[HN Gopher] I had to take down my course-swapping site or be exp...
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I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled
Author : jdkaim
Score : 1255 points
Date : 2025-01-08 21:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.linkedin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.linkedin.com)
| silexia wrote:
| UW alum here, my alma mater is a disappointment.
| craftman210 wrote:
| Yeah I'm glad I didn't go there.
| johncessna wrote:
| Tell them that. Alumni support is critical for a university and
| if they feel their donation base is upset, change will happen.
| jchung wrote:
| As an alum, you may have much more influence than you might
| expect. President Cauce (who's contact information is
| prominently displayed on the UW website) may be unaware that
| alumni are not pleased with this.
| pockmarked19 wrote:
| That's just how colleges are. I once reported to my alma mater
| that a somewhat obscure (but obviously public) link seemed to
| trigger the download of a zip of student details for no
| discernible reason (I think it was a WIP site), and they
| immediately threatened to call the FBI on me. I just sort of
| laughed it off, but I decided that was the last time I was going
| to initiate any sort of contact with them if I didn't absolutely
| have to.
|
| Which is the policy I followed when I found that they had stored
| one of their LDAP admin passwords in a world readable file on the
| CS servers.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Wasn't a government agency rendering citizen SSNs client-side
| and when someone discovered it, they went after them? Wouldn't
| be surprised if the anti-DRM part of the DMCA is used to
| persecute these non-crimes.
| gowld wrote:
| It's CFAA (computer fraud and abuse, aka hacking/cracking)
| not DMCA/anti-DRM
| pockmarked19 wrote:
| I imagine governments tend to be the same way, though my only
| direct experience here is that I don't report anything and
| nothing bad happens. The funny thing to me is that the
| discovery of these issues is not what triggers retaliation,
| but the audacity of reporting them.
|
| Were I personally impacted, I would just submit information
| to the media as an anonymous whistleblower to get it fixed.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Really? If you're personally impacted then surely you don't
| want the media bringing attention to an open vulnerability
| where anyone can steal your data.
|
| I'd opt for silence in this case and hope that some future
| update patches the bug (accidentally or otherwise).
| pockmarked19 wrote:
| Depends on the impact. In some cases you do, so a class
| action lawsuit gets some traction.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Yes, that was in MO. Their idiot governor threatened the
| journalist that discovered it with prosecution.
|
| An investigation by the Missouri State Patrol and a MO county
| later determined that the executive branch screwed up and
| leaked the SSNs and that the reporter committed no crime.
|
| https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-
| governor...
| jasinjames wrote:
| I think you're thinking of this case [1] from Missouri where
| a reporter notified the state that teacher SSNs were exposed,
| and the Governor went ballistic. Luckily, it seems like the
| local law enforcement set the record straight.
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-crime-
| educati...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I never figured out if the governor was that inept that he
| was truly convinced the person was a hacker despite every
| tech professional's opinion, or if he was merely doubling
| down on the hacking accusations to try to save face.
| mardef wrote:
| Missouri Governor was the one going after them for viewing
| the source of a public webpage.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866805
| grumple wrote:
| Isn't it weird how universities are so hostile towards their
| students? Some professors are genuinely interested in
| developing students and are great, but many faculty and
| administrators - and the overall tone of the schools - are
| draconian.
| zamalek wrote:
| Universities are businesses, they aren't institutions of
| learning. Students are on the "liability" side of the balance
| sheet. Students who stand out could accrue massive costs.
|
| Professors? The problem is tenure.
| rocqua wrote:
| Research universities have plenty of professors who are there
| to do research. But they often still have a teaching
| responsibility. For those professors, teaching students is a
| mandatory thing they only do so they can keep their job doing
| what they actually want: research.
|
| Those professors aren't great teachers, and I think we
| shouldn't blame them for it. Instead we should blame the
| system that forces them to do something they aren't good at.
| rtkwe wrote:
| This is a problem but it's not really related to the issue
| of the harsh reaction of college administrations to
| exposing problems, the examples mentioned in this thread
| and in the original article are all capital A
| Administration responses, a group completely separate from
| the professors. Some professors are involved in admin work
| but the vast majority of admin work is done by employees
| who neither teach nor research.
| yard2010 wrote:
| RIP Aaron Swartz
| NBJack wrote:
| Reminds me of the time _my_ university made headlines!...for
| attempting to regulate wifi.
|
| https://m.slashdot.org/story/49515
| dylan604 wrote:
| Trying to decide if having a slashdot link as a reference
| implies anything about _your_ age or if I 'm just a jaded old
| fart
| NBJack wrote:
| Jaded old farts unite?
| rincebrain wrote:
| My former institution tried that for a few years - nobody
| actually obeyed it, but at the time I went there, they still
| made you pay a separate registration fee on arrival each year
| for internet access in the dorms, so they didn't put in
| wireless APs there when they covered the campus, and IIRC they
| tried to use Cisco's "kill nearby APs that aren't ours" setting
| before the FCC pointed out that would get them shoved in a
| locker.
|
| Nobody actually got punished, that I recall, for bringing a
| wireless router, but that was the nominal policy for a number
| of years before someone successfully got it into the annual
| tuition rollup so it stopped being necessary.
|
| To my recollection from when I left the school years after
| that, though, there still wasn't campus wifi reliably
| accessible in the dorms. (Of course, half of them also didn't
| have reliable air conditioning in muggy humid summers and would
| blow breakers if you tried putting window units in,
| so...priorities.)
| SpaceNugget wrote:
| I have seen the name pop up before, but I have never actually
| visited slashdot before. I think it was popular a bit before my
| time. This link made me heavily reconsider how much "worse" I
| thought internet discourse had gotten in the past 10 years. It
| looks like way back in 2004, it was still a bunch of people who
| didn't read the article before commenting arguing past each
| other to shout into the void the loudest. I guess that's a bit
| comforting and a bit sad.
| NBJack wrote:
| Slashdot was the Hacker News of its day twenty years ago.
| Imperfect, sure, but a good source of tech news, discourse,
| and insight. The moderation was community driven and a
| privilege to participate in. It's also a sad shell of its
| former self.
|
| But, yeah, lots of people skipping straight to comment too.
| jdkaim wrote:
| 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 register for my final
| quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this
| quarter.
|
| Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the
| university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were
| clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied that
| they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| I really love UW and have had a wonderful time here. But this is
| so demoralizing.
|
| Update #2:
|
| I appreciate you guys for all of your advice.
|
| This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not
| planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW
| leadership will make it right in the end.
|
| I'm not planning to pursue this project at this point. If they
| came up to me at first with the offer to work with them it might
| be different, but the way they handled it makes me just want to
| walk away.
| NBJack wrote:
| You may want to consult with a lawyer. This is starting to
| sound like extortion.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 100% this. You'd be surprised what kinds of problems go away
| when you mention your lawyer casually or you have a lawyer
| send a letter. Even if you don't get the right kind of lawyer
| right away, they might be able to recommend someone or tell
| you how to research the right kind of lawyer to get ahold of.
| Professionals are usually helpful about those kinds of
| things.
|
| Also get a second or third opinion. I've sometimes gotten
| different answers from different lawyers about our prospects
| of success on things we've called about.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Don't mention a lawyer casually. Just have the lawyer send
| a letter. Don't give them the option to call your bluff.
| People casually mention a lawyer so frequently it means
| nothing. Receiving a letter from an actual lawyer means
| everything.
| zcrossing wrote:
| [flagged]
| SteveNuts wrote:
| The one time I mentioned getting a lawyer over a
| grievance with a car dealership, the customer service
| people immediately stopped talking to me and said all
| further communication goes through their lawyers.
|
| Whoops
| mingus88 wrote:
| That's the only reasonable thing to do in their position.
| Anything you say from there can and will be used against
| you.
|
| It's also the best way for any customer service rep to
| eject from an unpleasant exchange. 100% done with you;
| lawyers problem now.
| namaria wrote:
| Yeah, lawyering up works best in silence. Don't announce
| it, especially if you won't actually do it. That's just a
| double defeat, you show your hand in advance and they get
| defensive.
| timewizard wrote:
| It's all fun and games until you're called into a
| deposition.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Having a lawyer send a letter isn't an automatic win.
| Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to
| escalate to _their_ legal team. Reasonable lawyers would
| likely roll their eyes and talk the university back from
| this weird move, but you 're not guaranteed reasonable
| lawyers on the other end. If they feel threatened they
| might start looking even deeper into into contracts you
| signed as a way to protect themselves or as legal
| leverage to silence you with further threats.
|
| I've witnessed a couple cases where things went from
| hiring a lawyer, to sending a letter, to a stalemate
| where legal bills started getting so expensive that the
| only winners were the lawyers. When you're dealing with a
| big bureaucracy you can't count on them giving up at the
| first sight of a letter from a lawyer.
|
| The legal route also takes time and locks any further
| conversations into the speed of both sides' lawyers. Time
| matters in this case because this student needs to get
| registered for classes, so anything that could stall that
| process needs to be weighed carefully.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if this issue magically goes away
| as soon as the publicity comes around to local news media
| and/or some alumni with connections.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Once lawyers are involved, they are always going to be
| the only winners.
| eru wrote:
| What makes you think so?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Because even if you "win", you now have all of those
| lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you. If you
| loose, you now have all of those lovely legal bills that
| the lawyer sends you. So the lawyer wins either way.
| ipython wrote:
| All campuses have student legal aid offices. I engaged
| one once myself when I was in university. Even though the
| complaint is against the University itself, in this case,
| attorneys are still subject to strict ethical rules and
| so you can at the very least get an honest read on the
| situation at a very low or no cost to you. (if they
| clearly demonstrate a conflict of interest, then you'll
| have an easy pro-bono case from a real lawyer against the
| University now for _two_ things)
|
| I would take a look at your Student Legal Aid office and
| get an appointment. Usually consultations are free.
| Benanov wrote:
| You can't use the student aid legal office, which is part
| of the university, to help you sue the university. That's
| a non-waivable conflict.
| eru wrote:
| Involving lawyers doesn't automatically mean you are
| going to court. Going to court is expensive, yes.
|
| Most issues can be settled out of court for much cheaper.
| A good lawyer can help you make that happen.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Well yeah, if you hire someone to help you with
| something, you often end up owing them money, whether or
| not it ends up successful.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Whether it ends up being successful or not while still
| having to pay the lawyer is how the lawyer always win.
| This is not the gotcha you think it is
| sethherr wrote:
| Hmmmm. Yes but, if I hire a programmer to build me an app
| and no one ever uses it, I still have to pay the
| programmer.
|
| This is exactly the gotcha. You paid for a service. The
| outcome isn't guaranteed.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Did you need to use a tractor to move those goal posts?
| pc86 wrote:
| Did they move goal posts though? The original claim was
| that "once lawyers are involved, lawyers are the only
| winners." "Only" because "even if you win you still have
| to pay the lawyers."
|
| Even if your app is successful, you still have to pay the
| programmers. Even if you sell the building, you still
| have to pay the construction crew. Even if you're packed
| during dinner service you still have to pay the chef.
|
| None of these scenarios are painted as a pyrrhic victory
| because you had to pay the people who made it possible.
| All those people are generally paid hourly too. Is it
| because a good lawyer will bill you $400/hr? Is it
| because those generally have a lot more upside
| financially than simply winning a court case?
|
| I think it's projecting anger from spec attorneys taking
| 40% of personal injury judgments, or class action
| attorneys making $50 million in fees when the people
| affected get checks for $8.72, but neither of those apply
| here particularly when you're paying an attorney $75 to
| send a demand letter template on their letterhead.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Oncologists get paid even if the cancer kills you, that's
| not a good argument against oncologists.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Except the original claim was that *only* the lawyers
| win.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > Because even if you "win", you now have all of those
| lovely legal bills that the lawyer sends you
|
| Oh come on, that's like saying when you involve engineers
| to build a bridge, the only people who wins are the
| engineers because you have to pay them.
| fakedang wrote:
| Engineers don't get paid more when a project gets further
| delayed.
| dmurray wrote:
| You've obviously never worked in consulting.
| pc86 wrote:
| Plenty of engineers and firms bill hourly, so yes
| sometimes they do.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Ever get a $5 settlement check from a class action?
| wbl wrote:
| Good lawyers don't send letters automatically. They help
| the client whether that's involved the media, etc.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to
| escalate to their legal team._
|
| Assuming we have the relevant facts of the case, it seems
| like when UW's legal team gets involved, they will tell
| the relevant people in the university's leadership "wtf
| were you thinking, de-escalate immediately, and allow
| this kid to enroll in classes and graduate", and the
| problem will go away for OP.
| DennisP wrote:
| That might be the way to bet but casually mentioning a
| lawyer once worked for me on a used car warranty claim. I
| didn't make any threats, I just said "my mechanic says X
| and my lawyer says Y" and they said we'll call you back,
| which they did in ten minutes and said I was covered
| after all.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If that's actually what your lawyer says, then there's
| nothing wrong with that, but if you don't have a lawyer
| and they call your bluff, you're worse off than before
| you ran your mouth. So it's not really too much different
| than me telling about that one time I was in Vegas and I
| rolled a seven.
| DennisP wrote:
| I had a buddy who was a lawyer, who spent a few minutes
| looking over the contract as a favor. There was no bet
| for them to call since I wasn't threatening action, just
| pointing out what the contract actually said (which my
| buddy confirmed for me).
|
| It was under a thousand bucks so I could have just taken
| them to small claims court if they didn't fold. That may
| have worked in my favor.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| So you just have to make sure you actually _talk_ to a
| lawyer before you talk to anyone else.
| eru wrote:
| Yes, you don't mention a lawyer, casually or otherwise.
| What you do is keep a paper trail, and optionally
| 'casually' notify the other party of said paper trail
| collection.
| j45 wrote:
| Definitely doesn't hurt to get opinions when the other side
| has hundreds of resources and billions of dollars.
| abrookewood wrote:
| It is absolutely extortion. What a bunch of arseholes. I
| can't believe they even suggested that.
| widforss wrote:
| What? You didn't even do anything? This is extortion.
| cglace wrote:
| This sounds like they are trying to extort you.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Twitter, Substack and Bluesky is where journalists are too
| right?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Might be best to talk to that lawyer first before risking
| libelling the Uni, or anything they could reasonably claim...
| GordonGaffs wrote:
| It would be a huge story.. if it were true.
|
| The moment a journalist looks into they will spot what this
| actually is.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| You're making a lot of assumptions, unless you actually
| have facts, I don't see how you can justify those
| statements.
| Xelynega wrote:
| You mean like the entire post we're commenting on?
|
| All we have is the word of some student who is trying to
| frame themselves positively.
| GordonGaffs wrote:
| Wait till the response by UW
| mmooss wrote:
| This is very good advice. Human beings tend to overlook,
| minimize, or just not closely examine their own failings,
| expecially painful and shameful ones. And then when they
| tell the story to others, they tend to portray themselves
| as victims - innocent and persecuted.
|
| But you need to be very careful when you go from telling
| your friends to making public, consequential, legal moves.
| Contact a journalist, and they will want to find the whole
| story, not just your fanciful version. Involve lawyers and
| the same thing will happen.
|
| Talk to a lawyer first; let them dig in and find the real
| story; be completely open and honest. Then see where you
| stand.
| crystaln wrote:
| When I read your initial post I figured it was knee jerk
| reaction, and like many no's was only the start of the
| conversation.
|
| Now it sounds like you've got some sociopaths on the line. I
| would gather information and fish them to get very specific
| about their request and threat, then kindly turn it around on
| them. Be prepared to go above their heads all the way to the
| board if necessary.
| ok_dad wrote:
| 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.
| sf_rob wrote:
| Nationally there's FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights
| and Expression, who (despite a recent name change) are
| focused on campus free speech rights.
| sneak wrote:
| Stop posting anything publicly until you've retained and
| consulted with an attorney.
|
| You may wish to consider deleting this comment. You can always
| repost it later after you lawyer up.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The lack of compensation sounds like extortion. Definitely
| consult a lawyer.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Most universities seem now to include IP rights grabs in the
| matriculation documents you have to agree to when starting
| your course. If you squint, and apply a dose of salt, the OPs
| side of things sounds like a compromise offer to move forward
| allowing the student not to give over current IP but to
| develop something new.
|
| Depending on contracts, and local laws, that might be almost
| legal...
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| Realistically, and obviously I'm not a lawyer, but if it
| was developed as part of a course, I can see how that might
| (not saying I agree with it) make the IP rights assignment
| more complicated and maybe the university would have a leg
| to stand on?
| InfoSecErik wrote:
| Do what I did when UDub pushed me out: finish at UOregon.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| 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 free schedule to hold the
| class for you. In you're in a frat, great. If you're a bit of
| an introvert that lives off campus, you're shit out of luck.
|
| I imagine UW is fully aware of this, I cant believe that it's
| still so much an issue that they felt the jeed to expell you
| for even having the gall to demo an idea. Absolutely appalling
| diggan wrote:
| > 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
| while working, just about no one would have hundreds of
| dollars to spend on something like that.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| My sister-in-law is going back for her masters right now.
| She did the maximum allowed loans from her FAFSA, so after
| her tuition and fees were paid, she had enough left over to
| draw a $300/wk "salary" from the remaining balance. She has
| to pay her rent and groceries and other bills from that,
| but she usually has about $100 a month left over for "fun"
| - if she lived in a cheaper apartment or took out
| additional loans, she'd have a lot "left over," and this is
| what a lot of Americans do.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Wait, why would anyone do this, though? It's like taking
| a personal loan from the government that is non-
| dischargeable in bankruptcy. The interest is going to
| accrue every year you go to uni.
|
| If you use that to go long on the stock market, I get it
| since the S&P500 beats interest rates right now, though
| there's a risk. Using it on personal expenses seems like
| the lowest EV choice!
| hn4352 wrote:
| Living expenses have to come from somewhere. If you use
| the time to graduate faster, instead of working to
| generate weekly income, in some cases you can come out
| ahead overall. Details vary, but it's not obvious that
| it's a bad deal.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Essential expenses it certainly makes sense. But it seems
| some amount of it is treated as disposable income rather
| than liability.
| lkbm wrote:
| 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 late that I couldn't get it in my would-
| have-been-penultimate semester.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| hn4352 wrote:
| I think most students in America have loans. For me, and
| everyone I knew, there was a credit balance after the
| school got paid and that money was put into your bank
| account.
|
| Don't forget you have to buy books, etc., and they cost
| "a couple of hundred dollars" too.
|
| When I was an undergraduate I was definitely on a knife's
| edge, but I also often had cash in the bank because I got
| a big cash infusion annually. I just had to live off a
| very strict budget at that time to make sure the money
| would last.
|
| I wouldn't have wanted to rely on this service when I was
| a student, especially at that cost, but in a pinch I
| could see situations where it would make sense.
| AngryData wrote:
| I myself was never given access to any funds or credit
| from student loans.
|
| It would have been nice if I did though.
| bradlys wrote:
| A lot of students at UW - especially ones in the CS
| department - come from rich families. A lot of foreign
| students as well - who again - come from a ton of money.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| College is not cheap in the US. Going to any university in
| the US implies a certain amount of wealth, and barring that
| (scholarship, e.g.) then you must be someone who is
| incredibly motivated. In either case, spending a few
| hundred dollars to guaruntee a spot in a required course to
| keep your studies on track, to be accepted into your major,
| and to eventually graduate on time is worth AT LEAST a few
| hundred dollars. Like the other commenter, i also ended up
| needing to graduate a semester late due to this nonsense,
| which cost me thousands in actual money, and much more in
| lost potential income.
| kelnos wrote:
| I haven't been in university in over 20 years, but when I
| was, I absolutely did not have hundreds of dollars to throw
| around for things to make my life more convenient.
| Certainly some of my peers did, but they were not in the
| majority.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| Convenience was not a factor. If you were unable to sign
| up for some of these courses, you would be barred from
| advancing in your studies. These were things like
| prerequisites for applying to your major, not just
| shuffling around your timeslots for an ideal schedule.
|
| Im unsure if this was much more of an issue at UW
| specifically (also this was also over a decade ago), but
| UW accepted maybe ~30% of the applicants to a given major
| (in STEM). They dont tell you this as a freshman when you
| declare your intended course of study, but you're
| competing with your classmates to actually be able to
| study what you want to major in. This leads to critical
| classes filling up within seconds, massive waitlists, and
| delays of semesters possible if you miss courses you
| need.
| jostmey wrote:
| Sounds like you are being blackmailed into working for them for
| free
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| But when the founder sells and remains working they
| generally get a good income.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| not a laywer, but this sounds like you are being dicked.
| impendia wrote:
| 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 schmoozing
| with donors.)
|
| But if it's coming from the Registrar's Office, then the
| Registrar doesn't have _that_ much power internally, and you
| might be able to fight this decision within the university.
| What they did is not only brazenly immoral, it is also a
| _tremendous_ legal liability for UW, and it should and might be
| a firing offense for whoever is responsible. And quite frankly
| no matter what happens I would seriously consider hiring an
| attorney (you might find one who will work on contingency).
|
| You might speak with any professors in the department you have
| a good relationship with; I would be _very_ surprised if they
| were sympathetic to this decision.
|
| You might also talk with the university ombudsman, Dean of
| Students, etc. -- although I would be a little bit cautious and
| polite here. Just calmly describe the situation and ask what
| you should do in this situation. Hopefully (but this is very
| far from certain), they will calmly offer to intervene on your
| behalf, and then they will go ballistic behind closed doors and
| absolutely rake the Registrar over the coals. In any case, be
| poker faced, don't fully trust them, and avoid committing to a
| particular course of action if you don't have to.
|
| Finally, here's an amusing hack. Salaries at UW are public
| record. If you want to find out how important any individual
| person is in the hierarchy, look up how much money they make.
| It's a fairly accurate barometer.
|
| https://fiscal.wa.gov/Staffing/Salaries
|
| Universities are not monoliths, and the relationships between
| different power centers are usually mistrustful at best.
|
| Best of luck to you.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Are those numbers a sum of the total benefits or something?
| It seems insane that a campus security guard is making 170k.
| impendia wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| I knew that salaries at public universities are public in
| many states, so thought to google it -- but the details can
| vary.
| dekhn wrote:
| It's total pay without benefits. It includes overtime and
| on-call time (which are typically paid at a higher rate).
|
| It wouldn't surprise me that an experienced security guard
| is making $170K; the state itself is expensive, and they
| have to retain staff. The staff is often ex-cop, and guards
| very frequently work overtime (paid time-and-a-half or
| more). The guard may be a people manager (I don't know
| which row you're referring to but it looks like the typical
| guard makes far less).
| OtomotO wrote:
| It seems insane that you need campus security guards at all
| oO
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why?
| Biganon wrote:
| Because police is a thing?...
| singron wrote:
| A lot of campuses have actual police. In some ways
| campuses are similar to a municipality and have many of
| the services that entails (fire, trash, water, power,
| snow removal, parks, and security/law enforcement).
|
| You could similarly ask why a town of 50,000 people needs
| a police department.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| When you put it in terms of total number of people...it
| does make sense. A lot of universities down here in Texas
| have a small town+ amount of students and faculty and
| they tend to have their own police departments and other
| services.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| My university had a police department because it is, as
| one might expect of a flagship state university, an
| enormous landmass with billions of dollars in
| infrastructure and equipment, plus about 6,000 full-time
| residents living in university-owned housing. Residents
| of a certain class of people who are prone to doing
| stupid, illegal shit.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Consider the liability to which a _bad_ security guard can
| expose your organization! Not that pay guarantees quality
| but still
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| 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.
| impendia wrote:
| Yes, this is extremely common.
|
| On the one hand, yes, this is absolutely batshit insane.
|
| On the other hand, college sports are enormously popular;
| football games regularly play to sold out crowds of over
| 50,000, and during football season there will be games on
| TV all weekend (not just local ones). They bring in a lot
| of revenue and publicity for the university -- and the
| latter (debatably?) helps attract students to apply.
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| I'd never considered that a sports program could be
| revenue producing. That's quite interesting. Although it
| seems weird that higher education and (almost-
| professional) sports are so tightly coupled.
| sf_rob wrote:
| An interesting outsider perspective is this clip of
| Steven Fry going to an Auburn game:
| https://youtu.be/FuPeGPwGKe8
|
| Regarding the latter, it's weird and certainly was
| exploitative when college athletes weren't allowed to
| monetize through sponsorships and frankly still is
| exploitative.
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| I was more thinking that there's not a particularly
| natural overlap between sports and academic ability.
| You'd think that by tying the two together, you'd get
| both worse sporting and academic performance than if they
| were unrelated.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| The US has a decidedly liberal viewpoint on education.
| Sports ability is in some sense an educational endeavor.
| The ancient Greeks called it "athletics".
|
| So US educational institutions don't really have any
| hangup against treating sports any differently than they
| might treat a CS class.
|
| They are a subject you have to study and train at...and
| sometimes sit in a theatre and have a class time about
| (watching scout footage or deconstructing plays, etc).
|
| Sports are probably just as rigorous as anything else
| academically once you get to something approaching a
| division 1 level of play. The reason we don't recognize
| it is because we suck and are mostly casual about it on a
| forum like this (filled with sports failures like myself
| or sports non-participants). The people actually in these
| programs with D1 scholarships and whatnot I guarantee
| take it as seriously as you or I would take calculus.
| dcrazy wrote:
| This is hardly an American phenomenon. The Bauhaus was
| famous for incorporating athletics too.
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| I never meant to imply that athletics wasn't a serious
| pursuit. I agree that physical capability is part of
| being a well-rounded person. It's certainly common here
| (Aus) for schools and universities to have sports teams
| and to strongly encourage participation.
|
| What I find strange in the US context is the emphasis on
| it as a (revenue generating!) spectator sport. I
| understand that amateur (for want of a better word)
| sports can be highly entertaining; what I don't
| understand is why you'd go to university teams to find
| the best amateurs. I've played and watched enough sport
| to know that it's common for academic and physical
| abilities to be not particularly well correlated,
| particularly at tails of the distributions.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's batshit insane either way in the grand scheme of
| things. It just goes to show how market forces don't
| necessarily incentivize the things we actually want or
| need.
| simonh wrote:
| It seems like crowds of 50,000 people want this enough to
| regularly pay for it, subsidising other people's
| education in the process.
| SideQuark wrote:
| A college like UW may have sports revenue on order of
| $300M, much of which goes to the university, and means
| students may pay less than if there were no sports. Dig
| carefully through UW finances, which are usually public
| record. Paying a coach whose program is a massive profit
| center enough to have a team of quality enough to land
| bigger TV deals may be a financial benefit.
| o11c wrote:
| I always see people _saying_ that sports is financially
| positive on its own, but my actual experience is a ~10%
| tuition hike to subsidize sports expansion, so ...
| KPGv2 wrote:
| My university's athletics program pulls in so much money
| and some of it funds academic programs. No money goes from
| academics to sports.
|
| So the athletics department is not only self-sustaining and
| self-funding, but it funds academics as well.
|
| It's basically as if Man U sent some of its profits to
| Manchester University.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| Very common at larger state universities that have been
| around a long enough time to have a significant sports
| following.
|
| It makes sense if you do the math.
|
| Newer schools and smaller schools, typically not so much.
|
| A lot of what we do in the US probably sounds batshit
| insane to outsiders so no worries about that and thanks for
| asking!
| umanwizard wrote:
| Universities in the US administer the main second-tier
| sports leagues for basketball and football, so yes, it's
| common (though strange, I agree).
| cafard wrote:
| Yes, and not just at public universities.
| chillfox wrote:
| Having worked in university administration before I would say
| that anyone who lasts as a manager is a professional
| politician, so expect them to have engineered a very good
| reason and possibly have allied with another department.
|
| As manager pay is usually based on headcount instead of being
| aligned with good outcomes, they might just have threatened
| someone's mortgage payments. So, that manager might be
| willing to call in every favor and fight with everything they
| have got.
|
| But yeah of course it's possible that they got into more
| trouble than they can handle.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Does your university have a student's union? I'm not sure if
| this is common in the US. But in the UK they're usually
| incredibly effective at sorting out this kind of issue.
| dustyventure wrote:
| You may want to check what the conditions are on transferring
| credit from other schools.. In some schools you only need a
| limited portion of credit from your own school and a sign off
| from an appropriate professor for equivalences.
| sneak wrote:
| The way that the leadership will make it right in the end is
| VIA YOUR LAWYER.
|
| Without a lawyer they have no reason to do anything. You paid a
| lot to graduate, it is nothing short of foolish to squander
| that investment by forgoing legal representation while they try
| to extort you.
|
| Don't have any more unrecorded conversations with them. They
| are playing hardball and you are pretending that everything is
| a-ok, when it clearly isn't.
| umanwizard wrote:
| It seems reasonable to at least attempt to resolve the
| situation by emailing someone higher up than whichever random
| bureaucrat put a hold on his account before immediately
| jumping to hiring lawyers.
| sneak wrote:
| The lawyer emails someone higher up, otherwise the higher
| up will simply smash the hammer harder to protect against
| liability. Showing up without representation here is a mark
| of unseriousness.
|
| Adult businesspeople always have lawyers do the fighting
| for them; if you don't it says more about you than the
| fight.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Not necessarily. The more damage you do to someone, the
| higher the potential liability. Smart business people
| usually know that de-escalating is often the best choice.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Also, treat email conversations as "unrecorded" if they're
| using your university email address. Make sure to download a
| copy of all email correspondence to a storage device outside
| the control of the university.
| ta988 wrote:
| This is really important, they can delete emails. And if
| they do, that's one more point for your case.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| This new development is practically a gift.
|
| The last thing in the world you want at this point is to be
| getting into any big fights obviously, but wow did they just
| give you about 3 legs to stand on.
| prox wrote:
| This does sound like extortion, please don't get pushed over!
| hooverd wrote:
| That's concerning. I can see why IT wouldn't be giving API keys
| to random students. Who on the uni side is doing this?
| LPisGood wrote:
| This is bonkers, and sort of smells. I'm not saying you have
| outright said anything untrue, but there is at least some
| ambiguity that my mind is filling in, potentially incorrectly.
|
| Can you clarify how you got the Swagger files? Were they
| publicly available?
|
| Could you share the exact verbiage they used to seemingly
| extort labor and intellectual property from you?
|
| Does the university have some previously existing (and
| communicated/documented) policy regarding swapping or trading
| seats?
| dgfitz wrote:
| I wouldn't answer this question if I were the OP.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| https://webservices.washington.edu/sws/
| flir wrote:
| Neither would I, but they're very good questions. If I was
| OP, I'd want to make sure my answers were watertight.
| w0m wrote:
| Honestly this. I agree the registrar can be shitbag; but
| having a method to request token access but also blocking the
| OP here even though he claims he never actually had real data
| on his site, but was planning on using the legally-requested-
| token to populate it in the future? That smells of half the
| story i think.
|
| My guess being OP was probably running the service for months
| under-the-radar via scraping prior, and they didn't notice
| him until he requested the token to help clean up his data.
| Else they punished him before* he actually did anything
| wrong? yea, just smells.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| > I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith
| that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
|
| All evidence so far indicates they _will not_ make it right,
| but instead they may make it even worse. Your faith is wildly
| misplaced. Seriously, talk to a lawyer.
|
| Keep in mind, just because you seek advice from a lawyer
| doesn't mean you need to take legal action against the school.
| Talking to a lawyer is not an escalation; the school doesn't
| even need to know you consulted one. A lawyer will advise
| whether you should take legal action and any more amicable
| alternatives available before they do anything on your behalf.
| ryandrake wrote:
| OP please consider listening to this reply. Do not rely on an
| unaccountable bureaucracy to "do the right thing." They
| don't.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| At least he'll learn this valuable lesson pretty young. It
| was fairly devastating to me by the time I learned it well
| into my 30's.
| spieswl wrote:
| Having seen what some other university administrations have
| done to darling students and innovators even just around such
| things as lab space, parent comment is right on the money.
| eykanal wrote:
| Just piling on here because upvotes are not visible. The one
| thing you can guarantee is that your good faith is not
| reciprocated by the university. Get a lawyer.
|
| To make it easier: it sounds like you're still registered.
| University of Washington offers Student Legal Services (
| https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ). Set up a referral with
| one of them and talk to them. Even if they're employees of
| the university and don't want to work with you to sue the
| university itself they may be able to give you good advice
| about how to proceed.
| move-on-by wrote:
| It's a funny thought, but looks like a nonstarter:
|
| > SLS cannot represent a student when the opposing party is
| another UW-Seattle, Tacoma, or Bothell student or UW
| entity.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| They can have a conversation without being representation
| and should connect OP to someone who can represent them.
| DannyBee wrote:
| No they can't have a conversation when they know of a non
| waivable conflict.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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?
| creer wrote:
| > Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar
| association or something in this jurisdiction.
|
| They might but in many cases wouldn't even do that
| because they still wouldn't get paid for it. Doesn't
| matter, you don't need them for that.
| j45 wrote:
| An example of the difference between being independent vs
| third party.
|
| Who mostly pays them sets the rules.
| wl wrote:
| The entity paying the lawyers isn't making the rules
| here. This is professional ethics: the attorneys in
| question have a conflict of interest.
| glaugh wrote:
| I know very little about lawyering, but I could imagine a
| UW-alum or Seattle-area lawyer advising pro bono bc of
| generosity or good publicity on a very newsworthy case
|
| Anyone on here friends with a UW-alum or Seattle-area
| lawyer who might be interested but doesn't read HN?
| Symbiote wrote:
| Do American university students belong to unions?
|
| It's very common in the UK. The most visible part of the
| unions is running social activities, often bars and
| events, but they can also provide legal advice to their
| members.
| LPisGood wrote:
| Graduate students (who teach, do research, and some
| administrative tasks for the university) occasionally do.
| What American schools usually have is a "student
| government" which is approximately 90% roleplaying as
| elected officials, and the remaining 10% is deciding
| which banquets they should host themselves to spend the
| small budget the university gives them.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Not undergraduates. The "student union" in this context
| is 100% a social entity.
|
| Graduate students sometimes are part of unions, but
| usually only if they're also employed by the university
| (somebody paying full tuition for an MBA probably isn't
| in a union, but a doctoral student teaching or doing
| research might be).
|
| Undergrads doing part-time work at the university to pay
| bills (dining hall, bookstore, etc) could be, in theory,
| but probably aren't.
| kelloggm wrote:
| Even if this student isn't a member, the local graduate
| student union (https://www.uaw4121.org/) would probably
| be a useful ally. All TAs are in the bargaining unit, and
| UW CSE has _a lot_ of undergrad TAs, so I wouldn't even
| be surprised if this student is a present (or former)
| member.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| Upvoting too.
|
| > Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution
| for the university focused on solving the underlying
| problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably
| own the IP and were clear that I wouldn't be compensated.
| But it was implied that they would then remove the hold,
| allowing me to graduate.
|
| Wow. Literally blackmailing a student to do illegal work
| (at least would be categorized like that in my country). A
| student that already paid money for class and potentially a
| degree the univ is trying to block, mind blowing. OP, 1000%
| lawyer up.
| ra wrote:
| Relying on good faith won't help you at all.
|
| Someone at the uni has taken this personally, and has
| attacked you. At this point, if you don't defend yourself
| - that person has won.
|
| Please seek legal advice.
| phibz wrote:
| Their response on face value doesn't make sense. But if I
| had to guess, you inadvertently made someone in the
| registrar's office look bad. They probably had to answer
| to "why didn't you think of this?" If that is the case
| then it makes a lot more sense and is retaliatory
| behavior. You can't undo their insecurity and loss of
| face. Therefore you should not expect a reasonable
| response.
|
| Act accordingly.
|
| Educate yourself on your options. This is why people are
| recommending a consultation with a lawyer.
|
| Reach out to your friends and contacts in the University.
| Leverage existing ones to make new ones. Others may be in
| a stronger position to put pressure on the registrar's
| office.
|
| Use the news and media to further ratchet up pressure.
|
| Stay positive. Fon't stoop to their level, it won't help
| you.
|
| And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much
| in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly
| all companies stop caring about credentials. Just get
| your foot in the door somewhere and shine, that's what I
| did and it worked out for me 26 years later.
|
| Hang in there.
| colanderman wrote:
| Seconding this. It's entirely likely the registrar is
| this petty and boneheaded. It's less likely that their
| boss is though, this is a _really_ bad look for the
| university.
|
| Personally I would find a way to contact the president of
| the university (possibly through university PR, who also
| care about public image) and simply state,
|
| "The registrar is asking me for quid pro quo, that I
| develop software for them in exchange to restore my
| ability to register for classes."
|
| and include a screenshot of that communication.
|
| Additionally, consider "agreeing" to their demands, if
| they will unblock you immediately. Register for classes,
| then reneg on your half of the "deal". Even if they then
| retaliate, that strengthens your position (a) that they
| are engaging in quid pro quo, and (b) that there's no
| valid reason that you should be barred from registering
| for courses, and also buys you some time.
| emacsen wrote:
| A +1 to everyone else who has said get a lawyer.
|
| I'll add another angle: financial.
|
| You have invested years of time and presumably thousands
| of dollars into your schooling. Their threat that they
| will not allow you to graduate unless you give them
| unpaid labor without a clear boundary condition is a
| threat. While I haven't seen the correspondence, from
| what you said it appears they're doing the moral
| equivalent of one of those sitcom situations where
| someone is compelled to do what the other person wants
| under a threat, and even when they've done it, the
| threatening person keeps the threat.
|
| A good lawyer (and not all lawyers are good) will help
| you understand your rights and your position.
|
| As others have said, this is not an escalation of
| aggression, and not only don't you have to tell them
| whether you've seen a lawyer, unless the lawyer is
| speaking on your behalf- you don't have to tell them
| anything, and you shouldn't tell them, or tell us (in
| case they read this, which they likely will).
|
| A lawyer in this case is more of a scholarly resource,
| telling you what your options are.
| thih9 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| To add to that: it is understandable to expect and hope
| for the other party to behave rationally. But there is a
| power imbalance that the other party is exploiting and
| for all we know intends to continue.
| exe34 wrote:
| > reneg on your half of the "deal".
|
| deny, delay, defect.
|
| and don't sign anything!!
| Animats wrote:
| > and don't sign anything!!
|
| This. If asked to sign anything, say that you have to
| check with your attorney first.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > But if I had to guess, you inadvertently made someone
| in the registrar's office look bad. They probably had to
| answer to "why didn't you think of this?
|
| That was my initial thought too. The upside is that that
| "someone" likely has a boss who called them out - so
| there may well be levels of the hierarchy that won't lose
| face by backing out of the exclusion decision. The
| challenge is to get their attention.
| phibz wrote:
| The problem is that their leadership may not care.
| Bureaucrats at higher education don't take the job
| because they're good at it. They take it because they're
| not and want a job with high job security. The poor pay
| and unrewarding tasks are acceptable to them as a means
| to coast. Couple that with a job that can be quite
| stressful at times, students can be very demanding, and
| you have a recipe for entrenched apathy. I base my
| assessment on my time working for a University for 8
| years.
|
| The registrar's office are the wrong people to appeal to.
| The deans office can fix this, but they may only move if
| it makes the University look bad. That's where the news
| and media can help, but this guy likely needs help to
| make that happen effectively.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yeah, let me give some perspective here.
|
| There's somebody in the registrar's office whose job is
| to be responsible for the production process of
| registration. They are minimally staffed and given just
| enough resources to run that process. Likely at some
| point their leadership told them they had to make an API
| so that they could integrate with other systems. Due to
| poor funding and lack of skills, just doing that is a
| full time/major job.
|
| Then some student comes along and says "hey look if I
| scrape this API, I can make an app that helps users!
| That's what APIs are for, right!?" The student is likely
| quite smart and probably built something that is useful.
|
| But students aren't full time software engineers. They
| lack knowledge and context about how to build production
| systems that handle the load during the registration
| crush and also don't cause undue load on the backend API
| servers.
|
| So when the dean comes to the head of IT for
| Registration, and says "wait, this student just did
| something that you were supposed to do, and it looked
| really easy", you just made the IT person's life much
| harder but didn't actually necessarily solve the problem.
| Now the IT person has to defend what they have done,
| while looking bad... and is not getting any further
| resources to fix the issue.
|
| I think this is a variant of the "why don't you just..."
| and chesterton's fence. That is, if you're inexperienced,
| it's often easy to come up with a naive solution without
| understanding the context, that kind of works but that
| actually makes things overall worse. For example, what if
| your app crashed the registration backends during the
| middle of registration. Are you, the clever student, on
| call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in
| contact with the folks who run the registration backends?
|
| It's easy to criticize the IT folks at Colleges but they
| are not resourced to handle things like this.
| lastdong wrote:
| It's really noteworthy that other students have the
| opportunity to engage in this and other projects as part
| of their curriculum. They can gain valuable experience
| while also contributing to the college community. It's
| disheartening that this situation has led to such drastic
| measures, impacting students' futures. It seems like
| there could have been more thoughtful ways to address
| this on the college's part.
| dekhn wrote:
| I am not sure I consider the university's production
| registration system as a useful project for students to
| contribute to. Those are systems that are the
| responsbility of the university administration, not the
| educational mission of the university.
|
| Yes, the university was drastic; if I were the person
| responsible, I wouldn't have started with a terms of
| service violation and putting registration on hold; I'd
| write a nice thank you note with some encouragement,
| along with a direct request to hold off running the
| application until the next registration season, and a
| calendar entry to discuss this in person/off the written
| record to explain the more subtle aspects associated with
| developing production applications in a university
| environment.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _They lack knowledge and context about how to build
| production systems that handle the load during the
| registration crush and also don 't cause undue load on
| the backend API servers._
|
| That sounds like a cop-out. Sure, students may not know
| about all this, but they're also _not building Google_.
| Many people run businesses without caring about such
| things just fine. Most things don 't require six nines of
| reliability and people don't expect them to be this
| reliable. Students in particular are used to university
| systems being constantly down, or resource-starved to the
| point of uselessness for no good reason.
|
| > _it 's often easy to come up with a naive solution
| without understanding the context, that kind of works but
| that actually makes things overall worse. For example,
| what if your app crashed the registration backends during
| the middle of registration. Are you, the clever student,
| on call during registration (24/7) for your app, and in
| contact with the folks who run the registration
| backends?_
|
| It's hard to come up with a solution that's _worse_ than
| what you get at universities for this stuff, which
| usually is _nothing at all_ - and even if it is
| _something_ , there's no one on call to help the student
| anyway.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yes, but as we know, the best way to make a project that
| is late/slow/unreliable even later, slower, and more
| unreliable is to add inexperienced devs to the project.
| Which is (from the perspective of the university) what
| they are trying to avoid.
| mrmanner wrote:
| well except they allegedly asked said allegedly
| inexperienced developer to develop the thing for them,
| for free
| mmooss wrote:
| You write as if you've had some experience .... Still,
| the IT team should have reached out to the student - it's
| a university and they especially should be good and
| dealing with inexperienced, well-meaning students - and
| straightened it out: Hey, this is a great idea; it will
| also need this and this and something like this to work
| with these other systems and handle the load on
| registration day.
| mmooss wrote:
| > And if you have to walk away it won't hurt you too much
| in the long term. After about 5 years in industry nearly
| all companies stop caring about credentials.
|
| That is very wrong, in my experience. Many jobs require
| college degrees; much status in life requires college
| degrees. I know people who are smart, successful, and
| eternally embarrassed when that comes up.
|
| Also, you did the work, you deserve the degree - a
| college education is a real, valuable thing. Don't let
| the current anti-intellectual, anti-institutional, anti-
| liberal trendiness distract you. The trends pass, and
| decades from now you'll still have a degree and the
| truths of knowledge will remain.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Also worth noting that it would be incredibly naive to
| expect good faith to be reciprocated by any institution at
| all throughout the course of one's life, which sounds
| cynical, but lets be real. If there's a way that _almost_
| any institution or person that you 're transacting with in
| good faith--including schools, workplaces, lawyers, medical
| professionals, the leader of your country, sometimes
| family, whatever--can get away with fucking you over, they
| might. Not always, but expect it. Which reminds me, I need
| to pester a doctor about a web design invoice.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > If there's a way that almost any institution or person
| that you're transacting with in good faith [...] can get
| away with fucking you over, they might. Not always, but
| expect it.
|
| This. Always protect yourself, even when operating in
| good faith. You may only interact with someone
| professionally, but you never know what kind of person
| you are really working with. Sometimes people may seem
| nice, but are pure evil.
|
| In this particular case, it is likely the people in
| charge are completely unaware of the people doing the
| blackmailing. This may even be criminal, so it might be
| worth just talking to the police.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Yep, they'll walk all over whoever they can, until they
| receive just enough bad publicity or pushback, and
| suddenly it's not an issue anymore.
| autoexec wrote:
| > You may only interact with someone professionally, but
| you never know what kind of person you are really working
| with. Sometimes people may seem nice, but are pure evil.
|
| It's not even always a case of being evil. Large
| institutions/companies are full of polices and processes
| designed to protect the system at all costs and some nice
| people will turn their brain off and strictly follow
| those policies either because they feel they have to,
| because it's the easiest thing to do, or because they
| know that as long as they stick to the policies (or what
| they think the policies are) they'll be safe.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Absolutely. It's my impression--after many mistakes--that
| one of the most important pieces of advice I could have
| given myself at a younger age, is that "your job is
| basically a function of what you're empowered to do and
| what you're clearly rewarded for, don't imagine it to be
| something it's not, don't pretend or act as though you
| have more influence than you do".
|
| Your bank's website might have shit accessibility and
| usability, but it's not because the developers suck, it's
| because they aren't paid to do more than the minimum that
| they're paid for, and it's stupid for them to incur that
| cost or scope risk just because they're altruistic. If
| they spent 5 hours on a Wednesday optimizing a thing for
| screen readers, but there's literally no measurable
| reason to do so, that's a mark against them if there's
| anything else to do that does.
|
| The same pattern is true across other jobs. It's not the
| admin's job to have empathy or to decide whether a policy
| should exist, it's there job to enforce arbitrary
| policies. It's also not the job of a University to
| educate people, that's now a University typically makes
| money, it's only even tenuously their job to get people
| between having no measure of knowledge, and having a
| measure of knowledge, but not necessarily to have any
| specific impact on that.
| withinboredom wrote:
| To add to that, always know your rights and
| responsibilities. Don't let anyone walk on your rights
| and make sure you do at least what you are supposed to
| do. From moving to a different country, people will prey
| on you so fast if they realize you don't know your rights
| (rental rights are soooo much different here than in the
| US, for example, and they will literally prey on your
| fear of being evicted). In essence, knowing what you CAN
| do and MUST do can make all the difference in the world.
| firefax wrote:
| Student legal services usually can't help you with disputes
| with the uni -- I remember reading this when speaking to
| them about a (unfair IMO) traffic ticket when I was a
| student at a different institution.
| y33t wrote:
| Joining the dogpile to get a lawyer. Your degree is at
| stake, and this isn't the sort of issue that will burn up
| your money if you don't want it to. Go in for a
| consultation and see what they think. Bring all
| correspondence. Worst case scenario you pay him for a few
| hours after he has some answers for you.
|
| An attorney kept me from making some very expensive
| (honest) mistakes and payed for himself many times over.
| Don't gamble with your future.
| zzzeek wrote:
| cosign, this story is outrageous, it is Lawyer Time, Now.
| The university is completely out of line and this has all
| the makings of a disastrous outcome the way they are
| operating
| mmooss wrote:
| > University of Washington offers Student Legal Services (
| https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ).
|
| Do not talk to them. They report to the same people who are
| persecuting you. Find another attorney - ask someone local
| for references, maybe a student from the area could ask
| their parents.
| sitkack wrote:
| Get a lawyer. Holding your degree hostage unless you work for
| them for free is off the charts ridiculous. They might have
| just paid for your entire education.
|
| When I went to the UW I used Arexx and my 2400 baud modem to
| turbo register for classes the moment the system went live.
| bb88 wrote:
| > Arexx and my 2400 baud modem
|
| Arexx was fun back in the day. A nice scripting language
| for the time.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Not to mention that University of Washington is a _public_
| university run by the state. IANAL but this may well fall
| into constitutional issues so the ACLU might be interested,
| not to mention any number of other pro-bono lawyers. Most
| attorneys I've interacted with give a free one hour
| consultation and this sounds like a rather clear case where
| they can at least refer the OP to someone in their network
| who might be interested in doing it for free (again IANAL).
| infogulch wrote:
| Negative feedback can be a net good for anyone, even if they
| don't like it in the moment, and even for conglomerate
| entities like a school. Petty bureaucratic admins abusing
| their authority to spite you are likely abusing it against
| others under their purview. Honestly if you feel you have an
| allegiance to the school there's an argument that it's your
| _duty_ to oppose petty tyrants within it. Think of it as a
| service to the the ideal of the school.
| Animats wrote:
| Agreed. You need a lawyer. Not necessarily to go to court,
| but at least to write some letters. That should not cost more
| than a few hundred dollars. Don't wait.
|
| Document everything. Make copies. Store them somewhere safe.
|
| Read Washington State law on extortion in the first
| degree.[1] Follow the link to the definition of "threat",
| especially the section on "official action": "To take
| wrongful action as an official against anyone or anything, or
| wrongfully withhold official action, or cause such action or
| withholding". It's really bad for a state official to attempt
| extortion. It's a 10 years in prison felony offense.
|
| Edit: Having a lawyer write and send a letter on your behalf
| tends to resolve a large number of annoying situations. A
| lawyer on the other side will have to read it. This
| immediately gets you past the first-line people to people who
| have to consider consequences.
|
| [1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9A.56.120
| peeters wrote:
| Also, merely them knowing you have a lawyer instantly
| reframes the problem in their eyes. The path of least
| resistance to dealing with a "problematic" student is making
| the student go away. The path of least resistance to dealing
| with a "problematic" student with a lawyer is making the
| lawyer go away.
|
| All of a sudden bureaucrats will be getting visits from
| internal legal departments asking _very_ pointed questions
| about questionable actions.
| emacsen wrote:
| Yes and.
|
| Yes, and even if it doesn't go to court, the university
| will know that it will cost them time and money.
|
| It's entirely possible that university president or higher
| administration is unaware of the situation, and if they
| were, will intervene. The best way to do that is to have it
| brought to their attention via a legal letter, which then
| means they need to bring in their lawyers.
|
| A good lawyer for the university won't want to fight
| because fighting is not in the best interest of the
| university. A good lawyer will say "We threatened the
| student with this? No good can come of that... let him
| register, let him graduate and make this all go away."
|
| That doesn't mean the client (the university) will take it,
| but overall fighting isn't in their interest either.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Unlike most of the other commenters I have personal
| experience fighting a college administration in court. It was
| a massive time waste and I came out losing a years of my
| academic career where they lost nothing (money is absolutely
| not a factor for a large university, nor is stalling court
| proceedings to waste your life). I'm not even allowed to
| elaborate deeply on what it was about, the settlement for
| putting it behind me was a binding NDA.
|
| This isn't advice it's just a story about what happened to
| me, to give you an idea of how things *could* go for you:
|
| What I did to warrant initial sanctioning by my college was
| filing a witness statement describing a petty disorderly
| offense another student did. Apparently the college didn't
| like that I filed a statement with the police and it did not
| go through their internal system. The school placed a hold
| and I contacted my dean by email. I was told by the dean, in
| writing, that I was not being sanctioned but the hold would
| remain until I attended a hearing to describe the incident as
| prescribed in the handbook. When I went to this 'procedural
| hearing' with the other witness, they brought us in one at a
| time in front of representatives of the student body and the
| administration. At the end of my account they told me I would
| receive their decision and sanctions by mail. They issued
| formal academic sanctions and created a remediation plan not
| unlike what they are requesting of you.
|
| I retained a lawyer at this point and ended up filing a
| complaint in civil. There's nothing speedy here, judges
| stalled, the school stalled. Almost 2 years went by and we
| finally had the lawyers draft a settlement that made it
| possible to pursue college again. In the meanwhile they
| increased the sanctions on the remaining witness that didn't
| sue in order to retaliate. The student we filed the statement
| about, apparently the school couldn't touch since the police
| charged him. He got off paying a ticket and no other
| sanctions, last I heard he was in postgrad for mathematics
| and doing well for himself.
| cbozeman wrote:
| I didn't have it quite as bad as you, but I did go to war
| once with my alma mater regarding a particularly small lab
| director and part-time instructor who had a Napoleon
| complex going on. He was directly and obviously infringing
| on student's First Amendment rights, not to mention
| bullying the class as a whole and attempting to threaten
| people. Ironically, his heart was in the right place, but
| his execution was way off.
|
| I was fortunate in that I went to college much later in
| life, after a career in the military, and as I'd had enough
| bullshit there, I made the conscious choice not to tolerate
| any out in the world.
|
| Long story short, he and I butt heads. Then he wanted to
| take up to the Department head. For someone with a Ph.D.,
| she definitely didn't think it through, just proving you
| can have a Ph.D., even in a STEM field, and not be too
| fucking bright... but... when it got to the Dean of
| Students, and the campus's VA liaison all sat down for a
| meeting with me, and I started pointing out that F.I.R.E.
| would have a field day with this, and would we really want
| a veteran-led incident on campus with a lab director that's
| flat out admitted in recorded interviews (I was attending
| college in a one-party recording state, so I had recordings
| of every one of these meetings) that he doesn't care about
| students' First Amendment rights??
|
| That put everything into perspective really damn quick. I
| have never forgot that meeting because there, in that
| moment, we all looked at each other and everyone understood
| exactly what I was saying. The Dean of Students stood up
| and said, "Do you want to apologize to the department
| dean...?" and I just raised one eyebrow and he immediately
| shot back, "Right... we should probably all let this go." I
| nodded and said, "I think that'd be the best option for
| everyone involved, after you guys sit down with Lab
| Director and straighten him out."
|
| I've done some things I'm not too particularly proud of in
| my life, but this was one time I really felt like I did the
| right thing.
| numeri wrote:
| The First Amendement limits what the US
| Congress/government can do, not what a private person can
| do.
|
| > Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
| of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
| abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
| right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
| petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| If parent went to a state school, that is the government.
| If he went to a private school, FIRE goes after them for
| violating their own contracts that often mirror 1A
| language.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| That's a wild oversimplification, it of course applies to
| state and local governments as well and has for a long
| time. A public university is a state entity.
| cbozeman wrote:
| If your college or university accepts money from the
| government, in public spaces on that campus, like say...
| anywhere outdoors, for instance, out on the quad, where
| this happened, that is considered a protected area for
| speech.
| dcrazy wrote:
| Please familiarize yourself with the various ways higher
| education comes under the umbrella of "state actor."
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| Funnily enough, today I am I am (re)starting my post
| secondary education after a decade and counting in the
| military.
|
| Your comment reminds me of one of the misconceptions that
| friends have of me/military. I am not as it happens a
| particularly good shot/fighter/camper/adventurer. However
| the military has more then prepared me to wade through a
| bureaucratic swamp to tell a room full of people paid
| more then me that they're wrong and will fight to the
| proverbial death over it.
|
| That being said, other then some culture shock, not
| expecting anything too dramatic, ought to be a good time
| really.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I'm always curious in cases like these what the actual
| exercise of your "first amendment rights" was that the
| other person took offense to.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Made fun of a post-doc lab instructor that was under the
| lab director's purview.
|
| I shit you not. He got upset that someone was - verbally
| - making fun of this guy. He was a goofy as fuck guy, so
| I see why 18-22 year olds would do that. I wouldn't
| because he was a good guy with a good heart, he just
| looked goofy, acted goofy, and plain old WAS goofy, but
| that's not enough for me to make fun of someone.
|
| It is enough, actually, but I would never do it
| maliciously, and I would always do it to someone's face,
| and it would always... _always_ be good-natured, not
| intentionally cruel.
| yard2010 wrote:
| That's a mafia with extra steps
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Welcome to the US justice system
| Aurornis wrote:
| Thanks for speaking up. The internet talks about getting a
| lawyer like it's a magic (and free) button you press to
| resolve a situation.
|
| It's not, and in some cases it can turn your problem into a
| more expensive and protracted different problem if you're
| not careful.
|
| I'd be especially cautious around a University that has
| already proven itself to have bureaucratic people who will
| turn small issues into threats of expulsion. I wouldn't be
| surprised if they have legal counsel who is equally
| overstaffed and itching for something to do.
| digging wrote:
| It is usually free and kind of magical to _talk_ to a
| lawyer, though.
| novaleaf wrote:
| "You can beat the rap, but not the ride".
|
| I am still dealing with a case with a 3 letter agency,
| going on 6 years now. "Bureaucratic violence" is a thing.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Wow this sounds like extortion to me.. I mean not just from
| the school, but also in the court system. I don't really
| understand Academia much or if this would effect a person
| attending another collage, but with something like this, I
| would drop out of college entirely and take the self-
| teaching route or online education. I'm not going to allow
| myself to be subjected to an abusive educational and court
| system.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Unlike most of hte other commentators I also have personal
| experience fighting a college administration -- and
| winning. By threatening lawyers, too.
|
| I got into an Honors Study Abroad thing through the school,
| but was worried about an incomplete grade screwing up my
| GPA or causing issues. Emailed the admin about it + study
| abroad office -- they said all good, it's kosher.
|
| Turns out it wasn't, and after dropping 41k to lock in
| housing and study abroad they told me I couldn't go because
| I couldn't transfer credits. Well here is a lesson in "keep
| your emails" cuz I dug that out and picked a fight with the
| administration.
|
| They eventually gave me all of my money back minus the $600
| non-refundable deposit. I was ready to go to the mat for
| that, too, but they offered to get me a guaranteed slot for
| on campus housing and permanent first crack at class
| selection similar to athletes and disabled students. I was
| sick of commuting by that point and took the offer. I
| figured out it was a way to get more money out of me pretty
| quickly -- solve an issue and make money via housing -- but
| my RA in the on-campus apartments was super cool and
| basically let me and a roommate squat for multiple summers.
| Still friends with a lot of those folks I met living on
| campus too.
|
| Worked out okay, all things considered. Lawyers won't be a
| guaranteed win, but don't assume that just giving up is a
| better deal.
| dzdt wrote:
| A lawyer is NOT the right next step. As soon as you engage a
| lawyer the school will switch from treating this as a student
| policy matter (which will be resolved in a timeline of days)
| to a legal matter (which will only be resolved in a timeline
| of years). The timeline question is of no concern to the
| courts or the school but makes a huge difference to you.
|
| It does seem like you need someone on your side. A list of
| people to consider: your academic advisor, the professor in
| whose course you built the prototype application, your
| department chair, student ombudsman, dean of students. If the
| university is being as unreasonable as your posting makes it
| sound like, you will have no trouble getting one or more of
| these people on your side and they will be able to apply
| pressure to the registrars office on your behalf if needed to
| get your hold lifted.
| bazintastic wrote:
| This is the right answer. A large institution like a
| university is not a monolith. The university will produce
| antibodies to external participants, like lawyers (or the
| media). You're most likely to get better outcomes if you
| can ensure the conflict plays out within the university and
| its rules, structures, and participants. Your work now is
| to convince other members of the university to advocate on
| your behalf. (It should not be difficult. If this is as you
| describe, reasonable faculty members will be your allies.)
|
| The same goes for publicizing this further. The student
| newspaper is probably okay, but keep talking to other media
| in the room as a bargaining chip. Bad press may well force
| some administrator's hand.
|
| To be sure, a chat with a lawyer may be helpful to get a
| sense of the universe of possible outcomes pursuing
| extramural action, but don't let anbyody send any lawyerly
| letters yet.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _You 're most likely to get better outcomes if you can
| ensure the conflict plays out within the university and
| its rules, structures, and participants._
|
| It's too late for that, even if you're correct here (and
| I don't think I agree). News of this has already spread,
| and will continue to spread.
| ANewFormation wrote:
| Having been on both sides of the fence here, this is highly
| contrary to my experience. Large institutions are more than
| happy, in many cases, to bully anybody when it benefits
| them. But as soon as possible legal/media issues emerge
| they're going to suddenly be your best friend looking to
| make things right as quickly and cleanly as possible.
|
| The ombudsman is definitely not a bad idea, but in most
| cases the mere hint of legal involvement would get this
| resolved without any legal involvement - just going on for
| a consultation doesn't mean one has to go to the next step,
| and in all probability you won't have to.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| If they're attempting to extort him, then it's a legal
| matter whether or not he sees it that way.
| mmooss wrote:
| You can consult a lawyer without having the lawyer engage
| with the university, and without the unviversity even
| knowing that you did.
|
| Instead of taking your advice on the matter, maybe see what
| the lawyer has to say.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| ^ This.
|
| You need a trusted advisor on your side who can look at it
| with a calm mind and perspective on what is normal,
| acceptable, and legal. You're young and have been slapped
| around, seemingly inappropriately.
|
| If you were in physical pain, you'd talk to a doctor to
| assess and get recommendations before treatment. Do the same
| here.
| burnte wrote:
| And additionally a lawyer will help make him aware of
| alternatives he may not know about, and also give him warning
| as to what other strong arm tactics UW could do, and how to
| safeguard himself. It's truly a smart idea.
| darrmit wrote:
| Also upvoting, as this is a valuable lesson as you head into
| a career: no company (nor school) cares about you more than
| they care about the organization. HR does not work for you
| and while the individuals may care for you personally, they
| will almost never act in "good faith".
| websap wrote:
| Wait! What!
|
| I sort of understand the part they wanted you to shutdown the
| website. Maybe its a copyright issue, even though the website
| only showed dummy courses.
|
| I don't understand why they'd not let you sign up for classes
| to graduate, it seems like you were operating in good faith,
| and a University would lean towards the student. It doesn't
| seem like there was any indication of monetization here.
|
| I'm definitely flabbergasted by their stance on asking you to
| build the same feature as an extortion mechanism.
|
| I've lived in WA for ~9 years, and held UW in high regard as I
| often interact with graduates at my day job. But, this leaves a
| sour taste in my mouth.
|
| Hope the University admin that is involved in these series of
| decisions, receive health as more leadership gets involved with
| this going viral.
| Halian wrote:
| Shut the fuck up and start calling lawyers _now_.
| shawn-butler wrote:
| Most universities have sliding scale (down to zero fee)law
| services available for students.
|
| Things like tenant rights, criminal cases, immigration,
| consumer, employment, wills, health care directives, power of
| attorney, name change, etc.
|
| You should make use of them. Especially if your educational
| career is being impacted "a hold" (whatever that means). If it
| was coursework project then your professor also should have
| some sway if he or she has tenure and any integrity
|
| Good luck
| windexh8er wrote:
| Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp [0]) did something
| similar to this, but to find open slots in courses he wanted in
| college according to his blog [1]. You're on the right track.
|
| From the linked page: "As I began college, I noticed that the
| poor technical design of the registration system made it
| incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I
| developed automated registration software that would detect
| open slots in the full courses, and notify me via text message.
| While my friends were spending hours every day refreshing
| course schedules hoping to get into a full class, I was just
| waiting for a text message. And I always got into the classes,
| because a human refreshing a browser can't beat my software
| that was checking thousands of times per hour. Automation wins
| again."
|
| I thought I had read somewhere that he turned it into a product
| while he was in college, but that wasn't mentioned there.
|
| [0] https://www.hashicorp.com [1]
| https://mitchellh.com/writing/automation-obsessed
| maeil wrote:
| I reckon most HNers in such a situation have made the same
| script, I know I did.
| kurisufag wrote:
| i did it literally yesterday! my sleep schedule's all out
| of wack, so i miss the slightly-late emails the public
| services send.
|
| now i get a nice loud fire alarm beep to wake me up when
| someone drops a course i want ;^)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I didn't have to, my college provided fairly functional
| class scheduling systems. It had integrated wait lists, so
| you could just sign up and hope someone else drops if
| needed, and occasionally you could just have the professor
| add another slot (the college didn't mind the free extra
| money).
|
| I had this in a state school that isn't even our state's
| premier state school, and we are not a state known for
| computer science or anything, why do all these supposedly
| premier institutions not offer it?
| buildbot wrote:
| It's a fun coincidence that it's the same university/college,
| Michael Hashimoto went to UW (CSE).
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Do you _need_ an account to register for classes? Can 't you
| just register in-person like I did back when we roamed the
| earth with dinosaurs?
| brewdad wrote:
| At UW? No. You must log in at exactly 6am (preferably 5:58)
| on your registration day. Have your planned schedule in hand
| with all class codes and multiple backups. Assuming the
| system doesn't crash repeatedly, all of the required and/or
| popular classes will be full by 6:05.
|
| Rinse. Repeat for the entire 2 weeks of registration.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is pretty much how it works at every school I've ever
| attended. It ended up driving me towards "hacking" by
| writing a bunch of scripts to register as fast as possible,
| taught me some basic networking in the challenges I faced
| while doing that, and occasionally grabbed me a seat in a
| class I normally wouldn't have. However, I think a lot of
| other students in CS were also doing similar, because it
| would never make sense how stuff could fill as fast as they
| did. As a result, sometimes I would have to beg to be
| allowed to take a graduate level course to fill a
| requirement, just because it had seats. Ended up working
| out for me, as one of those graduate professors ended up
| offering me a job in my 2nd to last quarter, but I wouldn't
| be surprised if such overloaded systems just brutally
| sabotage people's entire education.
| greatgib wrote:
| If you manage to have them tell you that in an email that will
| be the jackpot for you.
| philpem wrote:
| Confirmation emails are great for this.
|
| "I was wondering if you could go over the details of the
| resolution we discussed on DATE? I'm giving it consideration
| and just want to make sure I fully understand. On reflection
| I feel like it could be a great opportunity. Could I put it
| on my resume'?"
|
| Sometimes they stitch themselves up and it's glorious when it
| happens.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I always thought that anything you create belongs to them in
| perpetuity. Stanford has the same rule which allowed them to
| own PageRank
| eru wrote:
| I don't think that applies for students who are not paid by
| the university?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| IANAL, obvs, but their is a consideration, the provision of
| education, so a contract can be formed. AFAIK, IPR clauses
| are standard (but I know nothing about this jurisdiction).
| chillfox wrote:
| Focus on graduating.
|
| Accept that you have lost, take the offer.
|
| It's unlikely that you will have to do more than attend a few
| meetings and write some emails, possibly provide some code
| samples. The goal is likely not a complete working solution but
| to punish you for unwittingly countering someone's reason for
| needing a large team (and therefor you are threatening their
| pay).
|
| Quite possible the desired solution here might be you agreeing
| to say that a proper solution can't work safely with the
| university systems for some made up reason.
| ColdTakes wrote:
| I was a similar position as yours when I was at university. Do
| not have faith in your university administration.
| thfuran wrote:
| >I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
|
| What about their actions so far suggests that?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Yeah maybe OP really is grifting us all
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Given all of the very public stories about university
| administrations and how they like to skirt the law/court system
| with their own tribunals and procedures and/or blackmail their
| own students to stay quiet why would you ever have a reason to
| have faith in them?
|
| It's clear the ones running things do not care about their
| students. They care only about their bottom line and
| appearances. Don't let one or two nice administrators fool you.
| Get a lawyer.
| ta988 wrote:
| Be extremely careful about what you say online or to friends
| from now on. They may use anything against you.
|
| Do not give any extra details about the project, do not comment
| on how it was made and what it used etc.
| RIMR wrote:
| Might be too late for that:
| https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap
| croes wrote:
| > Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and
| were clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied
| that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| WTF!
|
| That can't be legal
| fsckboy wrote:
| are JD Kaim and Ed Kaim related?
| joe5150 wrote:
| Yes: https://x.com/EdKaim/status/1877146069093466344
| MrLeap wrote:
| You've encountered a psychopath in the wild. "You did such a
| good job we want to show our appreciation by _stealing your
| work and threatening your future to do it while compensating
| you nothing_."
|
| It's so egregious. If you do a gofundme for legal support where
| would you post it? So we can follow you there.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| Sounds like UW does not follow its own Honor Code.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| ? that is so ridiculous that it almost triggers my BS detector
| simoncion wrote:
| > [The university will not defacto expel me at the end of the
| quarter if] I agree to work on a comparable solution for the
| university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and
| were clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied
| that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| Holy shit. Do you have this in writing? If you do, transfer the
| records to several places that YOU control... don't rely on
| University-controlled systems to keep this information safe.
|
| If they relayed this to you verbally, and you are in a one-
| party-consent state, did you record the conversation?
|
| If your report is reasonably accurate, they are absolutely NOT
| acting in good faith and absolutely WILL NOT act in good faith.
| If you have records of their statements, you should take those
| records to a lawyer and ask for advice.
| yava2025 wrote:
| bro what money do you think you are holding on to? Just let it
| go and graduate or move onto another school. How will they
| "make it right". They just want you to stop messing with the
| reg system. Its their school not yours. For better or worse.
| Hell, you chose them.
| croemer wrote:
| One half of me is sympathetic with you, the other wonders
| whether you're trying to get attention for a job (this is how
| the end of your LinkedIn post makes it sound).
|
| It's hard to judge from the outside as you haven't shared the
| actual writing from UW.
|
| I would probably cut this from the end of the LinkedIn post,
| this makes you look like you're possibly trying to blow this
| out of proportion for attention:
|
| > I'm scheduled to graduate in a few months and am eager to
| move on to projects that don't need to be cleared with the UW
| Registrar. If you know of anyone looking for a full-time
| software engineer with a knack for getting the attention of
| senior leadership, please send them my way! I can start full-
| time in June
|
| Your LinkedIn profile states you graduated high school mid 2023
| and started at UW mid-late 2023. How can you graduate in a few
| months already? That would mean you'd just take 2 years instead
| of the normal 4?
| WD-42 wrote:
| Something definitely smells.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's possible there's deception here, but I also knew a few
| kids in high school who graduated with their Associates
| (equivalent to 2 years of college). This can allow a student
| to skip the general education courses and focus exclusively
| on major coursework, which depending on the program and how
| well the student can schedule classes can mean finishing in 2
| years.
|
| Their profile also mentions "Stanford Summer Session" in Jun
| 2022, which does give college credit, so Associates or not
| they were definitely more active in pursuing a degree than
| most high school students.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > That would mean you'd just take 2 years instead of the
| normal 4?
|
| FWIW my wife was a fourth-year the start of her second year
| at uni because she'd tested out of a ton of basics or taken
| dual-credit courses in high school. I was a fourth-year the
| end of my second year.
|
| I AP'd my way out of 6 hours of English, 14 or so hours of
| Spanish, 8 hours of physics, 8 hours of calculus, and a
| hodgepodge of psych, sociology, etc., plus I'd taken some uni
| courses as a high school student as well.
|
| I basically spent two years taking nothing but upper div math
| classes + a year living in Japan working on a second degree.
|
| AP classes, my friend, save you so much time and money.
| croemer wrote:
| Only saves time if you consider being in university a waste
| of time instead of an opportunity to be free to learn what
| you are interested in and surrounded by like-minded people.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Oh it's great. But depending on what country you are in,
| it could be the difference between a lifetime debt, and
| economic freedom.
| imtringued wrote:
| University is definitely not a place where you are free
| to learn whatever you want, unless you already have all
| your credit points.
| croemer wrote:
| If you have all the credits done within 2 years you can
| spend the other 2 years learning whatever you want :)
| brushfoot wrote:
| > One half of me is sympathetic with you, the other wonders
| whether you're trying to get attention for a job (this is how
| the end of your LinkedIn post makes it sound).
|
| Why not both. I hire, and it crossed my mind to reach out to
| him when I read the ending. The project shows ambition and
| independent thought, two virtues in my book.
|
| He's smart to leverage the attention. Might as well get some
| benefit out of the university's heavy-handed policing here.
| croemer wrote:
| I'm not sure whether I can trust the story as he presents
| it. The fact that he might be out for attention is a reason
| to have doubts, because he might have made the case look
| more extreme than it is so it trends better.
|
| There are a couple of other question marks:
|
| - Says he'll graduate this year, but he's only started at
| UW 1.5y ago, his project team mates also started 1.5y ago,
| so the course does not seem to be super advanced
|
| - Claims he did the project on his own in the LinkedIn
| post, when in fact it was coursework by a team of 6
|
| - The docs promise stuff that are entirely unimplemented, I
| couldn't find anything related to talking to the UW API
| blitzar wrote:
| It must have been a survey course. Frankly, I found the
| course rather elementary.
| croemer wrote:
| What's a survey course? It turns out that at least
| another team in the same course had the exact same app
| idea: https://www.sammybharadwaj.com/huskyswap - even
| same name. Sounds like this idea was either given by the
| instructor or the groups cooperated on choosing it.
|
| Hence the idea of swapping must not have been the problem
| here, otherwise surely the instructor should be more in
| trouble than OP, and this other website shouldn't still
| be up.
| mbernstein wrote:
| I remember that class - it was just between recess and
| lunch!
| lolinder wrote:
| In general I worry about ragebait stories that trend on
| HN.
|
| They're sometimes legit, but way too often there's a
| quiet coda where someone figures out it was all a sham,
| but that discovery occurs after the story has already
| been drawing attention for 24 hours or more, and the
| recall doesn't get the attention the initial rage did. So
| people walk away remembering a story that was a lie,
| while the truth gets quickly forgotten.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Washington state (and many others, I'm assuming) have systems
| in place that allow high school students to take collegiate
| level classes in lieu of high school classes.
|
| Done to completion, it is possible (and becoming more common)
| to exit high school with an Associates degree and the first 2
| years of college completed.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| > Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and
| were clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied
| that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| This is extortion.
| tomhallett wrote:
| 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)
| croemer wrote:
| You write: "I'm scheduled to graduate in a few months"
|
| Is the UW CS Bachelor just 2 years? Your LinkedIn profile
| states that you started there mid-2023, so you've been there
| for just 1.5y. What am I missing?
| loeg wrote:
| You can definitely bang out all the major requirements in 2
| years if you don't need _any_ gen ed classes (e.g. community
| college or other transfer credits). ~18 class-quarters of
| requirements, 3 classes /quarter => 6 quarters. Possibly as
| short as 4-5 quarters if you can manage a higher courseload.
| croemer wrote:
| Wow, really? So you just pay for a year instead of 4 years?
| Why do people not do that more?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You normally pay per credit, so not quite, and also that
| way you'll have lower grades, fewer chances to get
| internships, and make less connections.
| loeg wrote:
| UW charges the same fixed credit rate for 10-18
| credits/quarter then adds significant per-credit fees
| above 18 to explicitly discourage super high courseloads.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Yep, pretty common, at least they allow it though - mine
| wouldn't let you take such a courseload unless you had a
| stellar academic record, and they would require grades
| significantly above average to recognize equivalent
| classes from lower education.
| joe5150 wrote:
| You can double up on a lot in high school (AP, IB, dual
| enrollment) or CLEP out of a good number of GenEd
| classes, but not everybody has the access and support
| they need to pull that off. There's potential value in
| going to college (as in _being in college_) that isn't
| strictly measured in credit hours as well.
| croemer wrote:
| Oh absolutely, most of the value is being there not in
| the credit hours. At Cambridge Uni you can't just
| condense the time for a BA, no matter how brilliant you
| are. You spend time 3y on learning. If you're fast, you
| just learn more.
| loeg wrote:
| You still need the gen ed credits from somewhere. And you
| have to actually get in to the major, which is hard for
| UW CSE (desirable major with limited spots).
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Because you have to go to a high school that offers
| special courses, you have to be willing to work much
| harder than the average student, and you have to know
| about this trick when you're like 15yo and comprehend how
| much $$$ and time it's going to save you in the long run.
|
| I fortunately _did_ take advantage of this, and so did my
| wife. Thought we took advantage of it so we could do
| cheap study abroad and not have to take any courses
| toward our degree plan (indeed, I actually earned a
| second degree in a completely unrelated field while doing
| my study abroad)
|
| But to be clear, this was because I took every advanced
| class offered at my high school _and_ took other courses
| at the local community college instead of hanging out
| with my friends during lunch, etc. It was a constant
| gaming of the system to eventually get the results I
| wanted.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| In Washington, high school students can enrol in
| community college courses through their school, and count
| them for both high school and college credit.
|
| https://www.seattlecolleges.edu/running-start
| xp84 wrote:
| The critical part is getting all the non-exciting stuff
| done at community college. There's a useless cultural
| construct we have that says that CC is for a lower tier
| of student. Obviously this is absolute poppycock, since
| paying $2000 a year for college vs $20,000 only proves
| that you don't like pissing away money. It's not like
| English 112 is taught by world-class professors at
| Stanford or UW. It's taught by some random TA. But many
| types of people (even myself) felt pressure to "attend a
| 4-year school" right from the start.
|
| The best argument for it actually is purely social --
| community colleges (for no real reason though) don't have
| dorms, so the 'commuter school' experience can be
| socially isolating, whereas for outgoing types mixing
| with all your fellow freshman in a dorm can be very
| socially rewarding and help establish major friendships.
| I think they should add on-campus living to community
| college.
| craftman210 wrote:
| Note: this isn't true for some universities that limit
| transfer/AP credits. I remember some of my classmates not
| taking their AP tests senior year of high school because of
| it.
| loeg wrote:
| We're specifically talking about UW CSE here.
| 0003 wrote:
| Please get a lawyer. This is a crazy, non-reasonable
| stipulation "They would presumably own the IP and were clear
| that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied that they
| would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate....unless,
| that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the
| university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for."
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Uh yeah you should get a lawyer, they are threatening to kick
| you out unless you do work for free?? That's crazy! How can
| they justify this?
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| > I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the
| end.
|
| Yikes, they're going to walk all over you.
| dcrazy wrote:
| Don't rely on them "making it right in the end." Get a lawyer.
| Get a referral from the WA State Bar Association for someone
| who is familiar with federal and state law regarding
| universities and will take $100 or so to send a letter that
| ensures you graduate on time.
| grumple wrote:
| > 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 register for my final
| quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this
| quarter.
|
| > Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and
| were clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied
| that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| This is so outrageous that I have trouble believing it. If it's
| true, you need to immediately take this to the media.
| saghm wrote:
| On your post on LinkedIn, you said this:
|
| > I was instructed to take down my demo site (and its handful
| of fake demo classes) or else they would begin the process that
| would culminate with my expulsion.
|
| And now here, you say this:
|
| > 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 register for my final
| quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this
| quarter.
|
| > Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and
| were clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied
| that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| I don't think there's any reason to have faith that their
| leadership will make things right. It sounds like they've
| already moved the goalposts once, and there's no reason to
| trust that they wouldn't do it again later. They no longer
| deserve the presumption of good faith.
|
| As an alternative to what the options here seem to be saying, I
| can't help but wonder if some other university might be more
| willing to work with you without having to go through all of
| the blackmail. If this is something that's actually valuable to
| UW, it probably would be valuable to others as well, and
| without the threat of expulsion, you might be able to get
| better terms from them; maybe someone here with a connection to
| a more open-minded university could help get the door open to
| making a more fair deal? If finishing your degree is important
| to you, and you still don't have any desire to make a business
| out of this, maybe some form of scholarship in return for
| making a system for them for something like this? Alternately,
| if you do end up wanting to own the IP and monetize it in some
| way, you could try to rework the idea to be a service you sell
| to universities rather than offer for free to students. Even if
| you don't want to sell it, you could always offer it to
| universities for free with some terms that require attribution
| to you (and maybe also stipulate that no one is allowed to
| share the code with UW, since you deserve some compensation
| from them even if you don't want it from anyone else).
| balderdash wrote:
| talk to a lawyer, it doesn't mean taking action, but I've been
| in a number of situations at work that were quite "grey", and
| the value of knowing where I stood, where the lines were, and
| what to do/not to do were invaluable. I never planned on taking
| legal action, but knowing the landscape was invaluable and
| often kept me out of trouble down the road when people were
| playing CYA...
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| _> 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
| fear of those questions ever being held against you.
|
| You're right not to talk to a lawyer. Instead, you should ask
| them questions. Like "what's the worst that can happen?" and
| "what are my options if it does?" and " what documents /
| evidence would I need to defend myself?" and "what would you
| advise me _not_ to do?".
|
| As a silly rule of thumb: every message to a lawyer should have
| at least one question mark in it. That is the role of legal
| counsel in our society. Use that privilege. Seek counsel.
|
| Then, if you don't want to do anything with their advice,
| that's ok.
| tiahura wrote:
| 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.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| I don't think the post says privilege depends on whether
| the communication involves questions. I read it as saying
| that privilege exists so you can seek counsel. And, in
| their opinion, seeking counsel should always involve asking
| questions. Which seems reasonable to me. I am struggling to
| think of a situation where someone initiating contact with
| a lawyer wouldn't need, or at least want, to ask any
| questions. Are there situations where that is not the case?
| balfirevic wrote:
| > 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.
| Clubber wrote:
| >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.
|
| In all fairness, You would probably be ok with criticizing
| software or a website that didn't work for you and offer
| improvements or features. There's certainly nothing wrong
| with that.
| ysjet wrote:
| > as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the
| end.
|
| They are actively trying to fuck you over- stop hoping and
| having faith that it will somehow magically work out. Your
| degree is at stake. You need to escalate, and that starts with
| talking with a lawyer.
|
| Right now, you are being the worst kind of naive.
| abtinf wrote:
| As you describe it, this is so egregious that you might find
| pro-bono legal support from major advocacy non-profits like The
| Institute for Justice.
|
| https://ij.org/
| eviks wrote:
| > and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have
| faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
|
| They've already demonstrated that they won't, so faith is
| misplaced
| edm0nd wrote:
| Bro, fuck them. Put the site back online.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| UW CSE alum (but graduated 1^H25 years ago).
|
| You should at least talk to a guidance counselor if you are
| close to graduating. They have a lot of incentive to get you
| graduated, and would probably just register you for your
| courses manually (because...you weren't officially expelled so
| there has to be a way). Anyways, the counselor will have
| options for you, and won't be constrained by whoever is running
| the registration site (and aren't going to be their allies
| either). If that doesn't work, go to UW administration, they
| are going to be less interested in allying with the tech
| department the higher up you go (unless this came from them,
| and not the tech department?).
|
| Alternatively, if you can put your work with the university on
| your CV, it isn't a clear loss for you. You should also
| consider getting a lawyer involved, but it might be better just
| to get what you can and graduate.
| icameron wrote:
| This is some sound advice. The student hasn't actually been
| expelled, he's just pissed off the registrar, by making an an
| app that says "HuskySwap is a platform designed for students
| at the University of Washington ("UW") to swap classes with
| one another. " (against the rules) but not expelled.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Academic work, including for undergrad classes, is often owned
| by the institution you are enrolled at. Presumably, they
| already own the IP.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| This is blackmail - it's wrong. It's fairly obvious you can't
| trust them, at the very least ask a lawyer.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Do not have faith. Once they pick some dumb track, they will
| stick with it until they either lose legally or lose in the
| court of public opinion (donors). See also: Oberlin.
|
| If this is a one-party state, record those calls!
|
| Best thing to do is to lure them into overestepping themselves
| in writing, and the extortionate demand that you work for free
| is heading in that direction.
| hattmall wrote:
| You need to figure out who exactly you are dealing with and who
| is making these decisions and then find out who you need to be
| talking to in order to get what you need. The person putting
| you on the hold is probably a very low level person in the
| registrars office. Probably start with going to your professors
| if you have good relationships with them or if not figure out
| how to speak with someone who understands and has more
| authority. I don't think lawyers are going to do much for you.
| RobRivera wrote:
| >Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and
| were clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied
| that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further.
| exe34 wrote:
| > I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith
| that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
|
| don't be daft. they are already blackmailing you for free
| labour.
| farhaven wrote:
| Others have already told you that talking to a lawyer is still
| a good idea. If I may offer a personal story that illustrates
| that that is _really_ a good idea:
|
| While I did my Bachelor's in CS, I was employed by a university
| (not the one I attended, but one that the project I worked on
| moved to after the Prof in charge switched universities) as a
| "student worker" type deal. My job was essentially a Jr. SWE.
|
| A friend of mine also worked on that project, but he was ahead
| a bit further in his studies, so he already had a BSc degree,
| while I hadn't. Universities being universities, this meant
| that his hourly pay was a tiny smidge more than mine (think 50
| cents/hour or something like that). Neither of us was paid very
| well, we both came out to about 10-12 EUR/hour.
|
| After 6 months my contract was up for renewal. Along with the
| renewal, they included a modest pay raise to my friend's level.
| I naively thought that that meant they appreciated my work or
| something like that. All went well until the _next_ renewal was
| up.
|
| The HR person responsible for student workers noticed that my
| "raise" had been in error because they assumed I had gotten my
| degree as well. None of their paperwork that I signed
| originally mentioned that. As "proof" that I "should have
| known" that the raise was in error, they sent along a scanned
| copy of a copy of a copy of an internal "wage schedule" that I
| somehow should've been aware of.
|
| Their solution was to hand me a "new" backdated contract with
| lower hourly wages and told me to sign that to "just quickly
| fix this error" and told me to just pay back what I had
| "erroneously" received (signed contract stating the contrary
| nonwithstanding).
|
| I politely declined because that's not how I think employment
| works. As a response they said "ah well, don't worry, we'll
| just take it out of your next pay check", which they did
| (without me signing anything).
|
| At that point I called my mom and told her the full story. She
| immediately went "Alright, how do you want to play this? Should
| we talk to them or do you want to pull out the big guns?". I
| was sufficiently pissed off that I told her I want the big
| guns, she told me the info for my families' "lawsuit insurance"
| (The German term is "Rechtsschutzversicherung", basically
| cheap-ish insurance to help you pay for a lawyer in cases like
| this) and called them after we talked.
|
| I called up a lawyer in town that specialized in employment
| law, had an appointment with him to tell him the story, he went
| "I can see roughly 4 or 5 reasons that they can't take that
| money from you, let me write a letter to them and we'll see how
| it goes".
|
| The end result was that the university in my next paycheck
| included the amount they had initially reduced my previous
| check by, my higher-wage contract was renewed, and we never
| spoke of any of that again. I didn't get an apology or anything
| from the HR admin who had clearly messed up my contract and was
| probably trying to cover her ass, but that's fine with me.
|
| Point being: talk to a lawyer, even just to get some advice or
| to have them write out a nice letter as to why what they're
| doing is not OK.
| hartator wrote:
| > I immediately took down my class project site after receiving
| yesterday's ultimatum.
|
| Never do this.
|
| You are on the right, they are on the wrong. This makes sound
| like you are doing something wrong.
|
| Standing your ground on what you believe is right -
| technically, legally, ethically, ideology - would be what make
| you very successful in the long term.
| neilv wrote:
| As you describe it, it sounds like some element of the
| university may have made a mistake, but (no offense) I'm not
| yet certain that you fully understand the situation and are
| being fully forthright.
|
| Hopefully, the matter will be cleared up quickly and
| satisfactorily, for all parties.
|
| > _I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith
| that [university] leadership will make it right in the end._
|
| Ironically, the fact that you went public on what could be a
| delicate internal matter might've escalated things, more than
| consulting a lawyer would.
|
| At a university, if there's at least one specific administrator
| or full professor who you both trust, and think has clout to
| resolve the matter satisfactorily, then trusting the university
| to make things right _might_ be reasonable.
|
| Or, if your university is a rare one that has unusually good
| conventions of honorable behavior, which you know are practiced
| by most (including administrators, faculty, staff, and
| students), and there are effective checks and balances for when
| that fails, then maybe you're also OK.
|
| But, in most universities, when an official is talking about
| possibly ruining your career/life, then either you fudged up
| really-really badly (so, consult a lawyer), or you're in danger
| of learning just how bad a largely unaccountable institution of
| largely unaccountable individuals can get (so, consult a
| lawyer).
|
| Also, if an official you're talking with ever asks if you've
| filed a lawsuit, and says they have to stop talking with you if
| you do, _don 't_ say that you want to work collegially with the
| university to resolve the situation internally. A shitty person
| hearing that will totally take advantage of naive you, to
| neutralize the risk from you. Run, don't walk, to consult a
| lawyer.
| raxxor wrote:
| Take the project, do your finals and then throw the project
| again if you don't want to take the legal course.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| @jdkaim do the project as a way to say you're sorry, give them
| the work uncompensated (effectively they're charging you the
| value of your degree, I'd assume that's not trivial).
|
| Once you have your degree, you can go from there, hire a
| lawyer, sue for uncompensated labor (something about minimum
| wage laws, I think, requires they pay you), and so on. Maybe
| even some emotional distress.
|
| But hey, IANAL and ya gotta do what you think is right.
| astockwell wrote:
| This is probably the right answer. Similar to "dont fight the
| police on the street, fight them in court". Can even quiet-
| quit during the project if you need to.. software can take an
| awfully long time to build..
|
| Also, track your time during the work. And keep all
| correspondance. Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail.
| fredgrott wrote:
| given the type of UW blackmail you need to contact a lawyer to
| protect your right to an education finishing your studies....do
| not delay that step
| n144q wrote:
| > I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the
| end.
|
| I would never ever trust those hypocritical bureaucrats in
| universities. They have power over your degree and your life,
| but you have nothing. They are businessmen and politicians
| (some of which actually had/will have a political life
| before/after the high education gig), not educators.
|
| You high school teachers and university professors are real
| humans. Administrators are not.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > the way they handled it makes me just want to walk away.
|
| Assuming you mean the project, not your degree, that sounds
| reasonable but from your description it also sounds like they
| aren't willing to let you do that. Hence the advice to at least
| talk to a lawyer.
| btreecat wrote:
| Lawyer up
| _3u10 wrote:
| Withholding your ability to attend school so that you can labor
| for another free of charge is more generally known as human
| trafficking.
| lightedman wrote:
| "Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and
| were clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied
| that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate."
|
| Sue the ever living hell out of them. They are forcing you to
| work for them unpaid. Call multiple labor boards and drag them
| into UW immediately.
| xyst wrote:
| This is an awful PR situation for UW. Whoever thought they
| could hold a students ability to graduate hostage in exchange
| for _free_/slave labor is fucking insane. The people behind
| that decision need to be publicly named and subsequently fired.
|
| In addition to raising hell on the public front. I would be
| consulting with attorneys to discuss what can be done in court
| to compel the UW to do the right thing.
|
| Don't be naive and think uni leadership will "make it right in
| the end".
| fazeirony wrote:
| if anything, thanks for letting us all know that University of
| Washington blackmails their students in bad faith. hopefully
| this will save at least one other kid from being taken
| advantage of like you are clearly being and go to a superior
| institution that doesn't do _these_ kinds of things.
| dns_snek wrote:
| What they're doing isn't just wrong, it's abusive and possibly
| illegal, and I'm sorry that you're having to deal with this.
|
| Please seek legal advice and do not take anything they say at
| face value. They're engaging in bad faith and preying on your
| fears and ignorance.
|
| Just remember that your didn't do anything wrong, and I hope
| that you don't get discouraged from your future pursuits, I'm
| almost certain that there are employers out there who will love
| this and offer you a great start your career.
| pc86 wrote:
| I for one would absolutely donate to your legal defense
| (offense?) fund. This isn't right and whoever decided to
| approach this in this manner should lose their job and never
| have an authoritative position in higher ed ever again.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| You need a lawyer. They will 100% bully the F out of you to get
| what they want. Do not assume good faith.
| devwastaken wrote:
| you enrolled in a predatory institution designed to indebt
| workers forever. theyre not there for your interest. social
| media blast, leave, and potentially litigate.
| cashsterling wrote:
| 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.
| polynomial wrote:
| Gut reaction is this feels like petty and vindictive
| retaliatory behavior hiding behind an official facade.
| morgango wrote:
| Please don't listen to all of these folks who are trying to
| bring conflict into your life. You did something interesting,
| and learned a lesson about how big institutions actually work.
| It is a great story, and one that you can tell your friends.
|
| The easiest path forward is to do what it takes to graduate, it
| sounds like you are one quarter away. Smile, play nice, help
| out where you can. Get everything in writing.
|
| Definitely TALK to a lawyer and have that in your back pocket.
| It is likely there is some sort of legal aid through the law
| school and you can. However, only use this as a last resort. It
| would be no problem for a university to drag something like
| this out for months or years and you will be left without a
| degree.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| There is already conflict in his life at this point. The
| question is how best to resolve it. The school is in a
| position of authority and is telling the student that after
| spending tens of thousands of dollars at his school, he can't
| register for his final quarter necessary to graduate, unless
| he provides additional free work for them. This absolutely
| should not be tolerated.
|
| Everyone in this thread is simply suggesting he talk to a
| lawyer. The lawyer can help guide him on the next action to
| take.
| petercooper wrote:
| That's reasonable advice if he could cease to work on his
| project and status quo were resumed, but from his telling of
| events, it sounds like they're saying he can't study at all
| _unless_ he works for them for free. Such a scenario would be
| extortion, and is worth taking the stand on IMO.
| teeray wrote:
| > have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.
| Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university
|
| Not a lawyer, but this is outrageous and feels like a breach of
| the university-student contract. Point to the other students
| that must perform surprise labor for the university as a
| precondition for course registration. This is like paying your
| debt to the early 1900s company store. Absolutely lawyer up.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| If UW is anything like my state university your advisor should
| be able to access the system on your behalf.
| storyinmemo wrote:
| Am I reading it correctly that you asked for a read only access
| token, never received the token or accessed the site with your
| software, and got a take down notice for your demo that only
| had fake data hours after asking if you could read data?
| cush wrote:
| This is just regular old extortion
| e40 wrote:
| > This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am
| not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW
| leadership will make it right in the end.
|
| Hopefully the Streisand Effect will force them to do the right
| thing.
|
| I upvoted your LinkedIn post.
| eddonner wrote:
| With apologies if I'm misunderstanding or my glasses are too
| rose-colored. Is it possible that there are crossed wires here?
|
| You say: "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 register for
| my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of
| this quarter."
|
| Is it possible that some tiresome UW admin person has put your
| account on hold while this is being sorted out, but they
| haven't connected the dots that you now won't be able to
| register? Is the "de facto expulsion" an unintended consequence
| rather than a deliberate punishment?
|
| And then perhaps this person is trying to say, hey, there's a
| way we could keep your project going if it's an official
| project, but we don't have budget for it. Let's discuss if that
| would work for you. And perhaps this was intended to be a
| suggestion for a positive outcome, rather than an IP-grabbing
| maneuver.
|
| And when you say, "it was implied that they would then remove
| the hold, allowing me to graduate." I totally get that it feels
| that way, but is it possible that such an aggressive
| implication wasn't intended?
|
| This might be wishful thinking on my part. It just seems so
| hard to believe that anything you've done comes remotely close
| to actual expulsion, and this idea that you'd be forced to work
| to graduate seems like a total head-scratcher that wouldn't
| stand up to any scrutiny. I'm hoping that this is just a
| poorly-handled, poorly-worded communication from this
| department.
| grayfaced wrote:
| Find out what "agree to work" means, they may have very
| different ideas then you on what effort they're asking for.
| Also you only need to be in good graces with registrar office
| until classes begin. So maybe just say what they want to
| appease them then make long timelines, slow roll and eventually
| ghost when you have your diploma. "As a solo dev this will take
| over a year", "I don't want to stress the API during
| registration season", "My employer doesn't allow me to work on
| volunteer projects"
|
| They're using bureaucracy to save face for themselves. Once
| this is out of view, they're going to forget about it.
| flybarrel wrote:
| | I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the
| end.
|
| Please do not plan based on anyone's goodwill only, especially
| in this one you have such a high stake. I'd at least consult a
| lawyer at this point, even if it means you don't take any legal
| action.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith
| that UW leadership will make it right in the end._
|
| That's incredibly foolish. UW has treated you very poorly at
| this point, and they have all the leverage and power here. You
| need to protect yourself legally. You've done nothing wrong
| (AFAICT), and yet you've been threatened with expulsion, and
| now they are attempting to extort you: "provide us with
| uncompensated labor or we won't let you graduate".
|
| You might even have a _criminal_ complaint around that last
| bit. Assuming good faith by the university (an entity that has
| already shown plenty of bad faith) is naive, to say the least.
| pmarreck wrote:
| your intuition is correct.
|
| your creativity is correct.
|
| enjoy your spotlight.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| Please retain council.
| flaminHotSpeedo wrote:
| I don't understand - what could they possibly expel you for?
| FateOfNations wrote:
| "abusing the registration system" apparently.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Why would the school admin go nuclear over a request to integrate
| with the registration system, a system that is clearly intended
| to be used by applications:
|
| > "The Student Web Service gives your application access to
| information in the Student database such as course data,
| registration data, section data, person data, and term data
| (general academic data)."
|
| It doesn't make any sense. Was there something left out of the
| story? Do they offer this web service as a honeypot to find and
| expel ambitious software developers?
| widforss wrote:
| Everybody knows you have to be a drop-out to become successful
| in tech. This is basically their way of identifying potential
| entrepreneurs and helping them to drop out.
| cpfohl wrote:
| I laughed out loud. Thanks!
| robocat wrote:
| Independent self-starter types that respond creatively to
| strict rules don't like schooling. They often don't bother to
| start university so never drop out.
|
| A few of the smartest people I personally know left school at
| 15 - they reacted badly to school restrictions and just
| wanted to just do something (not study) and often left home
| early too.
| mbreese wrote:
| My guess is that those integration points are intended to be
| used by University owned and operated services. Having a
| service that the University doesn't control wanting to do this
| would be difficult to get approval. Student data is highly
| protected (legally), so access to it through another
| application (where the operators could see other students'
| data) is problematic.
| nisegami wrote:
| That makes sense. Now, with that in mind, a reasonable
| response to OP's request would involve just saying "no".
| Maybe even politely explain why, but that isn't required.
| w0m wrote:
| Yep; that's where the story as-told seems fishy.
| impendia wrote:
| There are strict privacy laws (e.g. FERPA) which university
| administrators are terrified of violating and getting sued
| over.
|
| Meanwhile, most university "enterprise" software is a festering
| pile of shit.
|
| I'm very surprised by the extortion attempt, but sadly a
| massive overreaction doesn't much surprise me.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Something I have noticed about higher education admins is
| that they hire consultants to do every project
|
| I came to understand that this is because the career
| positions have such great benefits, often the last bastion of
| pensions, that these people literally go there to die.
|
| So they take no risks and don't try anything. They hire a
| consultant and if it doesn't work out the blame lies there.
|
| They also get big budgets to implement the consultant
| solution, which is bloated and terrible, so the department
| head gets more money every year to support it
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639478
| niftyBeaks wrote:
| I mean, it still doesn't make any sense. From what I can
| tell, OP never acquired the API keys needed to actually
| interact with the system. So he literally just made a demo
| app and asked permission to make it live. Instead of just
| saying "No" they tried to coerce him into slave labor.
| hooverd wrote:
| Yea, I don't understand the response to him here. You can just
| tell the random student who wants the keys to the student
| database "no" and go about your day.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| It's almost like this one-sided story is leaving some things
| out.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Nope. Universities are wild and their technology is weak.
| It's always been this way.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Victim blaming is not cool. These types of over-the-top
| legal threats in response to good-faith engagement are
| extremely common and it's why bug bounties have safe harbor
| protections.
| lupire wrote:
| You seem to not understand what a "key" is in computer
| science.
| hooverd wrote:
| No, I do. It was an informal usage; they were requesting
| access to an internal web service and universities don't
| give that out to every student who asks.
| bsder wrote:
| The British have a nice word: "jobsworth".
|
| No bureaucrat is going to say "yes" because the consequences of
| something going wrong costs them their job while the benefits
| of things going right are zero.
|
| (For example, a DDoS. The number of times I have accidentally
| fired a DDoS at an API endpoint is non-trivial. Or it could get
| so popular that it's a DDoS. etc.)
| rincebrain wrote:
| Imagine an entire institution where your goal is to minimize
| the ability for anyone to convince people you were negligent,
| and you hate your job because it doesn't matter how you do it,
| you have little control outside of whatever fiefdom and
| backroom channels you've assembled.
|
| The kind of person who doesn't leave that role tends to be
| either someone who enjoys accumulating or wielding power, or
| would have trouble in roles outside of an institution like
| that.
|
| Now imagine a person who has almost no power just made a public
| spectacle about something in your camp that you've been not
| doing for years even though it's been a well known problem
| because nobody could make you do anything about it.
|
| You're probably going to go into overdrive and try to kill this
| story, even if it's not because you'll be directly punished in
| any way from it (because that's very uncommon in academia), but
| because this person DARED to challenge you.
|
| ...at least, that's my perception from years of time around
| toxic parts of academia (and some less toxic parts, but.)
|
| I'm not saying the story is true, I don't have enough data to
| comment, but I have absolutely seen enough academics go off the
| handle from 0 to 11 to buy this as plausible.
| protocolture wrote:
| Yeah universities are horrific for ethics.
|
| I had a lecturer log in and leak the grades for my entire year,
| including my own, so his students could choose the best partners
| for final project.
| gowld wrote:
| I remember asking for permission to get some innocuous University
| data to build an app to help students. University said no.
|
| Then Mark Zuckerberg built the Facebook by ignoring the data
| usage policy and scraping University data.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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're doing the right thing by publicizing this far and
| wide. Stay calm, cool, and stick to the facts as tightly as
| possible. When this gets picked up across social media and news
| media it will start to become a problem for _other_ people on the
| administrative side of the university who are also territorial
| (about PR /image) and will take it as their job to fix it.
|
| So be loud, but polite.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I've spent quite a bit of time in academia and was going to
| post something similar. Universities, no matter how great, are
| filled to the brim with petty bureaucrats just itching to exert
| whatever meager power they wield over someone whenever they get
| the chance.
|
| > So be loud, but polite.
|
| Fully agree. In academia problems don't get fixed until it's
| _more_ annoying to _not_ fix it. The more attention this gets
| the more likely a petty bureaucrat above the one responsible
| for this will realize their day just significantly more
| annoying and will likely squash it quickly and quietly.
| mandibles wrote:
| The conflict is so intense because the stakes are so low.
| mingus88 wrote:
| This is so true. My nephew worked at a Starbucks kiosk for
| a minute and had to deal with the most toxic territorial BS
| from the women who worked there before he started
|
| I said basically the same thing to him. It's amazing how
| bad it can get when you threaten someone's small stake when
| that's all they have.
|
| Reminds me of when I suggested to a college admin that she
| could automate some scheduling chore. She gave me death
| stares as if I wanted to take all the food off her plate.
| ta988 wrote:
| This reflects my experience as well.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > They have a lot of time on their hands because there are so,
| so many people in administration.
|
| Not so polite take: most of them could be replaced by a 20 line
| shell script.
| hooverd wrote:
| such as?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I feel like if you just piped stdin to stdout you would
| have a solid start on it
| bombcar wrote:
| Actually, they can't. Their job isn't to do whatever is on
| the description, their job is to give someone for their boss
| to have in his little fiefdom.
|
| Lord of the Shell Scripts doesn't ring as fun as having 20
| employees, even if the shell scripts do more.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > their job is to give someone for their boss to have in
| his little fiefdom.
|
| In my friends' case, he didn't really want a little fiefdom
| or even to be a manager.
|
| The problem was that they made it clear that the only way
| to get promoted and move up the salary ladder was to become
| a manager of a team. So by converting his one-person role
| into a job that had to be done by several people, he could
| justify hiring a team underneath him and therefore getting
| a significant raise and better title.
|
| It's weird to hear them describe how everyone seemingly
| knows the game is broken, but they're open about how it
| needs to be played.
| chillfox wrote:
| Yep, pay is directly tied to how many people are under
| you.
|
| And it should be no surprise that this is how it works.
| The operational side is hired by the academic side which
| is even more crazy. It's made up mostly of people who
| have never had a job outside of school (they went to
| university and then never left) so it's high school drama
| all of the time.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| In that case, even better: lay off all the subordinates,
| and replace the _boss_ with a 20 line shell script.
| chillfox wrote:
| lolz.
|
| Having worked at a university your job isn't to get shit
| done. Your job is to make managers happy, usually by
| attending meetings, being knowledgeable, polite and always
| available. Your manager's job is to inflate headcount for the
| executives, so their empires grow and their ranking among
| other executives improves.
|
| People at the higher levels literally use words like empire
| and fiefdom (of x) to refer to departments instead of the
| departments name.
|
| The first few years I didn't understand this, so I would
| suggest automations and process improvements at meetings, my
| manager was always unhappy with me when I did this. I was
| literally told once that there was value in a human doing a
| task when I suggested we automate something that could be
| done with about 5 lines of code.
|
| Eventually I understood and improved. I would automate some
| tasks silently and then use the freed-up time to prepare for
| meetings and generally being a better team member. After
| starting doing this I frequently got highlighted as one of
| the top 3 team members.
| hooverd wrote:
| Weird. I work a university and we love our self-service and
| process automation. Could be that it's a land-grant
| university and we don't have an unlimited endowment to
| blow.
| chillfox wrote:
| Where I was we had a self-service system as well that the
| university was very proud of. It's just that a lot of the
| things you could do on there would create a task for a
| human on the backend instead of having the computer just
| do it.
| hibikir wrote:
| Note that this isn't limited to universities: Larger
| headcount's make promotions easier everywhere. A modern
| trick is to hire remote workers from abroad: I might not
| need 5 people, but 5 remote devs from Mexico are much more
| affordable than 5 US employees, and they sure mean one can
| justify someone in the US that is already here becoming a
| dev lead.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| My mother works at a state university as a secretary for
| about 15 years now. Her job, especially after the pandemic,
| is pretty much to forward one or two emails a day to her
| boss. $70k/yr, lush state benefits, pension, all that stuff.
| The workday is 7 hours officially, but only 3-4 in reality
| (she comes in a few hours late and leaves a few hours early).
| 3 days in office, 2 remote. Basically unlimited PTO days too,
| since they are already generous in allotment and unused ones
| roll over.
|
| She loves it, obviously. Her boss loves her too, they chit
| chat all day when together, so she isn't getting laid off.
| But man, the inefficiency and waste is unreal.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| In USSR there was a common saying that "the lower the position,
| the pettier the bureaucrat"
| lovemenot wrote:
| The English word petty derives from the French petit (small).
| So that's almost tautological.
| timewizard wrote:
| > have a lot of time on their hands because there are so, so
| many people in administration
|
| It shouldn't be difficult to determine why education costs are
| so inflated, nor should it be difficult to see the obvious
| solution here.
| Zak wrote:
| This problem seems to be fairly well known, but
| insufficiently scandalous for anyone with power to do
| something about it.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau.
| ..
| greatgib wrote:
| This is the negative part of bullshit jobs that become harmful
| to others once their existence starts to be threatened!
| pdfernhout wrote:
| 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? ..."
| gatinsama wrote:
| Amazing story. Why post on LinkedIn though? I'm not angry, just
| disappointed.
| cosinetau wrote:
| Homie is looking for work.
| ajdjspaj wrote:
| Serious question: where else, currently?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Haha. The programmer ananlysts left the Ellucian swagger
| documentation up and public, and someone was embarrassed.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Looks intentionally up: https://itconnect.uw.edu/tools-
| services-support/data-reporti...
| gowld wrote:
| 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's
| Hold on your record, and potential diploma withholding for
| graduating students until the conduct process is complete."
|
| https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-proce...
|
| "Registration Abuse The registration system is provided for the
| sole express purpose for students to register themselves into
| sections. Any use of the registration system other than for this
| purpose is considered abuse of the system. Such abuse includes,
| but is not limited to, buying or selling one's seat in a class,
| holding seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a
| section that one has no intention of taking."
|
| Disclaimer: I am making no claim about the ethical validity of
| this policy, and I don't know how well the policy is communicated
| to students. I am not commenting on the allegation that the
| University demanded free labor in exchange for not-expelling OP.
| pdpi wrote:
| > Such abuse includes, but is not limited to, buying or selling
| one's seat in a class, holding seats for another student, or
| otherwise registering for a section that one has no intention
| of taking."
|
| This bit is important.
|
| At a glance, stubhub/ticketmaster/etc are pretty benign
| services that fulfil a pretty natural need for event tickets,
| but we've all seen the damage they can cause. There's a very
| real risk that OP's service could become a ticketmaster for UW
| classes, with all the perverse incentives that entails. Their
| reaction was probably excessive, but, from this perspective,
| understandable.
| jjmarr wrote:
| If you look at the GitHub commit history, the repo was created
| _before_ the blog post from UW, and also never contained actual
| courses.
|
| This is important, because it's the only explicit reference to
| "trading open spots" they've made.
|
| The Registration Abuse policy covers access to the registration
| system for:
|
| * buying or selling one's seat in a class,
|
| * holding seats for another student,
|
| * or otherwise registering for a section that one has no
| intention of taking.
|
| It's unclear if HuskySwap actually violated this policy, given
| that it never actually _accessed_ the registration system and
| no students used it in conjunction with the registration system
| of the school.
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| UW student - see the "Tampering and Abuse" section of
| (https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-
| proce...) which has been around for much longer and is well
| communicated with students.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| How does a fake site, with fake classes, that had nothing
| to do with actual registration, violate that?
| jjmarr wrote:
| Yes, I saw that linked in the top comment.
|
| What _isn 't_ clear is how this site actually violated that
| policy, if there was no course slot trading actually
| occurring. You could describe it as an _attempt_ , but in
| this situation, the student _asked for permission from the
| school_ before doing something that would violate their
| policies.
|
| To use an analogy, if I sneak notes into an exam, that is
| likely academic misconduct. However, creating a formula
| sheet and asking the professor if I can use it is not
| academic misconduct. I wouldn't consider that to be
| attempted cheating.
| croemer wrote:
| He might have violated the following by testing alone:
|
| > The use of robots and other automated tools to submit
| registration requests is expressly forbidden.
|
| Some sort of testing will likely have happened, in which
| case an automated tool has been used. Even if only by TFA
| himself.
|
| Also note:
|
| > Because use of scripts, robots, or other automated
| queries can adversely impact University network and
| computing resources and interferes with equal access to
| registration, such automated querying of registration-
| related resources is expressly forbidden. Violators may
| have their access to University network and computing
| resources terminated and may be subject to action by the
| University under applicable law, regulation, or policy,
| including but not limited to, discipline under any
| applicable University conduct code.
|
| The whole purpose of the project is to violate this
| clause. I agree that if no testing had happened, no
| sanctions should apply because the clause above doesn't
| say anything about attempts of use being sanctioned.
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| I'd personally describe it as an attempt for two reasons,
| although reasonable minds can differ:
|
| 1. They made substantial progress towards a working tool
| with available code, _before_ requesting permission from
| the school. That request was to enable parts of the site,
| not requesting permission to develop /release it
| publicly.
|
| 2. It is pretty clear to students that you aren't allowed
| to mess with any of the registration systems/process
| (e.g. trading/holding classes). Your analogy has a very
| reasonable question (are notesheets allowed) vs a policy
| which is made very clear.
|
| A different analogy is creating a hidden device to cheat
| on exams, then asking the professor for the exam room's
| wifi password as to enable it it in the future. While the
| situation is not as clear-cut as the analogy, I hope it
| helps show my perspective.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| Yet another analogy is designing and presenting a radar
| detector/jammer but never using it on public roads.
|
| Until the author has used the tool on the UW server
| during registration, he is not violating their policies
| and procedures: He hasn't attempted to tamper with
| records. He admittedly hasn't used their registration
| system with this tool. Those are the two key phrases in
| their policy. The text goes on to specifically describe
| abuse as "use" of a script or robot. There isn't anything
| forbidding a student from _authoring_ a script.
|
| One problem here is that by releasing the source, it
| makes it easier for another student to exploit the
| system. In the case where another student uses this tool
| during registration, the other student is fully
| responsible.
|
| Besides all that, it's a great project idea because
| everyone in his program would instantly relate to the
| problem.
|
| It's easy to understand the University's overreaction---
| and it _is_ an overreaction. The better solution from UW
| would have been to sternly inform the student(s), "The
| website can never go live. It dies as a proof of concept.
| Please use your own dummy data; no API access. A
| disclaimer must be added to any class demos
| (presentations, code, etc.) with the Tampering and Abuse
| policy, and that this only uses generated data. Our
| efforts to improve the registration system in the future
| will be X, Y, Z."
|
| This student has done nothing wrong (yet) (based on what
| he revealed) and is getting punished for being near the
| border.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Why is trading considered bad? It is solving some problems for
| both students and administrators.
|
| In my old days we did the same, only by finding someone who
| want to swap manually
| foota wrote:
| Trading when it happens organically "oops I thought I wanted
| to take this class, but can't make the time slot work" is
| beneficial, but making it easy to register for a bunch of
| classes in high demand and then swap them with others messes
| with things.
| LPisGood wrote:
| It opens up for abuse by offering to sell a spot.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| The downside is that you may be unable to sell it and
| actually have to take a course that you don't want
| isotypic wrote:
| You can just drop the course - pretty much every
| university (in the United States, at least) allows
| students to drop courses one or two weeks into the
| semester without any record (on say, a transcript).
| Otherwise students cannot possibly plan their semesters,
| since courses may not make material available until after
| the semester actually starts.
|
| So if you are planning to sell the slots and it does not
| work out, you just drop the course, no harm to you.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| And the slot will be reallocated.
|
| I won't say no harm but you have to be pretty desperate
| to try to pull this off
| mrguyorama wrote:
| "No harm" except for the several slots that were taken up
| by people hoping to make a quick buck (selling the trade)
| who drop a day or two into classes and cause the students
| who actually NEED the class to be very stressed and
| annoyed and possibly have to adjust their plans because
| they don't think they will be able to take a class even
| though it will actually be free by the third time the
| class meets.
|
| It also just fucks with the University's ability to gauge
| class interest. In my university, if a class filled up
| early in the registration window, the University would
| try to increase capacity or add another copy of the
| class, but that's not always an option.
|
| A reminder that _this is not done for technical reasons_.
| Plenty of colleges all across the US, big and small,
| custom-built registration software or purchased on the
| open market, have fully functional waitlist features.
| "first come first serve" is a policy choice.
| toyg wrote:
| If a resource is so scarce that its real value is higher
| than the official one, the producer will have to either
| increase production, or accept that black markets will
| appear.
|
| Why can't UW increase the number of classes?
| cibyr wrote:
| The ability to trade creates an incentive to register for
| courses you don't actually plan to take, which leads to
| further scarcity.
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
| loeg wrote:
| I benefited from a UW CSE spot trade in like 2010 and
| didn't get in trouble for it at the time.
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| Yeah, a small amount of "organic" mischief isn't bad IMO,
| but it's problematic on a larger scale.
| buildbot wrote:
| Yeah I agree, not ideal given how limited capacity is in
| some classes.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| Not sure, but UW IT isn't incapable of noticing repeated
| requests from the same IP or something, I assume most
| students are not setting up systems that go over
| residential proxies.
| thorncorona wrote:
| You typically need to be signed in in order to get all
| the course info.
| buildbot wrote:
| UW does have that info publicly available:
| https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/WIN2025/
|
| You do have to be signed typically to actually make
| changes of course, I imagine this tool would have to have
| your netid login... (yikes)
| lupire wrote:
| Can you explain when this horrific behavior (seat trading) is
| explicitly supported by UW, when they could simply NOT accept
| requests for trading seats?
|
| I sign up for a class. I am on the roster. How is it possible
| for me to put your name on the class roster, for credit,
| transcript, and diploma, without the university going out of
| their way to help?
|
| These aren't anonymous concert tickets or XBoxes. They are
| personally identifiable registrations.
| badgersnake wrote:
| It seems odd that they would want the author to provided them
| with a system to automate it then.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| It sounds like the actual demo site didn't actually interact
| with the registration system at all. He mentions "fake"
| classes. That's what he wanted the API token for; that would
| have allowed him to actually make the site function, and he
| (falsely) assumed that the documentation meant the university
| was open to the idea.
|
| So while it sounds like his site would almost certainly wound
| up violating policy had it gone live _it never did so_. That's
| a pretty good reason for them to deny the API request (which
| seems like may have not been intended for the public anyway?)
| But it does not in any way seem to merit the threat of
| expulsion, or, even worse, the fact that (according to the
| student in an update), even though he immediately complied
| _they still put a hold on his account anyways_.
|
| There is some nuance here for sure, but I do not see in any way
| that the universities response is proportional to what actually
| happened.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| 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?
| Xelynega wrote:
| The only source we have for this is the person saying it.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| Good point.
| w0m wrote:
| I'm guessing he had been running the 'demo' site for a fair
| minute using scrapped data; but didn't get noticed/caught
| until he requested the token.
|
| Still shit to lock him out after he pulled the site down.
| nayuki wrote:
| As a non-student, I received an overzealous takedown request from
| the University of Washington a decade ago.
| https://github.com/nayuki/Reference-Huffman-coding/issues/1
|
| Also related:
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/295420/how-to-cope-...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That is hilariously naive.
|
| Particularly in the age of AI, professors might have to go back
| to the practice of oral exams to have people demonstrate their
| understanding of an issue. The problem for universities is that
| means you have to have a lower student:teacher ratio.
| userbinator wrote:
| Or just any exam where the only thing you're allowed to use
| is "the mass of cells between your ears", as one instructor I
| know liked to put it.
| loeg wrote:
| The request was in 2015, dawg.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Check the date on the issue... it's from 2015 way before
| (gen) AI was even close to being a thing much less being
| useful for actual coding.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I know - that's why I said "particularly". I was in college
| in the era of Facebook being for college students only.
|
| My point was that a professor cannot fault providers of
| information on the internet for their students' unethical
| behavior. And if they can't trust their students to do
| remote assignments, then they should test with more
| reliable methods like in-person examinations.
| loeg wrote:
| I would not call that overzealous? It's not couched in legal
| language / demands, it fully explains the rationale for the
| _request_. Intro CS students cheat _all the time_ , they're
| very lazy about it, having posted answers as top Google results
| facilitates that and increases TA burden. (Full disclosure, I
| was personally acquainted with Whitaker long ago. He was a TA
| for the intro classes. I think he just sincerely wanted to
| reduce cheating in the intro UW CS courses.)
| userbinator wrote:
| It's definitely an overreach, and reflects badly on him and
| his employer.
|
| If one of my open-source projects got hit with that sort of
| request, my response would be far less polite.
|
| (Full disclosure: I have taught CS courses before.)
| loeg wrote:
| I guess I assumed it was actually written directly to a UW
| homework assignment, but looking at the repository, I don't
| actually see any reference to that. So you may be right.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| You are so much more polite than I am. Admirable.
| nayuki wrote:
| I would love to see examples of your sassy writings. Maybe I
| could learn a thing or two about responding to people.
|
| Note that I've become more cynical in these 10 years that
| passed. I was, let's say, more charitable with people in the
| past.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Well, here's the post that made Paul Graham block me on X:
|
| https://x.com/LewisCTech/status/1778912158404997494
|
| Also briefly made me popular on Nigerian Twitter, which was
| fun :)
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Well, I guess there's no point to applying to YC for
| whoever is working on delve.io
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Best of luck. It sounds like you really pissed someone off by
| threatening some internal power structure or process they
| controlled. I hope you don't keep quiet about this - I know it's
| easy to say when I'm watching from the sidelines, but don't let
| them coerce you into silence!
|
| About a decade ago, some teammates and I built an internal
| request system for our Ops team to replace the MS Sharepoint crap
| we were using. We used Bottle, BootstrapJS and SQLite to get it
| up and going quickly, and under the radar. Our customer IT teams
| loved it, and managers from elsewhere in our department were even
| asking half-jokingly if we could support their teams, too.
|
| Well, the IT team that was deploying ServiceNOW was none too
| happy that a "non-standard" application was running... our
| manager was a knight and kept them from making us tear it down.
| We pretended to play ball, we walked through SNOW process of
| getting a team-specific form to build out. And then we never used
| it; we kept directing our customers to the self-built tool.
|
| The moral is, people like their fiefdoms. Bureaucrats often shun
| innovation because it has the chance to make them obsolete, or
| else they are simply the kind of people who don't like
| disruption.
|
| You may also have invented a tool that would have obsoleted some
| multimillion dollar software acquisition or internal process, who
| knows.
| stikit wrote:
| something is missing from this story. it doesn't make sense they
| jumped right to blocking your account because you requested to
| integrate. You sort of skipped over the part where you got hold
| of the Swagger files. would you care to elaborate on how exactly
| you found those files and if this might have been the reason for
| the heavy handed response? usually swagger files would be locked
| down on the backend .
| richbell wrote:
| > would you care to elaborate on how exactly you found those
| files and if this might have been the reason for the heavy
| handed response? usually swagger files would be locked down on
| the backend .
|
| Presumably by visiting `https://site.com/swagger-ui` or one of
| the other common doc endpoints. It's not that hard, and many
| places do not lock them down (even if they should).
| spiffyk wrote:
| They seem to be public. A simple "University of Washington
| swagger" search turned this up: https://itconnect.uw.edu/tools-
| services-support/data-reporti...
| compootr wrote:
| they're public. After searching for "university of washington
| student web service" thr homepage literally links to
| https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/swagger/index.html
| agluszak wrote:
| Interesting. I graduated from the _other_ UW (University of
| Warsaw) and our uni has course-swapping capability built into the
| University Study Service System (USOS)[1].
|
| FYI public university education is fully government-funded in
| Poland (i.e. it is free for students).
|
| 1 -
| https://usosweb.mimuw.edu.pl/kontroler.php?_action=news%2Fde...
| Aaron2222 wrote:
| I'm from New Zealand, and this kind of stuff isn't a thing
| where I went (as far as I'm aware). Course enrolments open at
| some point (everything all at once), and you just log in and
| fill it out at some point over the multiple months between it
| opening and the due date for completing it. Some programs have
| limited admission (with their associated papers being
| restricted to those enrolled in that program), but limited
| space at the paper level (as opposed to the course level) and
| rushing to submit your paper selection just isn't a thing (as
| far as I'm aware).
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Isn't USOS like nightmare of a system? I've heard of stories
| that people had to graduate after time, because they failed a
| subject at first year (!) and they had no chance to sign up for
| the course in the following years at USOS because someone was
| always faster.
|
| I'm happy my uni in Poland didn't use it :P
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| A third UW is the University of Wisconsin!
| simonbw wrote:
| I went to UW a decade ago, and back then it was pretty common
| knowledge that you don't fuck with software and the class
| registration system. Registering for classes was really
| competitive and they were really strict about making sure that no
| one had an edge over anyone else by being able to write code.
| There were plenty of rumors of people being expelled for using
| scripts to try to get the classes they wanted right when they
| opened. I also believe they forbid or at least frowned on
| students "trading" registrations, because they didn't want even
| more people trying to sign up for high value classes and trading
| them as a commodity.
|
| So at least back when I went there, basically any CS student
| could have told you that this website was a horrible idea that is
| sure to get you in trouble.
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| UW cs student - most current cs students would still know that
| this would get you in trouble.
| isotypic wrote:
| I am somewhat surprised issues of scripting and trading even
| exist in the registration system. Staggering enrollment times
| over a few days, with new waves every 20 minutes or so, mostly
| solves scripting issues since you are only competing with a
| fraction of the student body now. Giving courses waitlists once
| they are full, instead of allowing people to just directly
| register once a spot frees up, makes trading impossible since
| if you could trade you could have just registered for the
| course anyways.
|
| I understand that the registration system is probably old and
| tied up in tons of just as old management software, but if the
| university really cared the solutions should be there.
| loeg wrote:
| So, for context, UW's registration system runs on, like, a
| single 1980s VAX.
| lupire wrote:
| I didn't know VAX had web APIs.
|
| Do you know that software can be used to build a wrapper
| layer around other software?
| twodave wrote:
| It's much easier to build a gateway API for a legacy
| system than to extend it. Not disagreeing with you.
| Honestly, though, software systems for academic
| institutions are ridiculously complicated, because they
| are essentially a student portal, a school, a sales
| organization, a rules engine, etc. etc. all wrapped up
| into one and interconnected in ways that aren't obvious
| on the surface.
| confidentlyinc wrote:
| That is confidently incorrect
| dpedu wrote:
| The school I attended in 2010 had a system like this as
| well. Awful backend with a simple, but still awful, web
| interface to talk to it. There was rumor you could telnet
| in and use an actual text interface, but I never saw it.
|
| The system was replaced a few years later with an Oracle
| PeopleSoft implementation. Everybody hated it more.
| campbel wrote:
| I went to school about 20 years ago and we had staggered
| online registrations. Surprised the best solutions haven't
| propagated further.
| wil421 wrote:
| Pretty much every schools uses staggered registrations to
| allow upper class men or even athletes the ability to get
| classes they need.
| buildbot wrote:
| When I went there it was staggered, which causes this desire
| for spot trading - seniors register first, so if you are an
| freshman/sophomore/junior, you beg a senior to register a
| spot in a class you want then coordinate them deregistering
| just before you register for the class. This automated that
| and at scale could be a big issue.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Punishing people is easy. Changing process is hard,
| especially when you're a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| > they were really strict about making sure that no one had an
| edge over anyone else by being able to write code.
|
| Or you know, they could have just improved their registration
| system so this wouldn't be an issue... But hey, I'm sure UW
| raises their tuition every year for good reasons and the money
| is well spent.
| scotty79 wrote:
| This is so bizarre to me that I'm not sure if I understand it
| correctly. They soft lock him out of UW system which will get
| him expelled for having an idea for an app for trading spots in
| classes and implementing a demo with fake data and using the
| token they provided him with to download data that is public
| already? And then they try to blackmail him with a promise of
| restoring system access to do unpaid compelled work for them?
| loeg wrote:
| I'd heard of people writing these kinds of scripts but never
| heard of anyone getting expelled for it (ca. 2010).
| DaSHacka wrote:
| At my University, scripts like these are pretty much
| universal.
|
| We even have an alumni-run site that scrapes the registration
| platform's API for the details of every course to provide a
| better UI interface.
|
| It even has a tool to generate an AutoHotkey script so
| students can insta-register for all their classes seconds
| after registration opens up for them (it's usually a mad rush
| at midnight when course registration opens for
| freshman/sophomores as they all compete for the remaining
| course slots left after seniors and juniors have already
| registered).
|
| Seems inane an institution would crack down on it.
|
| We even have another alumni-run site that does nothing but
| FOIA the average GPA of all courses from every professor;
| While I can't imagine the university is thrilled about it, as
| it's completely legal they haven't tried to pressure the
| creators to shut it down afaik.
| macNchz wrote:
| > Seems inane an institution would crack down on it.
|
| Mad rushes to register requiring people to use automations
| like that sounds like a bad system to me, and something the
| university should be trying to address. That said, rather
| than a crackdown on tools, it'd make more sense to
| implement a harder-to-game system like spreading
| registration across a long period and assigning students to
| have their access unlock at a random time during the
| period. My college had time-slot (in person!) appointments
| like that 20 years ago.
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| If the university offers an API then it's not a "scrape".
| If you're describing unauthorized use of an API then you've
| disclosed a possible CFAA violation, not web scraping.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I have no idea how they do it, and I don't care if
| they're breaking the CFAA; Neither are my problem.
|
| Though they do claim to obtain at least some of their
| information using an API, so if it's the word "scrape"
| you take issue with in the post, perhaps "queries" is a
| better fit.
| asdffdasy wrote:
| it's almost like universities are about controlling an
| artificial limited access to knowledge than about knowledge uh.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| That's what bothers me the most about this. The reason this
| is even an issue in the first place is because universities
| are aren't adequately providing what the students want.
|
| So you want to study, say, engineering.
|
| First you have to apply and get admitted to the university,
| and many people aren't admitted. The acceptance rate I can
| find for UW is 54% in-state, 46% out of state.
|
| Then the university tells you that if you want to study
| engineering, you have to study a lot of other non-engineering
| things it feels like you should study. All of which are
| pretty costly and time consuming.
|
| You might have to take courses in things you already know,
| because there are few courses you can test out of and the
| universities limit how many credits it can bring over.
|
| Then on top of this, the universities don't provide anywhere
| near enough adequate quality classes for students, which is
| the whole reason why there's this level of demand in the
| first place.
|
| Not only do they not provide enough, they know they don't
| provide enough, so their response is since it's "really
| competitive" they need to be "really strict about making sure
| that no one had an edge over anyone else." It's not about
| making sure students needs are being met, even for classes
| that the university is forcing on them. It's about
| restricting students, so that they suffer a roughly equal
| amount from the university's failures.
|
| The attitude of the universities seems to be that since
| they're the only game in town, students have to suffer
| through all of this. Imagine a system where students could
| take classes from anywhere they want, and then could get a
| degree just by passing assessments at the university. I
| imagine the number of people paying huge amounts of money for
| inadequate classes would plummet.
| lupire wrote:
| It's not the university's fault that the taxpayers refuse
| to fund a larger school.
|
| Edit per reply: $1M/yr for the President is less than
| $50/student/year. Not funding more classes for students.
| pc86 wrote:
| The president of UW makes $912,000 a year. They have
| plenty of money, they're just not allocating it on the
| things they should be.
| pc86 wrote:
| Having admissions is an objective good though. Yes there's
| some gatekeeping aspects to it. But smart people want to be
| around smart people. I went to a school that I got into
| easily and if I could change one thing that I did in HS I
| would apply to more schools and try to go to the one that I
| _barely_ got into.
|
| Study other things is good too. I went to a liberal arts
| school for this. I studied politics, chemistry, computer
| science, Chinese language, South African history, Russian
| literature. Of course me knowing how to count to ten in
| Mandarin or being able to talk about the influences of
| Dostoevsky never helped me get a job but being well-rounded
| is an objectively Good Thing. I don't think you should have
| 60 credits of gen eds but a semester or two worth of non-
| STEM classes over 2-3 years is not going to hurt anyone.
| yard2010 wrote:
| It's funny how a perfectly organized crime is not crime at
| all
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Non-transferable class registrations decided by lottery would
| solve this. Publicly visible, physical random number generation
| is important of course.
|
| With pre-registration you can also get an idea of demand in
| advance, instead of having to post-hoc schedule additional
| classes (or concert tour dates, or airline flights, or PS5
| units, or... etc.)
|
| Non-transferability means the lottery is continuous. As soon as
| anyone relinquishes their class, the lottery will have to run
| again to reallocate. You could do this daily.
|
| This is a technical solution that works but it overlooks the
| cultural side of a resource allocator _wanting_ their resource
| to generate hype and demand, build up to the Big Event, and
| then sell out in "record time". I can understand that a big
| part of University marketing is to try to seem as popular and
| oversubscribed as possible, even if I don't agree with it.
|
| Finally of course, the public RNG bit feels like the most
| interesting. A giant continuous dice tumbler in the middle of
| UW's Red Square? The tumbler feels easy, but how would you make
| a physical ledger to record the dice rolls automatically?
| pc86 wrote:
| The idea of transferring registration from one student to
| another without input from the university is bananas to me.
| But only slightly more stupid than not having waitlists which
| is the only reason that exists in the first place.
|
| My alma mater let people register in descending order of
| number of completed credits with a C or better (e.g. 2.0),
| and then GPA, in waves. Same with dorm sign ups which were
| required for everyone but seniors. It worked out great and
| professors always had enough slack to let special cases in if
| they felt compelled to.
|
| Making it random seems like a bad idea to me. It's "fair"
| only insofar as randomness is fair. For high-demand classes
| isn't it more "fair" that people who will graduate sooner
| and/or have done better in their classes thus far should have
| the first opportunity to get those classes?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I really like the point you make about randomness being bad
| as well, albeit in different ways. I'm not sure if I agree
| on the prior-grade route, not for freshmen at least but
| that does make a lot of sense for the later years.
|
| Overall, randomness, like democracy, might be the least
| worst option.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If they didn't want people trading registrations why not
| just... not allow them to trade reservations? I can't trade
| plane tickets, and that isn't because of some implied threat.
| nlawalker wrote:
| The "trading" is all out of band, the system only sees one
| person drop their registration and another person fill the
| slot.
|
| When someone drops a class, the opening becomes available
| immediately, so you coordinate a time well after the
| registration rush has died down for one person to click
| "drop" and the other to refresh the page and click
| "register". At least that's how it worked when I did it 20
| years ago. It was relatively common in the Greek system not
| to "trade" a class for a class but rather a class for a few
| beers or the like: prior to registration, if you were an
| underclassman who really needed to get into a class next
| quarter that you knew filled up quickly, you'd find an
| upperclassman (who get access to the system earlier) who was
| eligible for the class you needed and wasn't full on credits
| to grab a slot, then a couple days before classes started,
| you'd have them drop and then grab it for yourself.
|
| At that time (early 2000s), polling bots weren't common, but
| there were rumors, so people doing this got more careful and
| actually sat next to each other with their laptops to
| coordinate the drop and add instead of just picking a time or
| date.
| gms7777 wrote:
| I feel like if the university has an issue with it, this
| could all be fixed by just adding course waitlists. Which
| is how it was handled at both my undergrad and grad
| university
| gowld wrote:
| polling bots were absolutely common by 2000
| IshKebab wrote:
| So have a queue?
| 93po wrote:
| or you know, offer more of the desirably classes, or charge
| extra for them, or give people "fun bucks" to register for
| classes and the more desirable ones cost more fun bucks
| pc86 wrote:
| High-demand classes are bi-modal. The left side of the
| distribution is the low-level intro and survey courses. I
| went to a very heavily pre-med undergrad with a total
| enrollment of about 1,500 where the intro Chemistry course
| had two 100-150-person survey courses with multiple TAs.
| Charging more for these is pretty stupid. The answer is to
| offer more of them _if_ you have the physical space, the
| professor(s), and the TA(s) to do it, which you don 't
| always have.
|
| The right side is the 5- or 6-person high level classes
| offered every other year or something. Usually, but not
| always, these are in demand because professors are not
| fungible at this level and they're probably taught by a
| popular or famous professor. I took one of these at my
| school taught by a former cabinet secretary, just four of
| us seniors and him talking about politics for 4 hours every
| week. You can't just offer more of these; if you're
| teaching one class every other Spring you're unlikely to
| seriously consider changing that to two Fall and two Spring
| classes every year.
| 93po wrote:
| god forbid schools get more desirable instructors when,
| in a class of 100 students, they're getting paid close to
| $200k in revenue if they're charging $600 per credit
| hour, which is on the low side, and making hundreds of
| millions per year off of endowment investments
| pc86 wrote:
| You'll get no argument from me on higher ed misspending
| the majority of their funds. You could remove 80% of all
| US higher ed _administration_ from the workforce forever
| and I 'm convinced there would be no noticeable negative
| impact on the economy. IMO it's one of the careers with
| the largest gap between how important the people in it
| think they are vs. how much of a real impact they
| actually have.
|
| I was just pointing out that there are two competing
| reasons why classes end up with long waitlists or people
| who graduate having never had the chance to take them so
| it's not a simple "Do _________" and it's fixed.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's an unintended consequence of the system being so
| laughably out of date and so poorly designed it doesn't
| support waitlists.
|
| Allowing infinitely large waitlists for a given class - which
| even in the most convoluted legacy system imaginable is not
| that big of a challenge - and trading disappears overnight.
|
| It's not a problem for the university directly, and fixing it
| would cost money, so there's no incentive to do it. Gotta
| make sure there's enough money to keep paying the president
| $76,000 every month, after all.
| ikrenji wrote:
| it's a disgrace that a university administrator makes over
| a million a year... in a public school to boot
| loeg wrote:
| UW registration weren't really open to criticism or improvement
| ca. 2009, either. Extremely hostile to student projects that
| would in any way interact with the registration system.
| donalhunt wrote:
| Having been on the IT side of student registration, it's a
| major undertaking for the teams involved with thousands of
| students to be processed in a fairly short window. Downtime of
| any type during the registration period has a major impact so
| I'm not surprised that a university is being cautious with a
| 3rd party system connecting and potentially causing performance
| or downtime issues.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Thousands is nothing, maybe the code should be written and
| tested more carefully?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's worse than that, throwing all 60k students at the
| registration system at the same second with no automated
| waitlist is a _policy decision_.
|
| Registration at my school was a zero stress endeavor
| because those features are built in and very good in
| College admin software on the open market, for at least 2
| decades.
|
| What is very likely is that UW considers something about
| staggered enrollment "unfair" or not right for everyone, so
| prefers the absurd freeforall, and therefore polices any
| attempt to bypass that freeforall "fairness" as
| unacceptable.
| matt3210 wrote:
| He probably accidentally exposed someone's bug or other screwups
| ta988 wrote:
| Stay calm, they will be the ones that will loose a lot and they
| will end up spending a lot ot time and money to clean-up their
| mess.
|
| You will get plenty of job offers out of your post, and you don't
| need their useless degree anyway.
|
| Universities are specialized in bullying from their admins (and
| often faculty) that have way too much time on their hands.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I manage university relations for our corporation and give money
| (though not very much) to have our corporate logo next to the
| Udub logo.
|
| I'm not sure this kind of misbehaviour reflects well on our
| brand.
|
| Do you have a contact at the university I can talk to?
| metadat wrote:
| Do you already have a contact who coordinates the payments?
| Seems like a better place to start, as they'll be the ones who
| might care.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Also... do you have the whole post somewhere. I didn't get past
| Microsoft's registration wall. It only let me see the first
| couple of lines.
| croemer wrote:
| Microsoft? Or LinkedIn?
|
| I had completely forgotten that LinkedIn is fully owned by
| Microsoft.
| ermir wrote:
| Sounds like this guy did not even publish or finish the project,
| but only communicated his intent. The university is clearly
| persecuting him and he should absolutely talk to a lawyer.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| UW used to cultivate this kind of thing. Pretty sad that
| administrators choke the life out of everything. I suppose it's
| the story of America.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| Student builds tool to circumvent common university registration
| rules, is surprised when university objects.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Alleging a violation after he _asked_ for an API key, rather than
| simply turning him down or saying that he could experiment but
| that he would need to get agreement before deploying, seems like
| defamation to me.
| rafram wrote:
| It's harsh, but that's not what defamation means at all.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Assuming his narrative is factual they are accusing him of a
| violation he did not commit and he is now being threatened
| with expulsion as a result.
| jcrites wrote:
| True, but accusing him of a violation privately, to him, is
| not defamation. Accusing him publicly is still probably not
| defamation. Whether he violated certain terms of service is
| something that would ultimately need to be decided by a
| court, so them believing he did so isn't defamation even if
| they're wrong.
| hk1337 wrote:
| I had something similar happen to me, not threaten with expulsion
| and I kind of deserved it.
|
| This was back in late 1990s, a group I was part of was getting a
| web site made on the school pages and I wanted to contribute. I
| ran my mouth about my dislike of the current site (I was a
| dumbass) and for some reason hosted the site on my local computer
| in my room which was accessible everywhere on the network. I
| wasn't going to run it permanently, I just wanted to showcase it.
| That got me in some trouble, what I said got back too, I got my
| room connection disconnected because we weren't supposed to run
| servers.
|
| I apologized, obviously disabled the server, and eventually got
| reconnected.
| notpushkin wrote:
| https://archive.is/8qR7w
| kitkat47 wrote:
| I wanted to chime in with some advice that also can help in _any_
| situation involving long administrative processes. I 'm sorry
| you're going through this and I really hope some of this can be
| helpful.
|
| - Write stuff down! A paper trail is helpful both to prevent
| hearsay and keep your own timeline of events in check. Recency
| bias and the like are too common in stressful situations.
|
| - Remember that you are one (1) human who needs food, sleep, and
| water.
|
| - Reach out to the Ombud (at the HUB), professors, and other
| administrators you may know. Even within one department there can
| be mixups -- nevermind when university-wide policies (such as
| registration) come into play. Having someone who can help point
| you in the right direction will be invaluable.
|
| - On that note, the HUB has free legal services; for better or
| worse, you aren't the first student to be in this position.
|
| - I understand in another comment you said you're confident in UW
| Leadership's ability, but crucially, there is no such thing as a
| singular leadership. At a university that large, *even when
| everyone is working to help*, things can turn out bad. (It's like
| how a CEO can get fired and nothing changes at a company; the
| system has its own momentum.) It's hard to say what level of
| intervention needs to happen to resolve this -- School of CSE?
| Undergrad CS department? Registrar? UW President's Office? -- and
| each level will likely not know what the level above/around them
| can do. - (And if you do need to escalate, it
| might be worth reaching out to the Registrar's office directly,
| over email. I say this because they work at a university-wide
| level, separate from any school or department, and may have a
| more-final say on what any individual branch can do/not do w.r.t.
| your enrollment.)
|
| - Hanlon's razor, or more optimistically, "assume good
| intention". Always. Even when someone has stated not-good
| intention. This will help in a few ways: keeping your tone
| cordial, clearing up miscommunication. Maybe someone genuinely
| misunderstands what you built, or has pressure on _their_ end to
| uphold some policy, however arcane. But most importantly, this
| will give yourself a way to not feel cornered, and distance your
| day-to-day /identity/etc. from this situation.
|
| - Remember that you are (likely still) one (1) human who needs
| food, sleep, and water. Those damn robots won't take over yet.
|
| - Be careful what you post publicly! There is a reason the best
| PR teams stay silent. Less is more. Form a close group of people
| you trust to share information freely, and be very clear (to
| yourself) what your intention is with every public post. Is it to
| get validation/advice? Is it to put pressure on the university?
| The court of public opinion is a double edged sword! Not every
| interpretation needs to or will be true. (And employers, like the
| public, might interpret this situation positively or negatively.
| It's hard to say which way it will go!)
| croemer wrote:
| The last point is wisdom that I only acquired over time. I also
| used to be very aggressive in publicly attacking institutions,
| like TFA, and it definitely has downsides, even with best
| intentions of calling out injustice.
| duxup wrote:
| They got a notice of "Registration Tampering Abuse Policy" for
| filling out a request form to request data that is available?
|
| Is the request system just a honeypot?
| janalsncm wrote:
| If I was a UW alum I would make it clear I am paying attention to
| how they deal with this.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| UW's slogan is "Be Boundless". This is the polar opposite of
| that.
|
| UW has missed a great opportunity to show its current and future
| students and faculty that innovation is valued there. Their
| management decision will shutdown the minds of so many brilliant
| hackers, as we have already witnessed with the OP's decision to
| back down. I really hope the school can re-evaluate their
| decision and more importantly, the faculty should support the
| students, as they are together pursuing the goal of learning by
| doing. That's what higher education should offer, not
| conditioning people into rule makers and rule followers.
| themantalope wrote:
| GET A LAWYER
| slantedview wrote:
| Wait, so the project is bad, but also they want you to re-create
| it for them for free else they won't let you register? This is
| some insane chicanery. I agree with the many comments here about
| getting legal advice.
| cvoss wrote:
| The comments here are almost entirely of one voice: UW bad.
| Student innocent.
|
| It is not hard to find the policy in question. I quote from the
| UW Registrar's website, their policy on tampering and abuse of
| the registration system, as cited in the subject of the email the
| student received:
|
| > The registration system is provided for the sole express
| purpose for students to register themselves into sections. Any
| use of the registration system other than for this purpose is
| considered abuse of the system. Such abuse includes, but is not
| limited to, buying or selling one's seat in a class, holding
| seats for another student, or otherwise registering for a section
| that one has no intention of taking. [0]
|
| The student's project, though well-intentioned, is in clear
| violation of this policy. And it ought to be forbidden. There are
| plenty of ways this kind of a system could go wrong, including
| creating incentives to overregister or develop a registration
| black market, not to mention the technical liabilities of letting
| a bot talk to the database at bot-speed.
|
| Now, as for follow-up conversations the student and the
| university have had, we have not seen these emails. We have only
| heard the student's own summary, which, given the high stakes and
| personally significant impact, may very well have been
| editorialized so that the university looks unreasonable and the
| student reasonable.
|
| I, for one, cannot pass such quick and single-minded judgment as
| everyone else without seeing these emails.
|
| [0] https://registrar.washington.edu/registration/policies-
| proce...
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Except the policy in question was never actually abused as the
| student did not receive an API key as requested. A proportional
| response would be a simple denial for API key and reminder of
| policy. Not preventing a student from graduating. Unless the
| student is lying here, this is an outrageous response on the
| part of UW.
| croemer wrote:
| Not necessarily lying, TFA could just be
| misrepresenting/misunderstanding what happened, without
| intent. Lying implies intent.
| croemer wrote:
| This is the comment I was looking for!
|
| Note also that the student uses the LinkedIn post to advertise
| themselves to potential employers. This reduces credibility in
| my mind as it provides a reason why TFA might benefit from
| exaggeration/misrepresentation.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I am a college professor so I am biased but I am extremely
| skeptical of the poster's version of events.
| croemer wrote:
| I'm surprised this is upvoted so much. All we have is a LinkedIn
| post and a GitHub repo. We haven't seen any of the original
| emails/writing from UW, not have we heard UW's view.
|
| Am I being overly skeptical here?
| ec109685 wrote:
| Yes, with a completely clickbait intro (given he took the site
| down after the university warned him, which he said later in
| his post).
|
| To be fair he follows up the first post saying that the
| university is holding his future registration hostage unless he
| builds them a similar
| website:https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jdkaim_github-
| jdkaimhuskyswap...
| croemer wrote:
| The followup is a bold claim with no receipts. He should
| share the uni's letter otherwise I won't believe it.
|
| What might have happened is that UW offered that he could
| keep the website up if he changed the project in such a way a
| way that the university is happy with it.
|
| We don't know how much escalation has happened already, maybe
| he gave grounds for UW to not give him the account back
| because he has indicated he wouldn't back down and try to
| find a way to get his project to work nonetheless.
| croemer wrote:
| Note that in the LinkedIn post he exclusively talks in first
| person: I developed the project etc.
|
| In fact if you go on GitHub, their project presentation lists
| a 6 people team: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/117dG
| uEK98-TwAPGUBijf.... He was on the backend team, but still
| mentions angular in the LinkedIn post.
|
| Did the others not do anything? Or why is he not giving them
| credit in the LinkedIn post?
| craftman210 wrote:
| If you look at the commit history and contributors, it's
| mostly him.
| croemer wrote:
| I'd take commit numbers with a grain of salt. Also, I
| wouldn't call half the commits _mostly_ at all: https://g
| ithub.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/graphs/contributors?from...
|
| By that metric, he did half the work. But it still means
| he completely disregards the other half.
| prophesi wrote:
| 56 commits, +273,244, -7,270 LOC
|
| vs
|
| 46 commits, +478, -94 LOC
|
| I think it's safe to say it was mostly him.
| croemer wrote:
| Don't get fooled by LOCs.
|
| Out of the 273k LOC added, all but 20k, that is 253k are
| just from the boilerplate auto-generated copy/paste
| initialization code: https://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/
| commit/e9f0df0d5a221b3c7...
|
| Sure he probably did most of the coding, but it's still
| weird to talk all about I and not mention the other 5 in
| a single word when they _did_ contribute. Maybe they did
| testing or other things that are not reflected in LOC,
| e.g. presentations etc.
| cdurth wrote:
| Not just random biloilerplate/framework code either. A
| framework his dad created. So with this logic his dad did
| the majority of the project.
| croemer wrote:
| His dad? How do you know? One doesn't count React in the
| LOC so why should one count a boilerplate template? As I
| said, LOC are not a good proxy.
|
| Update: I see, LightNap is the work of Ed Kaim, surname
| checks out. https://github.com/SharpLogic/LightNap
| prophesi wrote:
| I see the point of contention now. Though I don't think
| we're being fooled by LOC's. You can check the commits
| from the other contributors, and it's all documentation /
| adding line breaks. It's unfortunately common at
| universities for CS projects to be spearheaded by one
| gungho student with the others only tidying things up for
| in-class presentations.
| croemer wrote:
| It's also not 56 vs 46 commits but 56 vs 63. 46 is the
| second biggest committee but there are 17 more commits
| from the other 4 and my initial point was that it was odd
| for him to not mention the other contributors at all.
| Even if he did the major part, I would never say I
| created something if it was a team effort. He lead.
| craftman210 wrote:
| I'm mostly looking at lines changed -- 273k is a lot more
| than 500. But yeah, there can definitely be shady stuff
| that fudges it.
| croemer wrote:
| Out of the 273k, 253k were boilerplate template in the
| first commit, entirely copy/paste or tool-generated: http
| s://github.com/JDKaim/HuskySwap/commit/e9f0df0d5a221b3c7.
| ..
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| I'm not saying the story is true, but the intro is accurate
| to the story AFAICT. The university is allegedly threatening
| to expel him if he doesn't build them a website for free.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The utter ridiculousness of this should have stopped them. I hope
| this post of yours gets plenty of airtime as blocking a solution
| like this deserves every bit of punishment it gets.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| 1st rule of hacking: don't write your freaking name on it!
| Feltersnatch wrote:
| Attorney here. Get an attorney.
| jjluoma wrote:
| How does the course-swapping site work? Is there some part that
| requires users to enter their credentials (email, password) on a
| web site that is not operated by the university? Is there some
| part that saves an access token or a refresh token in other place
| than the web browser?
|
| Is some OAuth2 authentication flow involved so that the
| university has registered the application and assigned a client
| id and return URI?
|
| I think the university might have valid security concerns if the
| application somehow accesses student accounts without valid
| OAuth2 authorization flow (or equivalent).
|
| Entering login credentials for university on a third-party site
| is probably forbidden by terms of service for the university
| site.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| > _Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for_
|
| That's hardly readable, how could they act like that? I am sad to
| say it but you need the help of a lawyer and the most backup
| you'll get the better. The way they presented the case will never
| get solved in a happy manner. Do not let them get the code and
| the IP. Keep on!
| steakscience wrote:
| There's a reason you wake up at 5:50am to copy paste course codes
| the moment registrations open up!
| PennRobotics wrote:
| Just a thought: maybe replace the MIT license with something more
| strict (such as GPL-3) or even an "only private use" license.
| polotics wrote:
| Amidst all of the talk about the reported coercion attempt, which
| is bad, may I also ask something about the bait and switch: so
| you paid a lot of money to attend a given university and then
| even though your grades and everything else would in theory allow
| you to follow a class you can be blocked because of resource
| constraints that are not advertised as something you would have
| to contend with when you paid the big ticket tuition fee?
| antoinebalaine wrote:
| Isn't this the case in most universities?
| polotics wrote:
| In most of the world once you signed up and got admitted at
| an university it is for a specific program, and the defined
| set of courses for the program you are on is set, some first
| year medical-school lecture-halls can get very crowded and
| even nasty, but you're still in.
| The_suffocated wrote:
| "...find partners to trade spots in critical classes after they
| filled up".
|
| I am not from the USA and I don't understand the context. What
| does "trade spots" mean? Does it mean that if I have registered
| to course A but not course B and my friend have registered to
| course B but not course A, we can swap our registered courses in
| the official registration system?
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I assume it means that at the start of the semester or just
| days before it starts that if class A and B are both full but I
| am enrolled in class A but wanted to drop it and get in class B
| and you are in class B and wanted in class A then we could swap
| enrollments.
| lupire wrote:
| But how? The university threatens students with _expulsion_
| if they do that!
|
| So, why do they allow people to do it, but expell them for...
| publicly discussing it? When the university could just, you
| know, not offer the service!
| The_suffocated wrote:
| Is this swap recognised by the uni administration? I mean,
| after the swap, are you officially enrolled in class B?
| jccalhoun wrote:
| That's that the poster's app would allow. I assume that
| right now it is like a seat on a plane or something: If I
| drop there is an opening and it is first come first serve
| to fill the slot. So there's no way to assure that you get
| my old spot. But the poster's app would allow that.
| croemer wrote:
| How come there was another project team with the same idea? Did
| everyone have the same task? I'm confused:
| https://www.sammybharadwaj.com/huskyswap
| grishka wrote:
| Meanwhile in my Russian university, everyone scraped whatever
| they wanted. As long as you didn't cause any harm or disruption
| to these systems, no one cared.
|
| There were tests you had to take in a special classroom full of
| Sun thin clients. You had to register yourself for some time
| slot(s) to go there. Sometimes you _had_ to go there in like 2
| days to meet a deadline but there were no slots available. So,
| someone made an app that would continuously scrape that page and
| notify you when a slot for your chosen time is available. Saved
| my ass a couple times.
| rcfox wrote:
| Oh hey, I got in trouble at my university for trying to make a
| tool for students too. This was ~15 years ago now...
|
| In my case, they accused me of copyright infringement and trying
| to destroy the co-op program. I made the case that while I was
| reproducing some data from the university's website, none of it
| had creative value and therefore wasn't protected by copyright.
| (I drew a parallel to an actual court case about reproducing
| phone book listings.)
|
| I also reached out to some faculty that I was close to for some
| character references to show that I didn't have malicious intent.
|
| Ultimately, I wasn't expelled or anything too bad. I was required
| to take a business ethics course, which I actually ended up
| enjoying.
|
| Good luck!
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| This does not add up- this is your last term but you've only been
| there a year and a half? The university, who presumably has a
| professional engineering team making these systems is trying to
| blackmail an undergrad to reproduce something for free that they
| also wanted shut down? And you're marketing this on linkedin in
| the context of asking for job offers?
| Spivak wrote:
| Probably a transfer, but lol at professional engineering team.
| Zero chance. The resignation system is probably outsourced to
| at best some edu-tech company and at worst is basically the
| most cursed Sharepoint site that's ever existed.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I'm an academic and my institution does all such things in
| house with a real engineering team in the IT department- as
| well as a UI and visual design team. PIs can also pay them to
| develop sites for their own labs, etc. This is pretty
| standard across half a dozen universities I've worked at.
| buildbot wrote:
| It's all in house, UW IT has multiple floors in a 20+ floor
| building, literally the tallest until very recently in the UW
| neighborhood.
|
| The registration system is probably mostly still the original
| 90s code though, it's very basic, totally custom.
|
| UW CSE actually had its own tech support team, completely
| separate from UW IT, who also write internal software/manage
| the computing systems just for CSE. At least, that used to be
| the case.
| lowercased wrote:
| > Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for
| the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was
| building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were
| clear that I wouldn't be compensated. But it was implied that
| they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
|
| I'm really baffled here because the code Kaim published is itself
| MIT licensed. The university could use it however they see fit
| after his version, and perhaps make a modified version which they
| then incorporate in to their system as the 'official' version.
|
| Perhaps this code being public may expose potential flaws
| (logical, security, etc) which they don't want to have to deal
| with. Or might even be known flaws they don't want to expose.
| buildbot wrote:
| I would be really shocked if that part actually happened. Major
| state universities don't blackmail random students to write
| software for them. They make RFQs and send them to companies.
| There's a software procurement process. 0 chance some person in
| the registrars office is taking this persons code off github
| and deploying it to UW production.
| lowercased wrote:
| Colleagues of mine at a local university often have students
| work on projects that get used by various departments.
| Nothing as big as a registration system, but data reporting
| UIs, data collection forms, etc. Usually paired with a senior
| staff member, it gives the students some hands on experience,
| and helps the dev dept get a bit more done (in theory - in
| practice, not always).
|
| Taking the OP at face value, someone saying "build us a
| version of this" doesn't seem out of the realm of
| possibility, but again... whatever was demoed is already MIT.
| Absolutely no reason the school itself couldn't build on that
| (inhouse or out-sourcing).
| fullofbees wrote:
| It is wild to me that the bulk of responses here seem to take how
| this is being described by the poster at face value.
|
| As well as the question of interfering with registration, he has
| also gone about this in a way that causes reputational damage (&
| UW have probably caused their own, but that's not necessarily
| relevant here), which I cant imagine they'll take that kindly
| either.
|
| But I work in a public university in the EU, so my understanding
| of how these institutions probably operate is likely a little
| skewed.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| Probably pent up rage w.r.t. beurocracy we've all experienced
| in college?
|
| I agree with you that it seems that there might be something
| missing from the story.
|
| The standard response and advice of talking to a lawyer I think
| is still good and stands regardless of how full or truthful the
| OPs account of the situation is.
|
| I don't personally think that most university staff in the US
| are out to get people in this way either, so either there is
| something about the story we are missing, or this is a really
| big deal and this particular university is out of control.
|
| My experience in university in the US was never this dramatic
| and I didn't see actions like this taken (but I also never
| constructed a project of this nature that is directly related
| to the university beurocracy).
|
| In other words, this is kind of weird in a US context too and I
| feel the same weirdness about it that you are probably feeling
| viewing from the EU.
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| UW has had some pretty bad issues (e.g. systems lab abuse
| [1], early-entrance programs [2]). Another program I was in
| had serious issues such as overworking and threatening
| student eligibility, such that almost all the leadership
| involved left for other universities. That was never reported
| more loudly out of fear of retaliation and sheer exhaustion
| of the students. That being said, it is a large university
| with many different actors and most of my experiences here
| have been positive.
|
| [1] https://www.dailyuw.com/news/uw-allen-school-confirms-
| invest...
|
| [2] https://www.dailyuw.com/news/six-students-accuse-
| robinson-ce...
| ecshafer wrote:
| The insanity, authoritarian impulse and incompetence of
| American University admins is very easy to believe for anyone
| who has interacted with them.
| karaterobot wrote:
| How is he interfering with registration? I assumed all he built
| was a place to pair students so that they could exchange
| classes using the university's own system. It seems in
| principle as much of an interference with the university as a
| coupon aggregating website is to grocery stores: efficiently
| spreading information so that people can make better use of the
| existing resources available to them. In his LinkedIn post, he
| mentions trying to get read access to courses, not write
| access.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >It is wild to me that the bulk of responses here seem to take
| how this is being described by the poster at face value.
|
| Because it squared with just about how everyone expects
| universities to behave based on their own experience
| arctortect wrote:
| This is pretty blatant extortion on their part. It reminds me of
| MIT and Aaron Schwartz.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| IMO it should be ranked order and random assignment
| rtkwe wrote:
| Ranked base on what though? The other issue is registration
| doesn't always open for everyone all at once. Often you get
| earlier registration if you're in your final year(s) so you can
| take more specialized classes or fill in general education gaps
| that you might have put off.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I'm so thankful my university (UVA) didn't have these
| registration problems. Granted, I graduated in '99, so they might
| now. But I never had any difficulty getting into required
| classes. At worst, an email to the prof got me a waiver, and
| IIRC, I only had to do that once.
| dylanz wrote:
| Pick up a phone and call a lawyer. If any lawyers have already
| hit you up about this, talk to them.
| zephyreon wrote:
| Student web service in question:
| https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/swagger/index.html
|
| FERPA was probably a big factor in UW's initial response to ask
| that the site be taken down. Institutions are all about CYA now.
|
| The bit about blackmail seems a bit far fetched. I'd like to see
| the correspondence between UW and this individual. The entire
| story is certainly plausible but as other have pointed out, there
| are a number of inconsistencies.
| MattyRad wrote:
| Everyone is saying lawyer up like it's the author's only option,
| but it's not, and likely bad advice. Here's the order of
| operations I would take:
|
| _1. Mea Culpa_
|
| Talk to all of the faculty (dean of students, etc) and do your
| best to get people on your side. You need the petty person on the
| other end to reverse their decision, and having a lot of
| administration on your side, and more importantly, expressing
| (fake) remorse makes it easy for these jobsworth asshole(s) to
| fulfill their God complex. I'm actually convinced that this would
| have the highest probability of success. These Dolores Umbridge
| types adore getting to be the ones issuing mercy to the sinners.
|
| Additionally, informing staff of the expulsion will help bring
| awareness of this abuse, and spread the word and prevent this
| from happening to other students.
|
| While you perform your mea culpa groveling, record everything,
| which can be used as ammo later.
|
| _2. Agree to the (illegal) terms_
|
| Blackmailing you into slave labor is obviously illegal, but no
| terms have been laid out, so I don't see any harm in agreeing to
| them. Best case, they reverse the decision with the expectation
| that you'll do something (which you can then phone in or do a
| token exercise of), and worst case they outline terms which are
| the perfect ammo for negative publicity or a lawsuit.
|
| _3. Transfer schools /credits_
|
| I don't actually know what is involved in transferring schools or
| how expulsion factors in, but the reality is that you are
| effectively already expelled. Try and figure out the feasibility
| of saving what is salvageable at a school that is less
| insufferable.
|
| _4. Negative publicity_
|
| This story is easy to believe, sell, and consume- i.e. perfect
| ragebait. Start emailing every news outlet you can think of. Post
| on all social media. If it gets high enough, and probably not
| even that high, the weight of the negative publicity can easily
| outweigh the narcissists that started this, forcing a reversal.
|
| _5. Seek employment_
|
| If you have any employment cards in your deck, I'd consider
| playing them. If everything else fails, then at least you're
| financially secure and gain experience.
|
| _6. Lawyer_
|
| The combined weight of all of the above will assist a lawsuit,
| even prior to taking any legal steps. Note that all outcomes of a
| lawsuit that aren't "total win" are effectively a loss (of time,
| money, energy, and mental health), so I'd hesitate to take this
| course _at all_.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| No one is suggesting to sue. The suggestion is to get advise
| from a professional, i.e. a lawyer rather to listen to random
| people on the internet. A lawsuit may or may not follow.
| MattyRad wrote:
| That's true, but it's difficult to envision any scenario
| where a lawyer supplies the exact advice needed to trigger a
| reversal outside of threats/suing/arbitration. Maybe if you
| get a good one I guess, but that is a gamble on its own.
|
| A lawyer supplying helpful information like "Ok, this
| expulsion was triggered by the Department of Admin, which is
| overseen by John Smith, who has the power to reverse this
| decision. Schedule a meeting with him or find office hours to
| plead your case. I shouldn't get involved outright because it
| will escalate your situation and be received poorly." is less
| likely than "I can write a threatening letter and we'll see
| where it goes". A hammer hammers.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| It sounds to me like the university is using the threat of
| expulsion to steal or coerce you into giving over your site. I
| think you just got the best IRL education ever.
| croemer wrote:
| His (presumed) dad commented this on LinkedIn:
|
| > I have seen all the emails now and it's as bad as described. I
| thought there might be some hyperbole but the "University
| Registrar and Chief Officer of Enrollment Information Services"
| is clearly saying "work with us to build this for free or you're
| not graduating". They even specify that he needs to set up the
| meeting "well before registration opens on February 13th for
| spring quarter 2025" because they're not going to let him
| continue otherwise.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edkaim_github-jdkaimhuskyswap...
| hooverd wrote:
| I wish they would post the emails. It's all hearsay still.
| croemer wrote:
| Agreed, but at least it's more than one person's
| interpretation that's put their reputation on the line, even
| if it's a family member.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Email text can be easily faked too, there's really no reason
| to weigh them higher than the story other than they can be
| slightly tricky to fake the style and verbiage you might
| expect to see from that type of email.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Raw emails though are potentially verifiable if there's
| say, a DKIM header.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Until they post evidence, legal counsel comments on it, or its
| reported by a news agency its a bit moot. I personally would
| have gone full nuclear and posted all evidence to put pressure
| on the school already by now. If I'm already defacto expelled
| I'd have nothing to lose by putting this on blast.
|
| Its weird that he hasn't posted anything given the retaliation
| he is receiving, hence why its hard to take completely
| seriously.
| jajko wrote:
| Jeez, somebody not going immediately full mental meltdown
| fully public for reason X Y Z should be immediately
| dismissed. You have 0 info about him or his life, so it would
| be wiser to stop passing clueless judgements.
| theWreckluse wrote:
| Looks like brainrot has reached HN too. "0 info about their
| life" is exactly the reason why one cannot be certain about
| their story - neither trust nor mistrust is warrented yet.
| smt88 wrote:
| OP wanted this scrutiny and is using it to advertise
| himself to employers. Any analysis, criticism, or doubt is
| what he asked for. He should "show receipts" (emails at
| least) if he wants people to take his word for it.
| croemer wrote:
| While I agree that by going public on LinkedIn and HN
| scrutiny is fair game, he might still not want the
| scrutiny and/or be surprised by it.
| gota wrote:
| I guess we could chalk up any naive misconception of what
| would/could happen on his part to his inexperience and
| youth - but not his father, a founder with a long career,
| who just "stoked the flames".
|
| At this point - especially considering the overwhelming
| and almost consensus opinion in this thread yesterday -
| if they haven't shut up and talked to a lawyer yet, it
| MUST be a deliberate decision
| digging wrote:
| The only clueless judgment is one that doesn't ask for
| evidence.
| tantalor wrote:
| This is an internet discussion forum; everything is moot.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| "Only a fool would take anything here as fact"
| btilly wrote:
| Not weird at all if lawyers are involved.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| Presumably lawyers are not involved on the UW side, because
| if they were, they'd be freaking out at their client's
| blatantly illegal behavior and telling them to immediately
| unlock registration.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's worth noting that the dad also gave his son a job at his
| company while the kid was still in high school. There's nothing
| inherently wrong with that, but it does show that the father is
| heavily invested in this kid and willing to act affirmatively
| to give him a leg up, which means I personally would not count
| this as additional testimony backing up the story.
|
| The dad's testimony doesn't make it less likely to be true, but
| it's not high quality evidence in favor.
|
| Edit: I'm fine with downvotes, but do everyone a favor and
| explain _why_ you disagree. It 's a bit disheartening that
| every comment that doesn't go full on pitchfork gets squashed
| with no justification other than 'failure to light a torch'. We
| can be better than that.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that the (presumed) father would be heavily
| invested in his kid, regardless of whether or not he gave him
| a job while he was in HS.
|
| Certainly we should look at someone else's (especially a
| relative's) corroboration of the story with some skepticism;
| ideally we could see the emails themselves.
|
| But really, OP should contact a lawyer ASAP.
| lolinder wrote:
| Right, but I do think that the fact that he gave his son a
| job in high school makes his testimony even more unreliable
| than a typical parental relationship. Maybe the kid really
| is that good, but it's more likely that the dad was willing
| to sacrifice a bit of his company's time to support his
| son. That's not a decision that every father would make--
| not even every supportive father--so I think it's relevant
| here.
| croemer wrote:
| Someone else pointed out that the framework OP used in
| the project is the creation of his dad as well:
| https://github.com/SharpLogic/LightNap
| alexjplant wrote:
| > Maybe the kid really is that good, but it's more likely
| that the dad was willing to sacrifice a bit of his
| company's time to support his son.
|
| I haven't looked to see what position the son has at his
| father's business or the nature of the business itself so
| I can't comment on specifics. I will say, however, that
| it isn't uncommon for parents to employ their kids under
| the table for below market wage commensurate with their
| lack of experience. If a job gets half done for a quarter
| of the cost (no taxes, benefits, etc) then for many
| people it's a win, not to mention that the
| employer/parent has a captive employee and the
| employee/kid has early job history and walking around
| money.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's also not uncommon for many parents to employ their
| kids over the table at exactly or above market rate and
| let the kid develop experience and get paid at the
| expense of the parent's other employees. This is legal in
| most cases, but that doesn't mean that every parent would
| do it--I personally would steer well clear of this kind
| of arrangement to avoid even the appearance of nepotism.
|
| With either type of arrangement, I think it does tell you
| something about the parent-child relationship, which in
| turn does influence how you should take the parent's
| testimony.
| mrmanner wrote:
| > at the expense of the parent's other employees
|
| rather at the expense of the business owners, which may
| well be the parent themselves? (ok fine the other
| employees could have equity in the business, but other
| than that)
| lolinder wrote:
| I've been at companies where the owner prioritized their
| family over the business and the other employees. It's a
| sucky place to work.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Sucky, sure, but entirely within the moral and legal
| rights of the owners to do so.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Seems like a normal and expected parental relationship to
| me. I would be suspect of the fathers that didn't do so.
| encoderer wrote:
| You're being downvoted for poor critical thinking in this
| case, which led you to write a comment that doesn't add to
| the conversation.
|
| Of _course_ the father is "heavily invested" in his son. That
| comes from _decades_ of raising him, diapers, dinners,
| driving and him around, and probably also sharing 50% of his
| genes.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's less a lack of critical thinking and more an
| overabundance of cautious wording to avoid unnecessary
| offense.
|
| I'm suggesting that this father may have engaged in
| nepotism once before, which makes me question his
| integrity. Not every father does that, so it's more
| relevant than just "of course, it's the dad".
|
| I phrased it cautiously because I don't know the full
| story, but the pieces are there and I think it's worth
| pointing them out.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think people are also reacting to presumption that
| hiring ones son is a negative mark on integrity or
| honestly. Many (most?) people don't draw that as a
| logical conclusion.
| digging wrote:
| What does `this` refer to in your comment? If "hiring his
| son," I don't think anybody is indicating that it is a
| mark of integrity or honesty.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Thanks, I edited to clear that up. Yes, I meant hiring
| his son. I think loliander was explicitly claiming that
| it impacts their honesty and credibility.
|
| >I'm suggesting that this father may have engaged in
| nepotism once before, which makes me question his
| integrity.
| digging wrote:
| Oh, then I misunderstood that too, yes. I read "mark of
| integrity" as being a strictly positive thing. Your edit
| looks good though.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Helping your own son in life is not nepotism, nor does it
| indicate a possible lack of integrity.
| digging wrote:
| It's absolutely a mistake and a lack of critical thinking
| to believe that _any given_ father would go out of his way
| and put his own reputation at risk for his son. Some would.
| I don 't know if it's even a majority. But plenty of
| fathers would not, even if they're present in their son's
| life.
|
| Edited for clarity.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| > a favor and explain why you disagree
|
| Unrealistic request. 95% of the point of downvoting is to
| give people the option to do their bit to bury things that
| they can't logically refute or easily debunk or whatever. The
| other 5% is spam/troll mitigation.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| I didn't downvote you, but only because I can't downvote.
|
| This comment is so out of touch with human family norms and
| morals that I do think it detracts from the overall
| discussion.
|
| Totally fine to say "uh guys, it's the kid's dad, not exactly
| an unbiased party", but to suggest that a father using his
| resources to raise his son is an indication of a lack of
| integrity shows that you have a poor or distorted grasp on
| how the human world works (and _should_ work).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It is hard to take the student's post as anything but feigned
| innocence at how this solution could be viewed as registration
| tampering & abuse. I can imagine ignorance before the school
| reacted, but failing to grasp their position after receiving a
| expulsion threat shows either a major deficit of cognitive
| empathy or dishonesty.
|
| This makes me skeptical of any follow-on claims or discussion.
| atoav wrote:
| I am working at a German University on similar systems. I have
| some thoughts here:
|
| 1. The thing you are doing, could provide major value to the
| university and you did it for free.
|
| 2. The fact that you could simply just access that data is a
| _major_ fuckup on their part that is inexcusable. In my eyes the
| perdon who walks through an open door is not at fault, the one
| who left it open is.
|
| If they expell you for that, they do not deserve you.
|
| The first quesrion you should figure out is on whose feet you
| stepped and why they are butthurt. Simultaneously try to get
| legal advice and the social/political support of your collegues.
| If you have a big number of students complaining to the higher
| ups why your cool service is gone and give them the feeling it is
| needed, you might even get a cool collab out of that.
|
| Without knowing the details of how US academia operates I would
| try to maintain a positive angle (you want to help making the
| university life better), while in privage preparing for the
| worst.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Don't trust UW. They have a history of retaliating against
| students when complaints are raised. When faculty misbehave they
| cover it up and take it out on the student to silence them.
| ofslidingfeet wrote:
| Par for the course in the prissiest, most Karen city culture in
| the entire country. Seriously, living in King County is like
| living in a giant HOA neighborhood.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I'd like to see the email where they demand you work for free!
| Lawyer up of this is the case.
| uwthrowaway wrote:
| The following has been added to the "Tampering and Abuse" section
| of the UW Registrar's Policies & Procedures page in the last day:
|
| > Additionally, the creation of any service that enables any of
| the above behaviors is strictly forbidden and constitutes a
| violation of this policy.
|
| Worth noting that the administrative code is probably more
| important, here's some relevant sections:
|
| WAC Aiding, assisting, and attempting:
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/WAC/default.aspx?cite=478-121-113
|
| WAC Computer abuses:
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/WAC/default.aspx?cite=478-121-117
|
| Registrar before:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20241208123609/https://registrar...
|
| Registrar after:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250109203004/https://registrar...
| greenchair wrote:
| some people have to learn the hard way. at least he didn't go to
| jail!
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(page generated 2025-01-09 23:01 UTC)