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by luso_brazilian 3108 days ago
It is unfortunate that the course can't be taken anonymously and requires either a github login or an email and password. I understand the general motivation for that (a quid pro quo, an exchange of a bit of information for a valuable resource) but even then it is a disappointing trend to require personal identification for such type of valuable resources.
3 comments

We've spent over a year building this product and about a month creating the content. Now we're giving it all away for free. I think it's fair that we ask people to authenticate.

But of course, feel free to disagree.

I was going to check this out, but couldn't find a privacy policy or other statement re what you might do with harvested email addresses. https://github.com/scrimba/community/blob/master/TERMS.md seemed like the obvious place to look. I'm not remotely anticipating anything malign, but clarity of intent is important.
One nit: I like listening to tutorials at more than 1x playback speed, and I was overjoyed that you added the feature but it’s not persisted between videos which is a bit annoying. But other than that This product is amazing!
Thanks for the feedback. I've filed an issue here: https://github.com/scrimba/community/issues/188. Will try to implement next week!
Gives away hundreds of dollars in value in exchange for an email address, any email address.

HN complains.

It's a potentially reasonable quid pro quo, but it would obviously be reckless to sign in to scrimba without any information on what they plan to do with the collected information. I'm looking forward to seeing what the platform can do once they have published relevant disclosures.
Can't you just create an anonymous GitHub account or a throwaway email address?
inboxalias.com usually works