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

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

#481
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 absolutely ridiculous... shame on UW. Their quid pro quo offer is ethically very wrong.

My wife works at a major public university and fights with antiquated software and business systems all day long. The amount of IT system bloat and 'village-idiot dumb' processes for managing course offerings, course catalogs, class schedules, etc. is pretty bad at a lot of universities.

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

#482
post #29

He wasn't disciplined for building an app or fetching data. He was disciplined for blatantly trying to "hack" (in the YC sense, in UW's view) the registration process: https://registrar.washington.edu/winter-2025-registration-ch... "Know that trading, selling, or buying open spots is a breach of the Registration Tampering Abuse Policy. Consequences include referral to the Student Code of Conduct process, a Registrar’…

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.

It seems odd that they would want the author to provided them with a system to automate it then.

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

#483
post #475
post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there? Remembering my time when my friends were in university…

Some required courses are only taught in Spring or only in Fall. Some of those "Fall only" courses are prerequisites for other required Spring-only courses. If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars. I ended up needing to stay an extra semester for a single course my final semester, because I planned poorly and discovered too l…

> If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.

Sure, but if you don't have "a couple of hundred dollars", you don't. It's a bit like saying "Why are people poor? Just put $1 million into a savings account, then you'll get enough to survive each month". Great for the ones who can, irrelevant for the ones who can't.

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a university professor, and this is batshit crazy. Who ? As in not "they" or "the university", but who within the university? Can you tell where the directive is coming from? If this comes from, say, the Provost's Office then this probably can't be handled internally. (The position of Provost is the #2 position at a university, and the provost usually runs the show while the President or Chancellor goes schmoozin…

The head coach of football gets paid $4mil a year (4x the president) and is the highest payed employee. The top 7 staff are all sports related. Is this, like, common in the US? It seems batshit insane to an outsider.

Universities in the US administer the main second-tier sports leagues for basketball and football, so yes, it’s common (though strange, I agree).

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

#485
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…

Gut reaction is this feels like petty and vindictive retaliatory behavior hiding behind an official façade.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the fact that if it were so egregious, then why does the university want the creator's work or some modification of it?

The only source we have for this is the person saying it.

Good point.

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

#487
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you are being blackmailed into working for them for free

Right, if he does work for them, he is worth a full time salary for a new software engineer. That is at minimum, he can argue that he is worth a company founder salary.

Founder salaries are generally not high (at least until the company becomes mature). They own a (significant) portion of the company and want to minimize burn.

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

#489

I have several friends on the administrative side at Universities. The two things you have to realize is that there are an incredible number of administrative staff at Universities and they're extremely territorial. You rocked someone's boat and they got upset. They have a lot of time on their hands because there are so, so many people in administration. Now they're coming after you like it's their job. I think you'r…

This is the negative part of bullshit jobs that become harmful to others once their existence starts to be threatened!

Your comment reminds me of this part of Bob Black's 1985 essay "The Abolition of Work": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolit... "I don’t suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn’t worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Thirty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done—presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now—would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the “tertiary sector,” the service sector, is growing while the “secondary sector” (industry) stagnates and the “primary sector” (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last sixty years? ..."

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end. An officious word for lawyer is counsel , because that’s what they’re for: they offer legal counsel. You don’t technically “talk” to a lawyer , instead you ask them questions. They answer. That’s why client-attorney privilege exists at all: so you can feel free to seek counsel, ie ask questions , without fea…

As a lawyer, your post is almost entirely incorrect. Privilege in no way depends on whether the communication involves questions. It cracks me up. As a lawyer, I would never post on HN to argue about pointer arithmetic or inference optimization, yet the law seems to be fair game for amateur hour.

> Privilege in no way depends on whether the communication involves questions.

I sure hope most lawyers don't often misread other people's writing as bad as you did here.

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