rasmusrygaard

Looks like the answer is no:

"For now, Snapcash is available to Snapchatters in the United States who have a debit card and are 18 or older."

It was available and I think I managed to get one. I have yet to receive an email confirmation, but it shows up in my list of past purchases from Play. I bought it around 8:40 PST.

Which phone do you have? I suspect this could be disabled on older iPhones. I have a 4 and I don't get any voice feedback.

Not quite as important, but it seems that Caps Lock isn't being registered either (did the Rails demo and some of the constants would be rather tedious with only the shift key).

It would be great if everybody saw code as a utility belt, but I imagine that it would be unrealistic to expect people to develop those skills. When I think about what kinds of tools I use in, say, home DIY projects, I tend to have a decent understanding of a narrow part of the field but not a lot of knowledge about the area in general. I know how to change a light bulb or a fuse or fix a power strip, for instance, but I don't claim to know much about circuits in general.

I think this post touches on an interesting point about web development (might apply to other areas too, but the web seems particularly bad). A lot of things appear to be easy (Rails, Django, Heroku, AWS, JQuery etc.), but the number of different components you need to manage is still overwhelming. Furthermore, you often end up having to develop a low-level understanding of problems that someone else claimed to have solved for you. While this low-level knowledge is useful, it does add significant amounts of complexity for beginners and people who might not be committed as the hardcore full timers out there.

As we seem to push more and more for the "everybody should learn how to code" mindset, I think there is a big opportunity for someone out there to combined managed and protected environments with the ability to write your own code. I don't know if the solution is unifying languages across front and back end or a better set of abstractions, but I see way too many obstacles for 'simple' coding (although the situation today is without a doubt better than ever), and I imagine this is some of what the author of this post ran into.

Parent is referencing the Twitter blog post about changes in Version 1.1 of the API which stirred some controversy because of the new rules and limitations for 3rd party developers. See the link below:

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

I don't know of any similar limitations for Bootstrap, so you can probably safely assume that wickedchicken is kidding.

I'm a current student, and I believe that a major reason behind the skyrocketing enrollments in CS is that the introductory classes are immensely popular and well-organized (disclosure: I TA a couple of those classes). There seems to be an idea in a lot of the other engineering departments that you have to suffer through the introductory classes in order to get to the interesting topics. The Stanford CS classes give people interesting challenges while covering a lot of the basics of CS. Of course there's still a long way to go after that, but it's a start. The second half of the introductory series is pretty rigorous, too, and I've seen at least a handful of interview questions I've been asked pop up in that class.

I don't know how many people were inspired by the iOS class, but it doesn't seem to be super popular on campus. I do know a fair amount of people (myself included) who had never programmed before Stanford and were simply motivated to keep going after the introductory sequence. There's definitely a snowball effect, but it wouldn't happen without a great curriculum.

Wasn't that Instapaper? http://www.marco.org/2011/12/07/standing-up-for-android

Be sure to click through the slides. The blog post may not be overwhelmingly useful, but the presentation has plenty of helpful examples of interface copywriting done right (and wrong, too).

I think the main difference between the two is that entrepreneurs have a viable alternative in working for an established company (if we can forget about the lack of jobs for a minute). Yes, musicians can work day jobs too, but there are hardly as many openings for professional musicians as there are for professional programmers. The startup analogy is valid, but for recording artists, taking the leap is often in direct conflict with whatever pays the bills.

I can see why you would argue that you need early exposure to become a programming prodigy, but I honestly don't see why you would say that all hope of becoming a "good" programmer is lot by the time you're in your early/mid/late teens (or at any other age for that matter). I always saw programming as a meritocratic field where motivation and determination got you a long way as long as your code stood the distance. As a CS college student, I see a fair amount of people who have been coding for years being blown out of the water by people who hardly programmed before college. They might not be prodigies, sure, but saying that they'll never become serious programmers is a pretty narrow-minded statement.

108 is not actually part of the core. The third required systems class is CS110, Principles of Computer Systems, which is also taught in C.