If you read the article the author does quote the US embassy in Japan strictly advising against this and that you risk arrest and deportation, that immigration officials do crack down on digital nomads, especially re-entering Japan to renew 90 day tourist visas to work.
A lot of countries have laws against working remotely without a visa, although apart from the US few actively enforce them.
Seems like the restriction would only make sense in the context of working for a Japanese company. Similar to US visas for visitors where the traveler cannot visit the US for work purposes with a US-based employer.
Otherwise, opening a work laptop and answering some work emails for your foreign employer would be risky.
The difference is that Google had a clear unique value proposition that was to provide search results (and only search results) back extremely quickly and were highly relevant when they other players were focused on creating "web portals" and did not focus attention on search.
With CodeCombat and Codeacademy there UVP is very obvious (make learning to code a game and teach to code online resp.) and had not previously been done. With this site I don't understand what the UVP is (social programming challenges?) that hasn't been already by something like TopCoder, Sphere Online Judge, etc.
"Achieve mastery through challenge" is the tagline. The idea here is to push yourself to solve problems you may have not attempted before, and to learn from others by seeing how they solved theirs. I've have personally learned a lot from seeing how other people solve problems, I even learned a lot from creative uses of solving "Hello World" which was a bit of a surprise.
In short: Codecademy is meant for those who want to learn programming. Codewars is for existing programmers who want to get better at programming.
For every person who gets attention to their case on the internet, there's a thousand suffering with no attention. You think this is the only guy who didn't get his coins?
Makes sense if you are aiming to disappear in the crowd. Just get hired because you learned the right language, not because you are good at your job, not because you are productive.
Yes, because everyone who learns .Net is a a no good unproductive drone who will disappear while every node.js/scala/weeklyhiplanguage dev is a superproductive genius.
OK sorry let me put it another way ... the larger library is meant to run on PHP and Node.js, and the Q.js and front end part is just the SDK to use it on a web browser. So when the whole thing is released, it will mostly be a PHP+Node.JS+Web library.
A lot of countries have laws against working remotely without a visa, although apart from the US few actively enforce them.