Jesse from CoinList & Protocol Labs here -- completely agree that following securities regulation is an especially great idea. Unfortunately doing that correctly can be really challenging. Despite several misleading doom-and-gloom articles written today (http://fortune.com/2017/07/25/sec-says-digital-tokens-are-se...) the SEC has not said that all tokens are securities. Rather, application tokens are a promising new technology that enable all kinds of use-cases, each one unique from the next, and each having a unique 'regulation profile'. It would be very short-sighted to apply broad sweeping legislation and with this ruling, it's clear that the SEC also feels the same.
Just like mifeng mentioned, it really is a facts and circumstances determination per token. Given we had to build all of the token sale scaffolding (legal, tech, etc.) for Filecoin, it made sense to open this up to other technologists as well. Our hope with CoinList is that creators can focus on building awesome tech and expanding the valuable uses for application tokens while reducing the amount of time and resource they need to spend making sure they stay within the parameters of the law.
Filecoin may be limited to accredited investors for this particular sale, but that's not to say other tokens that use the platform in the future would be required to do the same. Ultimately the decision is up to the creators, but they should be very well educated on the implications of what those choices could mean.
So I see CoinList uses AngelList, which I think verifies accreditation via financial accounts.
From what I've read, the SEC doesn't mandate any particular method to verify net worth. In this space, wouldn't it make sense to accept a signature proving ownership of a large ETH balance?
How? On angel.co's accreditation form I only see a place to upload a single file containing one bank/brokerage statement. It says nothing about cryptographic proof of ownership, or even about providing multiple documents.
Another anecdote on the power of community college:
Back in 2009 I enrolled at Community College of San Francisco. I was 19 and had no idea what I wanted to do career wise, so I took broad and rigorous curriculum focused on transferring to UC-Berkeley.
The 2 years I spent there were some of the best of my life. I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects (a few even had Ph.D.s). I grew a passion for learning Spanish (a subject that I had found painful in high school) among many others and got involved with several extracurricular groups. By my second year I was an elected student government senator and president of the business club. I was amazed by all the school had to offer hungry students and I took advantage of every opportunity. Not to mention I met some of my closet friends in life geeking out in study groups.
When it came time to apply to 4 year universities (fall and spring of my second and final year) I decided to apply to Stanford in addition to my originally intended UC-Berkeley. Just a few months later I was shocked to accept Stanford’s offer of transfer admission to complete my undergraduate degree. Going to a place like Stanford would have been unthinkable for me just a few years earlier in high school, back then I had pretty average grades (around a 3.4) and mediocre test scores. Community college let me re-invent myself as a student and start with a completely fresh slate.
When I got into Stanford I eventually started to focus in on a major and skill-set, taking a ton of CS classes in the process. While I hadn’t studied CS in community college (although I think they do offer it), I strongly feel the high level of general curriculum I took prepared me to major in nearly anything I would have liked at Stanford. I now work as a full-time software engineer, something I had no knowledge of whatsoever when I first started community college.
No doubt my admission to Stanford is an outlier for community college students (only a tiny percentage are admitted), however a ton of very intelligent and eager students transfer to 4 year universities every year, including several of my close friends. They have now entered the workforce and are highly contributing members to society and the tax-base.
I could go on forever about the benefits of community college (and in some ways how certain things were better than at a place like Stanford), however the short of it is that indeed, I also owe it all to community college, too.
Not all community colleges are the same. If you live in close proximity to universities with high academic standards, most of the professors are going to be recent graduates of those programs, or educators picking up extra cash and some experience teaching at CC.
BFE Community College will not have the same level of academic excellence.
Yeah, while I think community college is great, the one I attended (GCC, in AZ) basically felt like high school all over again. Horrible professors, worse students, boring (and ridiculously easy) material; I hated it so much that I ditched college for two years before deciding to go back to school at a university. As soon as I was taking university classes I started to wonder why I hadn't just started at a university to begin with. It's good to hear there's community colleges out there that emit the same level of passion in students/professors though.
I took a couple math courses (discrete math and differential equations, I think) at GCC and MCC while attending ASU for Computer Engineering, and I thought the CC professors were more helpful and more passionate about teaching undergrads than the profs at ASU. In my experience the university professors were more worried about their own projects and acted like teaching 20 year olds was above them.
As far as the material goes, the curriculum of the classes I took was nearly identical to the ones at ASU. The diffeq course actually had a higher workload than the ASU version. It's interesting that CC/university experiences differ so much even among students of the same school.
Even within the same school, there are different professors of differing quality. I remember when I was choosing my courses for the next semester during university, I'd always check ratemyprofessor.com before making a final decision on a course.
Location, location, location, to borrow it from real estate market. In places like Bay Area, there is a surplus of excellent talents competing for academic positions. If one can't get one in Standard, Cal, UCDavis, USF, etc, they will fight for the positions in the community colleges. So it is not uncommon to meet excellent professors in community colleges in such places. I know a few who taught in community colleges in Bay Area and eventually got positions in 4-year universities in Midwest. I bet they wouldn't hesitate to come back if they can get a position here.
It could be quite a different story in other places. I lived in a small town in the Midwest before. It has a big university, which one might think would provide some good staffs to the local community colleges. The reality was it was pretty bad. The only students who were interested in learning were middle-aged, who took the classes more for leisure. The teachers were aloof, most of whom were not qualified in teaching in a college, IMHO.
Agreed -- little doubt that the Bay Area attracts teaching talent that colleges in less desirable areas aren't able to. That said, I feel strongly in the potential for community colleges nation wide to raise their standards and become places of first choice for citizens not entirely set on an expensive 4 year university with questionable value.
To be fair not all universities are the same either. A university may have a great engineering program but have terrible liberal arts professors. Why pay thousands for an English class where you learn to write a basic five paragraph essay (which you should have learned in highschool), when you can pay a few hundred instead.
Yes when I attended CC some of my instructors taught during the day at a private university that is ranked very high. One would always joke about how we were getting the same education as the students at the private school but for a third of the price since it was the same curriculum he taught there.
Yes I had to update my linkedin to try and make it clear it was Bedford Colledge (a FE college) and not the University of Bedfordshire where I went to do my Mech Eng Btech.
Bedfordshire University is regularly last in the UK legue tables on Universities.
I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects
I'm paying $47,336 to go to a private institution and wish this was true. Internal politics and tenure have ensured friends of department chairs have gotten the jobs irregardless of teaching ability, skill, research, knowledge in the subject area..
I live in a post-colonial country where English is the official language but 90% of the population have another language as their mother-tongue.
There is therefore a lot of "broken" english spoken, and I guess I'm just used to correcting people (and being corrected myself).
Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it.
Language adapts and therefore English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I'd prefer if the opposite were true.
A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.
Instead we have nonsense like Biweekly, which may refer to an event that occurs either twice weekly or once every two weeks. Why should it mean the latter when we have fortnightly for that?
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Anyway, I like to correct people (in as polite a manner as possible) because I like being corrected myself.
A statement in a programming language means the same regardless of the education-level, ethnicity, or social status of the reader. I wish the same were true for English.
That would make English very boring and dry. What of poetry and evocative prose? Natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes, despite their similarities.
Natural languages, since their inception, have been subjective reflections of people, emotions, cultures, points in time. What you wish for isn't even possible, due to the fact that different people will always have the potential to interpret things differently, based on their genetic predispositions and life experiences.
If we tried to make languages more prescriptive, we wouldn't end up with some golden era where everybody communicates amazingly with each other, it would be more like 1984 where the potential for creativity and emotional expressivity has been largely diminished.
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Edit: I do understand the point, and of course I try to use words "properly" most of the time. There is a difference between inventing new constructs and usages in order to express something, and just simply being "wrong." E.g. mixing up "your" and "you're" is a pretty cut-and-dried error. But, at the end of the day, all the rules are totally subjectively made up, and their only true purpose is to make it easier for people to understand each other, so if you can accomplish that, the rules don't actually matter.
I think we agree with each other. Words like "ain't" entering the common lexicon (usually in spoken english) is fine by me ie. Words formed out of contractions of other words/phrases, or entirely new inventions.
What I mostly get riled up about are words or phrases that are just plain wrong, but that have been used so widely that some dictionaries have accepted them as correct.
"Enormity" is one of those words. It used to be strictly "horrible," conveying a sense of wickedness, and to use it as a synonym for "enormousness" was glaringly wrong. But the mistake was so common, even among journalists and writers, that that it has gained acceptance in at least one English dictionary.
OTOH, were it not for bad Latin speakers, we wouldn't have the Romance languages. A John Simon/William Safire of the era is an important source of data on their development--he wrote a list of proper Latin terms and the corresponding words in the bad Latin he was seeing and/or hearing. Dang it, it's not caballus, it's equus!
So you're saying that when I correct someone publicly, I'm not being an insufferable pedant, I'm contemporaneously documenting usage for future linguists!
Ooh, I'm gonna get so much mileage out of that one.
While it has meant both every two weeks and twice a week for a long time, this is an interesting case where convincing people otherwise would pretty clearly improve our language. Even the page you linked to implies this:
> The ambiguous usage is confusing, and might be avoided by the use of semi-
"Irregardless is one of those words that is becoming OK to say just because so many people use it."
...literally describes our ENTIRE language. It's kinda what language is... I know "kinda" isn't officially a word yet but I like it and I'm guessing you know my intended meaning.
As a non-native speaker, I like when people correct me; it makes me sad to see them downvoted. On the other hand, it could be argued that since I already write well enough to be understood, I should disregard further improvements, but I just can't agree with that.
"Irregardless" isn't ambiguous, either. Everyone knows what it means. The debate is over whether it should be in the language, in a moral sense, which is different.
No, everyone doesn't 'know what it means', not without additional mental parsing. Myself, among many others, read it first as a double-negative, then have to double-take it and reinterpret it. Irrespective, irreducable, irrecoverable, irreconcilable, irrelevant, irreligious, irrefutable - irregardless stands out like a sore thumb.
Or should I say 'irreinterpret it'? After all, you would 'know what I meant' if I wrote that.
Ambiguity is fine if you're writing for poetic effect, but if you're trying to get a point across, it should be minimised.
Wait, are you really sYing that when you see "irregardless" that your first response is not "that's an error and they mean regardless[1]" but "they mean regardless but negated so regard but that doesn't make sense so they actually mean regardless"?
Yet astonishingly you are one of the people who knew what it meant.
Also, most English dialects don't strictly follow double-negation rules. I know this drives non-native speakers crazy, but you'll get over it with enough practice.
I recently took some classes at city college in SF as well. One of my professors teaches the same class at Stanford and said he doesn't water the curriculum down for the CC class.
I agree with others that this has a lot to do with location.
The classes I took were as rigorous as any other non-community college I've attended outside the bay area.
CCSF is an excellent community college. One of the best in the country. Too bad it's mired in political fight over state accreditation and students are scared away.
Uber has an API, but I looked into Uber's TOU a week a two ago and they explicitly disallowed this sort of thing (comparison shopping). Maybe it's just an estimate?
This is probably just violating the TOU. As a consumer, I think lack of comparison shopping is absolutely the worst thing about lyft/uber, and that they should be required to publish pricing data in a manner accessible to this sort of thing, just like taxis are required to use certified meters and post rates on their doors.
Wow, had no idea it wasn't customary to pay interns. That makes me wonder if I could get a job with someone doing a temporary contract for summer? Would that be unheard of?
The whole concept of interns in Sweden is different compared to the US. Here you intern while you study or even as a part of your education. There are a few smaller startups that are looking for interns sometimes. Most likely unpaid though.
Temporary contracts are more common. I'm currently on a 4 month contract at a huge telecom company.
My suggestion would be to just google whatever you want to work with and add Stockholm to the search. Most companies here have some kind of English homepage. If not - look for; Lediga jobb, Lediga tjänster, Karriär, Jobba hos oss.
Those are probably the most common ways of saying "Work with us" or "Available positions". After that you just look for job ads with words or programming languages you recognize.
Just like mifeng mentioned, it really is a facts and circumstances determination per token. Given we had to build all of the token sale scaffolding (legal, tech, etc.) for Filecoin, it made sense to open this up to other technologists as well. Our hope with CoinList is that creators can focus on building awesome tech and expanding the valuable uses for application tokens while reducing the amount of time and resource they need to spend making sure they stay within the parameters of the law. Filecoin may be limited to accredited investors for this particular sale, but that's not to say other tokens that use the platform in the future would be required to do the same. Ultimately the decision is up to the creators, but they should be very well educated on the implications of what those choices could mean.