Looking 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.
I think the DMCA is incorrect but the copyright argument might be correct, as in, I imagine that the starting code was provided by HackerRank so they have the copyright. The solution is a whole different thing.
The hashes will sum to something. To do it, at least as far as I understand, you'd have to use https://git-scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch . This will create a divergent history and the new master branch or any other branches that exists will have to be forced pushed. As far as "but local copies of the repo will have the 'problem files' still" - Yes they would. All parties would have to be notified of the legal request.
I'm not a copyright expert but it seems like enforcing this is another step in the erosion of fair use. Something about transformative works. The problem was transformed into a solution.
On the other hand hackerrank's terms of service should have banned this activity. I would imagine it does. I'm not sure how much leverage that gets them legally though. I suppose once you intend to publish it you're no longer an authorized user, and then you're violating that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act we see get applied harshly from time to time.
Copying 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.
Seems to me that’s the simplest and most intuitive point of view. Can you imagine publishing a question and then owning the copyright to every answer to it someone writes!?
Not in the least. Copyright applies to creative expressions, not functional expressions. My solution to your problem is my creative expression, not yours.
Both a question and an answer may or may not be subject to copyright. What GP is saying is that such rights, if any, are assigned to their respective authors.
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.
By 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.
My 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.
Hackerrank 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).
The JavaScript function Media devices.getUserMedia() will do this, and also includes screen sharing possibilities. It will ask the user for permission first but in a test situation, there's high pressure to accept those permissions or fail the test.
Blocking 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.
Literally 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"
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.
>>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.
They are in hiring business not CS education business. Their business is not helping people learn things, but helping companies hire people.
If the solutions are available online, anybody can memorize them and ace tests, And they often do. If too many people do it, the whole point of test is defeated. The more solutions are available online, the more pointless the test becomes. Which actually says more about the testing methods themselves.
On the other hand, it's realistically impossible to keeping coming up with questions that can genuinely test a person's ability to come up with a novel algorithm for a problem. That's a CS PhD at least, if not a Fields medal category problem.
I just checked another link on archive.org that really just explains how to do linear interpolation of a missing array element from neighboring elements. This is insane. GH should really be considered a potential single point of failure now.
They 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.
My 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
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.
"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.
Readit News
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.
Repos like this were DMCA'ed https://github.com/saikrishnareddykatta/react-movie-director...
I think the DMCA is incorrect but the copyright argument might be correct, as in, I imagine that the starting code was provided by HackerRank so they have the copyright. The solution is a whole different thing.
I'm not a copyright expert but it seems like enforcing this is another step in the erosion of fair use. Something about transformative works. The problem was transformed into a solution.
On the other hand hackerrank's terms of service should have banned this activity. I would imagine it does. I'm not sure how much leverage that gets them legally though. I suppose once you intend to publish it you're no longer an authorized user, and then you're violating that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act we see get applied harshly from time to time.
Deleted Comment
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?
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.
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
Isn't hacker rank a website? How could it possibly do that?
Deleted Comment
If I check on archive https://web.archive.org/web/20200921030437/https://github.co... it doesn't look like this repo should be dmca ed.
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/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.
They are in hiring business not CS education business. Their business is not helping people learn things, but helping companies hire people.
If the solutions are available online, anybody can memorize them and ace tests, And they often do. If too many people do it, the whole point of test is defeated. The more solutions are available online, the more pointless the test becomes. Which actually says more about the testing methods themselves.
On the other hand, it's realistically impossible to keeping coming up with questions that can genuinely test a person's ability to come up with a novel algorithm for a problem. That's a CS PhD at least, if not a Fields medal category problem.
now…
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
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.
"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.