Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 348 posts

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#311

Post by b20000 »

paulgb wrote: post #132
threatofrain wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May we hear more about why it’s a poor product?

To his credit, the CEO read my comment and reached out to me (as he noted in the sibling comment). Since that email answers your question, and also adds some useful context, I'll just share that: > So, I generally have a personal rule against disparaging things that other people made because I know how hard it is to make stuff and how criticism feels. I ignored that rule in this instance only because I've been a vict…

i will add to this that if recruiters or code interview people expect you to be a liar or fraud, by default, then they will be looking for evidence and the slightest misstep will instantly be a “fail” with the excuse that they prefer to have missed a great candidate than risk hiring a bad one, which is the typical passive aggressive BS you deal with.

the problem is really coding interviews in general, not just HR itself. who wants to do this type of shit in a browser anyway?

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#312

Post by rmbyrro »

philderbeast wrote: post #295
mfitzp wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HackerRank - the #1 way to find developers with zero self respect

also the #1 way to weed out self important idiots. bad hacker rank tests are bad, but not all hacker rank tests are bad.

You don't have to insult people to get your argument across.

Could just say, for example, you don't think it's a disrespect to oneself to attend Hacker Rank tests and explain why.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#313

Post by catwind7 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #74

Not the first time they've taken down Github repos, some with a legal basis (partial problem text, though Fair Use might overrule that if the cases ever made it to court), others with no involvement at all ( https://github.com/egfx/React-Leaderboard still hasn't been restored, for example) More information about previous DMCA abuse here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29239594 Personally, I would not trust a co…

wow, this is scary

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#314

Post by [deleted] »

voakbasda wrote: post #203
kingcharles wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the penalty requires prosecution by a federal district attorney. I've never managed to get a DA to prosecute perjury. I even filed a complaint against a DA once when they perjured themselves in writing. It was ruled "accidental perjury" and the case was dropped. [note: perjury has an intent element, you can't accidentally perjure yourself] Also, the above statement is vague. The perjury clause onl…

DAs are just lawyers with a fancy title, and that profession practices perjury as a second language. They won’t eat their own.

[deleted]

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#315

Post by orangepurple »

b20000 wrote: post #238
p5a0u9l wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, and a couple of the stock photos of "Our team" are duplicates. Crazy. How does an outfit like this get hired?

well, how did HR get through YC?

You don't become a billionaire by writing too many checks. Hence why they outsourced their goon squad to Pakistan.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#316

Post by orangepurple »

Sephr wrote: post #248
orangepurple wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but the ENTIRE TEAM SECTION ON THEIR WEBSITE (worthitsolutions.co) IS A BLATANT LIE. Not one of those people is real. Every single biography link leads to Lorem Ipsum. It's a shady, secretive sweatshop operating out of Lahore, Pakistan.

Wow, how did HackerRank end up hiring them? Incompetence all around.

The DMCA's work, don't they? It's not incompetence, just unethical, evil, and potentially illegal, but they know you'll go bankrupt litigating them.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#317

Post by ep103 »

riffraff wrote: post #227
ep103 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're just using HackerRank as a first round filter to see if they can write syntactically-correct code in a language... you don't need hackerRank. Or to restate this, if your interview process can't filter out such a candidate without using hackerRank, your interview process itself is flawed.

Their interview process surely can handle "can this person code fizzbuzz", but it makes no sense to take time from one of your engineers to test this when it can be trivially handled by something like hackerrank. I don't understand why people find this practice questionable, it saves time for both company and candidate.

I wrote a response to this already here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092829

But perhaps a different way of answering your question would be a more apt response?

Take this with a grain of salt, but in my experience of building organizations, it seems to me that in social systems, as opposed to engineering systems / code, the most powerful organizational forces are the second order and tertiary effects of the policies that are institutionally put in place. Not the first order effects.

The first order effect of using HR/LC easy questions might be that it weeds out people who really can't code in a language. And in that result, using HR and LC in your interview process, isn't a bad thing.

But the 2nd order effects of using HR/LC are often disastrous. Because once you start using HR/LC as your FizzBuzz question resource, you've made it easy for interviewers in your organization to start using HR/LC questions for more than just a FizzBuzz replacement. Maybe interviewers go to HR/LC for medium, hard questions. Maybe more?

HR/LC elevate what should be a small (though important!) part of the interview process, to one of the most important, hardest, and complex parts of the interview process. In most interviews I have witnessed in the last few years, this comes at the expense of other things that _should_ be more important parts of the interview process. And that's what is disasterous.

That's the issue with HackerRank and LeetCode. It is intentional from HR and LC's point of view. And is an unignorable, indeed one of the most important aspects of adopting a policy of using HR/LC in your organization.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#318

Post by philderbeast »

rmbyrro wrote: post #312
philderbeast wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also the #1 way to weed out self important idiots. bad hacker rank tests are bad, but not all hacker rank tests are bad.

You don't have to insult people to get your argument across. Could just say, for example, you don't think it's a disrespect to oneself to attend Hacker Rank tests and explain why.

it's fairly simple, at some point you have to evaluate somone technical skills to make sure they are suitble for the job, and well designed tests do that.

There is an abundance of bad tests out there, but blanket statements that you won't use a tool that is used for assessing candiates is just as rediculas as saying you won't give apply to jobs that ask for your cv to apply.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#319

Post by tristan957 »

rootlocus wrote: post #292
Karupan wrote: post #275

What scares me the most about this story is how easily it could've been a small software shop running their entire operations on GitHub getting DCMA'd without any merit, and just losing access to an important repo within 24 hours. And imagine they don't know about Hacker News. Or they posted something which didn't get enough upvotes for the offending company to respond and resolve it quickly. As a software developer,…

Git is a distributed VCS, everyone has a clone of the repo, and at least one person has the latest main branch.

With GitHub allowing editing on the web using devcontainers and VSCode, someone might not have a copy of the repo locally.

You could definitely still blame the company at hand for not having redundancy and having a single point of failure, but the point still stands.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#320

Post by yowlingcat »

philderbeast wrote: post #318
rmbyrro wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to insult people to get your argument across. Could just say, for example, you don't think it's a disrespect to oneself to attend Hacker Rank tests and explain why.

it's fairly simple, at some point you have to evaluate somone technical skills to make sure they are suitble for the job, and well designed tests do that. There is an abundance of bad tests out there, but blanket statements that you won't use a tool that is used for assessing candiates is just as rediculas as saying you won't give apply to jobs that ask for your cv to apply.

I understand why you're getting downvoted but I have to say that I agree with the gist of what you're saying. We use HackerRank mostly just to package a problem set and put a timer in place for upload, nothing more clever than that, so if someone pattern matched "HackerRank test" to "disrespectful" I would think of that as a severe red flag and move on to another candidate.

There are many "in good faith" steps that both parties must do in the interview process, wherein if either party drops the ball it really makes sense for both parties to cut their losses and move on; which I believe is what you are getting at.

Post reply on HN