151–160 of 306 posts
The language violates the new California Consumer Financial Protection Law (CCFPL), which took effect this year At the risk of being misconstrued as defending predatory practices, it sounds like they quickly reached an agreement to comply with legal stuff that probably didn't exist when they wrote the language that's being updated.
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Having read your comments in the thread I get where you are coming from, but can you please not do it like this? It doesn't help. It just gives people more reason to reject the point of view you're trying to defend. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you're going to flag my comments which are formatted in the exact same style and voice as the comment I'm responding to, please at least attempt to be consistent by flagging those comments as well.
I've flagged comments on both sides of this flamewar. If I haven't gone further, that's because I don't want to give rise to howls of protest about moderating HN to somehow benefit YC companies. Moderating less in such cases is literally the first thing pg taught me about moderating HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I understand what it feels like to be an embattled minority in a forum thread, but if you represent your community the way you've been doing here, you're actually hurting it, which is a bad trade to make for the momentary relief of venting frustration. I don't disagree with you about the underlying points. But as I tell startups all the time (YC and others) the important thing is always the silent audience. To the extent that there are undecided readers weighing arguments, you're giving them additional reasons to disagree with your position, which (again) doesn't help. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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You can't seriously believe that regulators have completely clean motives and actions. I'm still getting up to date on what happened here, but corporate malfeasance isn't incompatible with aggressive and even corrupt regulation. In fact my starting place is that both are likely. What I reject is the claim that the State only steps in and takes action if the party they're investigating has done something wrong. That's…
> You can't seriously believe that regulators have completely clean motives and actions. Since nothing in the comment you are responding to implies, or even has anything to do with, that, I’m not sure, other than love of pure non-sequitur, you would post that.
Kind of precludes alternate motives, like "the regulator is captured by existing interests and is prosecuting the company despite the company's sincere intention to make things better".
The language violates the new California Consumer Financial Protection Law (CCFPL), which took effect this year At the risk of being misconstrued as defending predatory practices, it sounds like they quickly reached an agreement to comply with legal stuff that probably didn't exist when they wrote the language that's being updated.
See [1] for further discussion of this. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26947875
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It's worth mentioning the the CEO Austen had a post on here (now deleted) proclaiming to have creating a bot army via stealing people's pictures on Instagram. I would qualify that as "underhanded"
Link to the post: https://web.archive.org/web/20190703224616/https://news.ycom... It's also weird that the post is still up, but the username was changed from austenallred to another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774
Hey everyone, Pretty excited to reach settlement on this one. The DFPI is a new regulatory agency in California that was tasked with reviewing Lambda School’s new incentive-aligned tuition ( https://lambdaschool.com/tuition/tuition-options ) in California. They came back requesting that we update a bankruptcy provision in the agreement to clarify that these agreements are dischargeable in bankruptcy, and to do a revi…
ie Was anyone harmed, or is this just preventative? Seems like the latter, but just want to make it clear for people.
Was it previously a gray zone on the dischargeability? Did something change in the law? Was Lambda just being cautious in saying it ::may not:: be dischargeable? Something else?
I remember hearing that ISA case law isn't very deep, so I can imagine that there may be more gray zones.
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> Lambda claimed this thing wasn't dischargeable in bankruptcy, the state of California says actually it is. Okay, fine. It doesn't mean Lambda was doing something malicious. Maybe I'm missing something, but if someone were in the unfortunate position to be considering bankruptcy, wouldn't knowing whether this loan is actually dischargeable or not be a big deal to them? It seems like it would be.
It's important, I just mean that the law isn't obvious here, so we shouldn't jump from "Lambda made a false statement about the California law" to "Lambda is maliciously trying to mislead students".
Are you seriously arguing that it is plausible that Lambda School has a good faith mistaken belief that they were qualified to participate in federal Title IV financial aid, but somehow made no mention or use of that qualification other than falsely claiming debts to the school were “qualified education loans” with limited dischargeability in bankruptcy?
Or are you claiming that it is not obvious that Title IV financial aid eligibility is a requirement for loans for a school to be qualified education loans?
That...strains credulity.
> "Lambda made a false statement about the California law"
Actually they broke California law by making a false statement of federal law. (“qualified education loan” is a federal-law category that determines both if the loan qualifies for the student loan interest deduction and if it has the “undue-hardship-only” discharge rule im bankruptcy.)
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> You can't seriously believe that regulators have completely clean motives and actions. Since nothing in the comment you are responding to implies, or even has anything to do with, that, I’m not sure, other than love of pure non-sequitur, you would post that.
> if the company had any interest in making things better the regulator would never have needed to get involved in the first place. Kind of precludes alternate motives, like "the regulator is captured by existing interests and is prosecuting the company despite the company's sincere intention to make things better".
See also Lambda School’s Misleading Promises: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
TBH this article makes me more confident that Lambda is overall Good. They found a single program that was substantially deficient, some disorganized operations, and some exaggerated marketing claims. It's starting a new form of education! There are going to be operational headaches and a few misses! While the referenced cases aren't good, we can assess Lambda on their overall contribution, not their mistakes alone.
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Link to the post: https://web.archive.org/web/20190703224616/https://news.ycom... It's also weird that the post is still up, but the username was changed from austenallred to another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774
Dang, is this a normal feature? Since when are users able to retroactively change the profile that made the comment? This looks like covering up a YC founder's past comment, but the archive still exists. According to snapshots it was modified over 2 years later.