Live data from Hacker News

I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

linkedin.com

211–220 of 737 posts

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can have a conversation without being representation and should connect OP to someone who can represent them.

No they can't have a conversation when they know of a non waivable conflict.

Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.

How would the lawyer even know, without conversation, that there was a conflict?

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#212
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once lawyers are involved, they are always going to be the only winners.

What makes you think so?

When lawyers are paid hourly to talk to each other on behalf of their clients, sometimes the bill can get sky high if not managed.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a uw cs student, it is made pretty clear that you're not supposed to trade spots or otherwise automate any part of the registration. Students typically know not to talk about this stuff. While well-intentioned, if this was commonly used it would mess registration up even more by making the "constrained" classes valuable and would be filled up quickly by people who wouldn't take them.

I was an EE student and worked for UW CSE back in the day, someone tried to do this back then as well and got very in trouble. There may have been some browser automation scripts about… I wouldn’t know.

How were said student(s) even caught? I am assuming someone spoke too loudly or shared too much, but I'd be lying if I said I was not hoping for some kind of technical solution.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#214
While at university I had a similar interaction. When the main university IT services team wanted to roll out a replacement to the student portal with a bunch of irrelevant features I mocked up a simple site with the things we actually wanted on it. Later on I re-implemented our students union website, again providing more useful information, like venue schedules and opening hours.

Both times we came under scrutiny for the possibility that we might be handling student data in ways that the university couldn't control, and mostly, that we might be taking passwords on behalf of users.

The first was just a mockup, and while the second initially had full university auth against their open LDAP server, we quickly removed that in favour of our own auth, because it was very apparent that the password input being on our domain was a dealbreaker for the university.

By doing this, and by communicating carefully about what we were doing and what we were not doing, where the boundaries were, and how we handled data, we managed to win them around to some productive discussions. Most of the people we spoke to on university staff who were involved in this were not at the technical level to be able to understand, for example, having an unsecured LDAP server that we could auth against, and were only interested in the policy of whether we were allowed to do it.

It's a common failure mode of software engineers to assume that because something is not technically disallowed, even though it could be, that it must therefore be allowed. This is not true.

What's not clear with this project is whether the university have a fundamental disagreement with the idea of a student project providing services, or if someone has panicked that a non-approved system might be receiving passwords from students. The former is obviously ridiculous, universities should be open to this sort of innovation, especially from their students. But the latter is understandable and a fairly reasonable response, but one that does need careful handling by the student to navigate well.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#215
post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

This is a huge story and if it goes viral, it could put a lot of heat on UW. Write a detailed post on your LinkedIn, Twitter, anywhere that could get the attention of media. Better yet, link your post here and I'd gladly help spread the word. What UW is doing is extortion especially for their fuck-up. Be polite in your post and just write down the facts.

Twitter, Substack and Bluesky is where journalists are too right?

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#216
post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

This doesn’t even make sense… why is you rebuilding it for them even part of the discussion? You built a demo of something they didn’t like, so you took it down. That should be the end of it.

Saying you need todo it for free is bonkers. Students who work in the cafeteria get paid…

And the gap between “a greenfield project” versus rebuilding the app in their infrastructure is so huge… This type of app would take 6 months to build minimum. So insane.

If you only have a few months left, you will barely get out of the initial project scoping meetings talking to all of the various departments (legal, it, hr, etc etc)

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#217
post #18
post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

Call a lawyer, there has to be some who specialize in educational rights violations. I can’t believe the state of education in this country that your own university would harm your life in such a way for an honesty effort to improve things. Fuck whomever at UW pulled this trigger, they need to be fired.

Nationally there’s FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, who (despite a recent name change) are focused on campus free speech rights.

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#218
post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

This is a huge story and if it goes viral, it could put a lot of heat on UW. Write a detailed post on your LinkedIn, Twitter, anywhere that could get the attention of media. Better yet, link your post here and I'd gladly help spread the word. What UW is doing is extortion especially for their fuck-up. Be polite in your post and just write down the facts.

Might be best to talk to that lawyer first before risking libelling the Uni, or anything they could reasonably claim...

Re: I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled

#220
post #7

Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith. They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to…

If you had managed to build this system during my time at UW, I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project. The class and reservation system there was (and presumably is?) incredibly broken. I remember literally the only way to get a spot reserved in some /mandatory/ courses was to find an upper classman with prioritized registration dates and a…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN