comment data in your project. There have been tons of alternative frontends and projects using HN data over the years, posted to Show HN without an issue. I think their primary concern is interfering with the YCombinator brand itself. "the site" and "site content" referring to YCombinator and not HN specifically.
maxloh 7mo ago
For what it's worth, there is an official, daily updated public dataset of all posts and comments. Therefore, the data clearly isn't something they consider a trade secret. https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combinator/hacker-news?pli=1 https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

by 6thbit 7mo ago

Wowfunhappy 7mo ago

I can't comment on what is legal, but I very much dislike the idea that my comments are the property of Y Combinator. I assume that by writing here, I am putting information out into the world for anyone to use as they wish.

stackghost 7mo ago
HN/YC cares more about community aesthetics than your right to be forgotten. Try to have your account and its contents deleted. The best I was offered for my 2011-vintage account was to randomize the username, and the reason I was given was that browsing and old thread with a bunch of deleted comments "looks bad".
- Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
  I agree with this policy, deleting comments isn't fair to all the other people who replied to that comment. I don't see how this goes against what I said?
  - stackghost 7mo ago
    I was responding to your statement that you don't like that your comments are the property of YC. I was elaborating on how they hold our content (that we author) hostage because it looks pretty. Not wanting your comments to be property of YC but then also being okay with them refusing to delete your content doesn't make sense to me. Those seem like fundamentally-opposed viewpoints. Now I'm thinking about it, I wonder what they do with GDPR deletion requests?
    - Wowfunhappy 7mo ago
      I don't want Y Combinator to be the gatekeeper of who can see and use my comments. I think they should belong to everybody.
    - wzdd 7mo ago
      If comments here were for anybody to use as they wish, then anybody could use them for whatever they liked and (thus) YC could refuse to delete them. Being okay with both of those doesn't isn't a fundamentally-opposed viewpoint. One is a logical consequence of the other.
hnfong 7mo ago
AFAICT, you retain the copyrights to your comments, but YC has a license to essentially do whatever they want with them. So, you could additionally give a license to the world to use your posted comments freely. That doesn't mean HN can't add terms to say clients can't copy the site as a condition for use.
YVoyiatzis 7mo ago
Your comments, yes. But the contextual thread as a while, no.

NewJazz 7mo ago

Quite relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

keepamovin 7mo ago

I did a show hn a month or so back like this: https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/ https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308 https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/HackerBook The mods and community had no problem with it Differences: Sharded SQLITE, used bigquery export, build script is open on GitHub, interactive “archived website” view of HN, updated weekly (each build takes a couple dollars on a custom GitHub runner)

tamnd 7mo ago
@keepamovin thanks, your project was a big inspiration for this. I built my own pipeline with a slightly different setup. I use Go to download and process the data, and update it every 5 minutes using the HN API, trying to stay within fair use. It is also easy to tweak if someone wants faster or slower updates. One part I really like is the "dynamic" README on Hugging Face. It is generated automatically by the code and keeps updating as new commits come in, so you can just open it and quickly see the current state. The code is still a bit messy right now (I open sourced it together with around 3.6M lines across 100+ other tools, hidden in a corner of GitHub, anyone interested can play Sherlock Holmes and find it :) ), but I will clean it up, and open source as clearer new repository and write a proper blog post explaining how it works.
- keepamovin 7mo ago
  Wow tamnd that is lovely to hear. I’m so glad you told me it was an inspiration. Your big download plus quick refreshes is smart. Is your Background in data/AI? Because i don’t know much about huggingface beyond its a hub for that.
  - tamnd 7mo ago
    Connecting directly with the author of the project that inspired me is awesome. Let's collaborate and see how we can make our two projects work together. DuckDB has a feature that can write to SQLite: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/sqlite https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/sqlite. Starting from Parquet files, we could use DuckDB to write into SQLite databases. This could reduce ingress time to around five minutes instead of a week. If I have some free time this weekend, I would definitely like to contribute to your project. Would you be interested? As for my background, I focus on data engineering and data architecture. I help clients build very large-scale data pipelines, ranging from near real-time systems (under 10 ms) to large batch processing systems (handling up to 1 billion business transactions per day across thousands of partners). Some of these systems use mathematical models I developed, particularly in graph theory. Happy to chat.

admiralrohan 7mo ago

Then why does the API is available for hackernews? If nothing is allowed to be copied legally. And why this post is approved as "Show HN" if it's illegal? Don't get the reasoning here.

krapp 7mo ago

This site offers a public, non rate-limted API. IANAL but I'm reasonably certain that's authorization for anyone to use the data as long as they do so through the API. It certainly isn't the case that you need explicit legal permission to use Hacker News comment data in your project. There have been tons of alternative frontends and projects using HN data over the years, posted to Show HN without an issue. I think their primary concern is interfering with the YCombinator brand itself. "the site" and "site content" referring to YCombinator and not HN specifically.

maxloh 7mo ago

For what it's worth, there is an official, daily updated public dataset of all posts and comments. Therefore, the data clearly isn't something they consider a trade secret. https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combinator/hacker-news?pli=1 https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...