One observation of mine is that interviewing is often more about finding the most feasible and consistent process rather than the most effective one. Whiteboard interviews make for consistent evaluation and it's easy to train up new people on a set of questions. Scoring based on how far the interview got, and the level of optimization of the approach used is relatively unambiguous. So it's logistically easy and less subject to bias - that's why it's popular even though it has little resemblance to day to day work.
A more effective interview would involve tasks that more closely resemble day to day work. However, the examples of this that I've seen so far make for much more ambiguous evaluation or are much more difficult to schedule:
One example interview process I've seen is having people submit PRs to a codebase to fix bugs or implement features, and then review a PR submitted by the interviewer. This more closely resembles day to day work, but has the disadvantage of spreading the interview process across multiple days. Additionally, you might tell the candidate that they shouldn't take more than 2 hours to implement the PR but who knows if they spend 10+ hours on it.
Another alternative interview format is a 2-hour long one that starts with the interviewer asking "how would you build a text editor?" There's no right response. If the candidate gives responses like ropes and gap buffers then the interview might go in a direction focused on data structures and systems. Some candidates ask if it's a WYSIWYG editor like word, or an ASCII/unicode editor like Vim. In that case the interview might test the candidate's abilities to think through how to build an interface to decouple the UI and underlying data structures. The candidate might start off with a simple array, and work through why it becomes infeasible at larger lengths and think through ways to mitigate that. This interview was flexible to test technical knowledge and reasoning for candidates at any level, and could go in a variety of directions. But on the other hand that makes consistent evaluation difficult and training people up on this interview similarly difficult. This was at a small company with maybe 30-40 engineers, where each team basically had total latitude on how it carried out its own hiring. That's not how a lot of larger companies' interviews work, which often emphasize consistent evaluation and multiple interviewers.
The only interview which does more closely resemble real world tasks, and I suggest that more companies employ is debugging interviews. It requires the candidate bring a laptop and that the company build a couple repository templates, but once that's done it's a very easy interview to conduct. Just observe the candidate debug and make note of how many bugs are fixed and whether the fixes do bad things like breach layers of abstraction.
One could argue that this is already the case. How many AAA games actually give you the full game for $60? Usually you need to buy a season pass to access the full content. Some of the most notable examples have included Mass Effect 3 which locked plot critical characters behind DLC. Total War: Rome 2 had $50 worth of DLC less than 1 year after launch, and their more recent Warhammer titles lock iconic factions like Chaos Warriors behind DLC.
This is the expected result of increased scrutiny over Google. Whether or not to respond to claims of abuse is a tradeoff between limiting false negatives or limiting false positives. When there is an increase in the cost of false negative, both monetary and in terms of status and reputation, then Google is going to optimize to reduce false negatives at the expense of creating more false positives.
This should definitely be part of the conversation when discussing regulating content on Google and other large aggregators and social media platforms. I find that the so-called "techlash" has resulted in more stringent policing of content, but also greater opportunity to abuse reporting functionality. Using copyright claims malicious has been a known practice for years now, at least between content creators (e.g. feuding YouTubers having their fans report rivals). I'm not surprised to see governments using the same tactics.
Google pretty often refuses to respond to counter-dmcas, there is a lawsuit currently over this. In addition recently lumen database stopped publishing the full list of links in the dmca complaints.
> Google pretty often refuses to respond to counter-dmcas,
There is not requirement to respond to DMCA notices or counternotices, doing so merely protects against certain liability you might otherwise have. In the case of counternotices, there generally is no liability to protect against (because providers can usually structure agreements with users to avoid liability for takedowns), and thus no reason to respond.
Hmm, hypothetically if you blanket refuse to respond to coutnernotices, could you lose your protection from liability under DMCA in general? Like even in cases where no notice has been followed? Don't you have to follow the procedures, including responding to counter notices, to be get the protection from liability under DMCA in the first place?
Even if in theory, in practice we know the risk is vanishingly low of actually being held liable for much.
> Hmm, hypothetically if you blanket refuse to respond to coutnernotices, could you lose your protection from liability under DMCA in general?
No, DMCA safe harbor is transactional: if you respond to a particular takedown, you are protected from liability to the issuer of the takedown for the content. If you respond to a particular counternotice, you are protected from liability to that user for taking down the content addressed by the counternotice.
the depressing reality is that most users who are pissed off still don't take their business elsewhere. There are few other choices for similar products that work as well.
I was also going to share this. Google and other places like Twitter and Facebook seem to be willing to pull the trigger instantly on a DMCA and unwilling to put it back up with the C-DMCA even though the same law protects them if they do.
I'd like to think this is because Google, Twitter, etc. know these media companies have a lot of lobbying connections that could get the DMCA landscape changed to drastically hurt them.
I think the Lumen full link thing is (at least in part) due to the fact that people were going to the lumen db to find the de-listed links to pirated movies (since the DMCA complaint submitter has already verified that those websites do, in fact, contain the copyrighted movie).
> since the DMCA complaint submitter has already verified that those websites do, in fact, contain the copyrighted movie
Well no, actually, that they haven't is exactly the problem. One of the major problems with the DMCA is that it says this:
> under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
In other words, the claim made "under penalty of perjury" is that you are "authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed" and not that the links you allege are infringing actually are infringing.
Meanwhile claims have been known to be filed based on generic searches, e.g. submitting a DMCA claim for every link that shows up in search results for the title of the movie even when it's a generic phrase also used in other contexts, or wasn't quoted so it turned up results where those words (or their synonyms!) appear in any order anywhere on the page. And looking at the DMCA complaint used to allow you to not only find those results that had been illegitimately removed, but also identify that that has happened and then have the ability to object to it in various ways.
As far as I'm aware no court has ever agreed with your interpretation of the wording of the DMCA. Do you have a source on it being correct (which I definitely could have missed) or are you just giving out questionable legal opinions as if they are fact?
The best I can find for someone trying to raise that interpretation in court is when warner bros tried to argue it here [1]. That the motion was denied without prejudice in a brief order here [2], to be re-raised at trial if necessary, and then it looks like the case was settled before it went to trial or the issue was raised again.
> As far as I'm aware no court has ever agreed with your interpretation of the wording of the DMCA
As far as I know, no court has every disagreed with that reading, which is simply the plain meaning of each of the words in the statute.
From the day the text was proposed, the fact that the only thing thar a DMCA takedown required to be sworn under penalty of perjury was that the complaining party represented a rights holder has been a frequent point of criticism.
> The best I can find for someone trying to raise that interpretation in court is when warner bros tried to argue it here
No, WB was not arguing that point, they were arguing that a hosts DMCA takedown notice form which purported to require additional certifications to be made under penalty of perjury was invalid because private parties can't just add “under penalty of perjury” without the legal requirements of perjury being satisfied and expect it to have legal effect. The host in that case agreed that what it tried to make under penalty of perjury was beyond what was required in the statute, but argued that the form did, in fact, have effect. IOW, the base requirements of the law weren't in dispute, the effect of a private form as to what was under penalty of perjury was I dispute.
>From the day the text was proposed, the fact that the only thing thar a DMCA takedown required to be sworn under penalty of perjury was that the complaining party represented a rights holder has been a frequent point of criticism.
This is wrong. Perjury also applies to having a good faith belief in the infringement.
>The DMCA requires a complainant to declare, under penalty of perjury, that he is authorized to represent the copyright holder, and that he has a good-faith belief that the use is infringing. This requirement is not superfluous. Accusations of alleged infringement have drastic consequences: A user could have content removed, or may have his access terminated entirely. If the content infringes, justice has been done. But if it does not, speech protected under the First Amendment could be removed. We therefore do not require a service provider to start potentially invasive proceedings if the complainant is unwilling to state under penalty of perjury that he is an authorized representative of the copyright owner, and that he has a good-faith belief that the material is unlicensed.
Perfect 10, Inc. v. Ccbill Llc, 488 F. 3d 1102 - Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2007
>A copyright owner who submits a takedown notice must include a statement, under penalty of perjury, that she has "a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner." Id. § 512(c)(3)(A)(v)-(vi).
> The DMCA requires a complainant to declare, under penalty of perjury, that he is authorized to represent the copyright holder, and that he has a good-faith belief that the use is infringing.
You're citing ambiguous language in a case that wasn't actually about perjury to begin with.
Possible valid reading of that sentence: "The DMCA requires a complainant to declare that he has a good-faith belief that the use is infringing, and under penalty of perjury, that he is authorized to represent the copyright holder."
> Hughes v. Benjamin, Dist. Court, SD New York 2020
This is a district court case which means it isn't binding precedent for other courts, and likewise doesn't appear to be a perjury case.
It would be nice if people got charged with perjury for making false DMCA claims. I still haven't seen any evidence of that happening.
I responded to a comment saying no court has ever disagreed with a reading saying perjury only applies to the authorization part, with two examples showing otherwise. As far as I know, every court to have considered the issue has said that perjury applies to both parts. None of them were actually considering a perjury case, correct. Perjury prosecutions are extremely rare.
Re your claim of ambiguity, read through the rest of the decision. It explains the rationale of the perjury requirement.
>We therefore do not require a service provider to start potentially invasive proceedings if the complainant is unwilling to state under penalty of perjury that he is an authorized representative of the copyright owner, and that he has a good-faith belief that the material is unlicensed.
Much harder to read this as you propose.
Both cases are obiter dictum, since it's not relevant to the ruling. But they provide a strong indication of what a court ruling on the perjury issue directly would say, and they would certainly be persuasive authority.
It has the exact same ambiguity. They even put the same comma between "under penalty of perjury that he is an authorized representative of the copyright owner" and "that he has a good-faith belief that the material is unlicensed."
> Both cases are obiter dictum, since it's not relevant to the ruling. But they provide a strong indication of what a court ruling on the perjury issue directly would say, and they would certainly be persuasive authority.
This was kind of my point. Having to bring in some dicta from unrelated cases because there are no actual perjury cases to cite pretty well implies that there are no teeth in the perjury requirement one way or another.
It's not as if there have been a lack of fraudulent DMCA claims to prosecute either.
Those are literally the words in the statute. I'd be more interested if you could find a case upheld on appeal of someone being actually found guilty of perjury for filing a DMCA claim against non-infringing content. Because if it is never actually enforced then it's a distinction without a difference anyway. In either case fraudulent DMCA notices are rampant and the perpetrators face no consequences.
Courts have interpreted the statute to mean that perjury applies to a good faith belief in infringement as well. See two cases cited at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23198236
There's no private cause of action for perjury. I agree that it would be nice if some ambitious DA would go after some of the people abusing DMCA or other infringement claims. Or perhaps someone in a state that allows private prosecution?
As far as I'm aware (and again, my knowledge of this field is far from perfect), the justice department has never charged anyone with perjury over a DMCA claim... period.
There have been civil lawsuits, for example Lenz v. Universal Music is famous for establishing that failure to consider fair use when filing a DMCA complaint constitutes misrepresentation under the DMCA. But these don't directly relate to perjury.
> There have been civil lawsuits, for example Lenz v. Universal Music is famous for establishing that failure to consider fair use when filing a DMCA complaint constitutes misrepresentation under the DMCA.
That's misrepresentation rather than perjury. It's a different section. That changes it from criminal penalties to actual damages, but then what are the actual damages to Joe's Blog from having a link delisted from Google for a few days? A hundred bucks to make a federal case out of it? That'll be more trouble than it's worth to most everyone and then nobody does it and there are still no consequences. Meanwhile if you did have major actual damages, then what? You have a valid claim against a judgment-proof DMCA spammer who just files for bankruptcy?
Whereas perjury charges that had the spammer spending a few nights in jail and were regularly enforced by well-resourced government prosecutors might actually make a dent in the prevalence of this sort of thing. But that hasn't been the case in practice, one way or another.
>This is not how the counter DMCA notification system is supposed to work. Upon receipt of a counter DMCA notice, you are required to forward the notice to the original sender, and restore content within 10 days.
That sounds very much like what has been claimed about Amazon handling the French court order to fine them a high dollar amount for each non-essential (as determined by the court) item they deliver. If the cost of something slipping through the cracks is that high, then it is cheaper to not do business where there are potential cracks to slip through.
Fun fact: The court order doesn't use the word essential even once, it was introduced by Amazon lawyers and PR. The court order was solely about repeated safety violations and Amazons refusal to reduce operations to a safe level. The court order also gave an explicit whitelist of Amazons own categories for the reduction, not a generic "essential" or "food" classification that Amazon would have to interpret itself.
> People need "non-essential" Amazon deliveries and drivers need jobs now more than ever.
Which is why Amazon quite clearly made the right choice by shutting down the warehouses completely, right?
> Amazon handling the French court order to fine them a high dollar amount for each non-essential (as determined by the court) item they deliver
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Amazon has shown that they cannot be trusted to determine whether workers or items delivered are essential, and do not take the safety of their workers into account. The cost of behaving in an untrustworthy manner is having everybody else treat Amazon as untrustworthy.
Seems to me the onus should fall on the false reporters:
- If the claim is valid, the provider who hosted the content eats the costs as a cost of doing business
- If the claim is invalid due to negligence, intent, or abuse of the system, the claimant should face a fine equal to or greater than the true cost of determining that the claim is false.
The courts essentially work this way, the internet should too.
I've been tracking similar cases, and have a database of over a hundred cases of lawsuits over false infringement claims. False copyright claims are often harder to prosecute than trademark or patent cases.
In practice it's difficult if not impossible to do anything about it, between providers being unwilling/unable to identify the claimants and the costs involved in taking them to court.
Especially hard to get the courts involved if the claimants are in other countries.
About the best you could hope for is if a person can be shown to be acting in bad faith they could have all of their takedowns reversed and the material in question flagged so that further takedown notices trigger an audit. In practice this might just mean making a new account for each takedown notice, but it does raise the bar a bit on bad behavior.
I'd also assume big media cartels would be exempt because operating in bad faith is their entire business plan and they're willing to sue to maintain the status quo.
A lot of automated copyright claims are made by reasonably sized organisations. Should require a deposit for making automated claims.
Do not have to take them to court, the burden of proof lies with the copyright holder. And sufficient mechanism for counter claims and forfeiting the deposit.
Also can take collective action against all falsely claimed copyright.
The real trouble is something flagged as offensive, once a comment of mine on Quora was taken down. I was given a warning of that being offensive and me being potentially banned. I have no idea to this day what was taken down and why people found it offensive.
The right to contest sadly does not exist, this makes it so easy political or religious groups to silence individuals.
Seems like if Google is doing extrajudicial enforcement, they could easily stipulate in their terms of use that false claims can result in a lifetime ban from Google services. People might think twice about making false claims if they (or their entire organization) will lose all access to their Google accounts forever.
If Google added that to their terms I would hop in the false copyright claim game ASAP. I want nothing to do with Google and I would be very interested in Google deciding they want nothing to do with me, too.
I don't get it, yes false positive removals are an issue worth discussing, but does it really warrant a whole WSJ front page article? Could WSJ make it any more obvious that they have a vendetta against tech companies and are just grasping at whatever hit piece they can get their hands on?
Tech companies need to be held accountable for their actions by someone. That's always been journalism's job. As long as they don't print lies, I don't see the issue.
Unfortunately I've seen WSJ (and several other tech media) print outright fabrications and omit whole pieces of stories to drive some agendas. It's hard to keep trusting them now.
2. Humans make mistakes as well, especially as volume of content increases and policies get more nuanced.
3. There's way more violating content then you could ever imagine. As just one example, YouTube reported having to remove >1.8 BILLION comments for spam or other policy violations in 2019 (https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy).
Regarding 1: I find it unlikely that most DMCA takedown notices contains traumatizing content. (Arguably) most of it has a copyright on it, which means that someone probably wanted to sell it to a sizeable market. The DMCA takedown notices identify URLs, so you don't really need to use the same pool of people that screen for child abuse and various horrors, and they don't get an unfiltered view of every sort of terms of service violation from every platform, just potential copyright violations, a completely separable issue.
Because I, the user, don't want that. I don't have a problem subjecting myself to Content ID in exchange for the ability to just host all sorts of crap.
Umm, you do realize that this is basically a DDOS attack, and automated tools are a necessity. What needs to happen is a law/legal process where you can counter sue against false DMCA/copyright complaints, with large penalties for indiscriminate and abusive filings. That would put the onus on copyright holders to put in some validation effort before filing.
> When there is an increase in the cost of false negative, both monetary and in terms of status and reputation, then Google is going to optimize to reduce false negatives at the expense of creating more false positives.
The problem is that Google optimizes for cost and doesn't give an iota of damn about accuracy.
Fine their ass when they are legally wrong and suddenly Google will become really good at figuring things out. And, if there is enough cost, they'll even allocate some people to the problem.
The scam is the fact that prices are being propped up by constraining supply. If things get to a breaking point and the State limits the abilities of municipalities to block housing construction then the price of housing will deflate significantly.
I disagree. There are a variety of reasons to prohibit political speech in the workplace even if one desires to change the status quo:
* A company might find that it's employees become toxic when political disagreements happen.
* A company might find itself alienating people with minority viewpoints.
* A company may find itself losing customers because political views discussed in the workplace is attributed to the company.
This mentality that lack of political discussion in the workplace implies agreement with the status quo has negative consequences, and makes employees feel pressured to voice support for things they don't actually support in order to avoid losing face with coworkers.
Game engine implementations have different tradeoffs, and generalized game engines are optimizing for the lowest common denominator. Niche use cases often require custom engines. For example flight simulators need good terrain level of detail streaming, and may need to use special techniques to work around loss of floating point detail when rendering at a global scale. I don't know of any game engine that supports spherical height maps.
On the other hand Kerbal Space program is implemented in Unity, so maybe even off the shelf engines can handle that.
Unity is incredibly versatile. As a single dev, it is highly unlikely that you'll be able to implement a use case that it doesn't support. It is far more likely that you are reinventing the wheel out of ignorance.
The US Jewish population is 90-95% Ashkenazim. It's unfortunate that Americans sometimes forget about the minority of Sephardim and Mizrahim, but for the most part the assumption that Jewish American == Ashkenazi holds true.
Empress trees capture roughly 100 tons of carbon per acre per year. But wood's energy density is roughly half that of oil (oil and coal are decomposed algae and wood respectively) so it's effectively 50 tons of potential jet fuel per acre of forest per year. A 10 hours 747 flight apparently burns about 250,000 pounds of fuel - roughly 125 tons. So we'd need about two and a half acres of forest for a ten hour 747 flight.
There has been some speculation that people could cultivate vats of algae illuminated by blue LEDs emitting light in the optimal photosynthesis spectrum. But this is probably only feasible with effectively limitless supplies of electricity.
Do people actually interact with each other over LinkedIn? The only people I've every talked to are recruiters. I thought it was just a directory of potential employees for recruiters. If people actually do social things on LinkedIn then that's news for me.
After a long time in software development, I'm now a sales engineer, and LinkedIn is a very different place when your weeks involve interactions with C-suite and marketing types. I find LinkedIn to be pretty absurd, and I'm never going to (or want to) compete with the people who share life-affirming abstract business nonsense in a vertical video shot from their car, but I get a surprising amount of interaction from my screeds about the ecommerce ecosystem. I'm not using LinkedIn to boost my personal brand, but I do use it to talk about the Saas ecommerce platform we sell (because a lot of people hate Magento and find Shopify doesn't suit their needs)
A coworker has at times referred to me as a LinkedIn Shitpost Memelord, although I don't use image macros/memes. I just share information about a very niche corner of the internet, and it's way more effective than advertising. It actually serves as an outlet for the kind of writing I used to do, and sometimes still do, on forums - but instead of being about music and bands, it's about commerce and software. It's weird, but it scratches an itch I guess.
I do see more 'social' posts on LinkedIn, and it's pretty close to the worst of the net. It's like YouTube comments, except you can see the people who post them all wear suits in their photos. A surprisingly large number of people who like & reply to self-help garbage, effusively, as though Gary Vee's latest you-can-do-it schlock saved them from offing themselves at the water cooler that morning.
I see some people using LinkedIn in an attempt to boost their public relevance in their fields, but I only see recruiters interact with their content. Hence, nobody cares about the content.
There's also companies who are posting things like "Hey we won some irrelevant award yay us." Or more likely, employees posting this about their own as a public signal that they are "all in" on "company."
It's mostly for signalling for especially aspirational people. But generally speaking, 99% of the utility of LinkedIn is to have a public resume so recruiters can find you. At least in my case.
My linked in is only for recruiters. I rarely update it. Every time I go on it I get kind of sick I guess? Like I can't really say what makes me dislike it, maybe it feels corporate? It feels like everything there is just to promote yourself? Idk but I hate it.
While the work visa structure does give the employee less leverage, and I've known several people that needed to get new employers quickly to stay in the country and this probably does limit the ability of people staying on work visas to shop around and make companies outbid each other for their labor. That said I am very dubious of calling this "modernized slavery". Sort by salary, ascending, and you can see that the significant majority (over 90%) make $100k or more, and most of those under 6 figure salaries are not in the Bay Area.
A more effective interview would involve tasks that more closely resemble day to day work. However, the examples of this that I've seen so far make for much more ambiguous evaluation or are much more difficult to schedule:
One example interview process I've seen is having people submit PRs to a codebase to fix bugs or implement features, and then review a PR submitted by the interviewer. This more closely resembles day to day work, but has the disadvantage of spreading the interview process across multiple days. Additionally, you might tell the candidate that they shouldn't take more than 2 hours to implement the PR but who knows if they spend 10+ hours on it.
Another alternative interview format is a 2-hour long one that starts with the interviewer asking "how would you build a text editor?" There's no right response. If the candidate gives responses like ropes and gap buffers then the interview might go in a direction focused on data structures and systems. Some candidates ask if it's a WYSIWYG editor like word, or an ASCII/unicode editor like Vim. In that case the interview might test the candidate's abilities to think through how to build an interface to decouple the UI and underlying data structures. The candidate might start off with a simple array, and work through why it becomes infeasible at larger lengths and think through ways to mitigate that. This interview was flexible to test technical knowledge and reasoning for candidates at any level, and could go in a variety of directions. But on the other hand that makes consistent evaluation difficult and training people up on this interview similarly difficult. This was at a small company with maybe 30-40 engineers, where each team basically had total latitude on how it carried out its own hiring. That's not how a lot of larger companies' interviews work, which often emphasize consistent evaluation and multiple interviewers.
The only interview which does more closely resemble real world tasks, and I suggest that more companies employ is debugging interviews. It requires the candidate bring a laptop and that the company build a couple repository templates, but once that's done it's a very easy interview to conduct. Just observe the candidate debug and make note of how many bugs are fixed and whether the fixes do bad things like breach layers of abstraction.