dylanvee

Until Letterpress I had no use for Game Center at all, but I just used its auto-matching to start two engaging rounds with strangers. Fun game.

What kind of magic expression is that?

That's a really good idea, thank you.

Yes, perhaps.

Thanks! The server is in EC2's Oregon region, so it'll be laggy if you're very far from there. Didn't stop you from beating me though...

And you don't have to type in the username, you can click the button and it should open a new SSH session for you.

Today I'm launching a little side project of mine. I'm striving for a sublimely simple user experience with this one: log in with your GitHub account and with one click you can launch a terminal window and instantly get matched up with another hacker for a head-to-head game. Thanks to the magic of SSH, you don't have to install a thing. It's pretty fun and feels social like IRC, not social like a Facebook Timeline-enabled Flash game.

I hope you have as much fun using Gitris as I did developing it, and I'd love your feedback.

Actually, SSE is a better fit here: it works in many more browsers than WebSockets when you count the existence of SSE polyfills, and you don't need the bidirectionality of WebSockets here.

This was my first real encounter with BrowserID, and I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the experience was.

Have you checked out http://khanacademy.org/cs?

We also use Hive on Amazon Elastic MapReduce to do some of our analytics.

App Engine handles many hundreds of requests per second for us, and as Jamie mentioned, big spikes like the CS launch are no sweat.

+1 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4404568

Whether or not you use it, it's all about understanding the tradeoffs you're making. It's worked out for us :)

If you want more from us about GAE, our lead developer Ben Kamens' blog is full of good stuff: http://bjk5.com

I'm a summer intern at Khan Academy working on various App Engine projects. My uneducated guess is that we're one of the platform's bigger customers.

One of GAE's biggest downsides is lack of control: unlike EC2 where you get to mold vanilla Linux installations to suit your needs, your application must fit GAE's service model through and through. But by giving up some of those freedoms you receive a whole lot of awesome in return. Khan Academy has successfully leveraged App Engine to scale to millions of users without hiring a single sysadmin or spending too much time worrying about anything ops-related. We're able to handle traffic spikes like our 60 Minutes appearance and the launch of our new computer science curriculum (http://khanacademy.org/cs) with no sweat. To deploy the site, any developer (or our friendly CI bot) can simply run our "deploy.py" and wait a few minutes, then get back to spending time on the product. We haven't had to think once about whether or not the database can handle the write load we throw at it; the App Engine Datastore is uniquely worry-free in that regard. (Well, I'm sure Google SREs worry about it plenty, but we don't have to.)

The GAE platform is a moving target, which is a Very Good Thing because it demonstrates Google's investment in the product and indicates that the App Engine team truly understands developer pain points and is working to solve them. I'll point to backends and Guido van Rossum's work on the NDB datastore interface as features that give GAE developers a little more freedom to use the platform in the most efficient way possible. If you're going to complain about lock-in, you might as well go all the way and take advantage of everything you get in return. You might find that it's not worth your time to replicate all of that elsewhere, especially when doing so on top of an IaaS provider like AWS introduces its own set of inefficiencies and points of failure.

P.S.: If you'd like to come work with great people on great stuff without worrying about keeping the site up, we're hiring: http://khanacademy.org/careers

Definitely pie. On Tau Day the Khan Academy office was graced with a wonderful tau (two pie).

What a beautiful moment. That team has a lot to be proud of.

I'm happy to see that many occurrences of the word "native."

AirPlay mirroring relies on Intel Quick Sync Video support in your CPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

Chrome Web Store link: http://bit.ly/khanpedia GitHub repository: http://github.com/dylanvee/Khanpedia

KA intern here. I made this extension during Khan Academy's first ever Healthy Hackathon. It's an unofficial project, but it's a fun way to discover new videos and exercises.

In case Heroku needs names for future stacks (Aspen, Bamboo, Cedar...), here are building names from the De Neve housing complex at UCLA:

(Acacia) (Birch) (Cedar) Dogwood Evergreen Fir Gardenia Holly

How interesting: I installed and launched the app expecting to see the standard "Log in with Facebook" screen, but instead there's a big button that says "Continue as [my name]" (and a smaller one, "Not you?"). I wonder how exactly they're doing this, and if it will make its way into 3rd-party apps. It made the first launch experience quite seamless.

Unfortunately I've been running into a bug with lxc-execute (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lxc/+bug/986956) that prevents it from "just working" with interactive programs such as bash or python.

I believe the only remaining hurdle for full isolation is user namespacing, which is slated to be implemented by the next LTS release.

I applied to a bunch of software engineering internships last fall and was amazed by the variation from company to company in terms of how I was dealt with as an intern candidate.

Half Maltese here too!

As a hacker, sure, I'd rather not have this potentially spam my wall with posts. But as a college student living with other college students, it's the perfect choice. This could prove to be really useful, I'm looking forward to trying it.

Excellently put! I've spent so many nights holed up in the library, staring at a dozen lines of some esoteric programming language and cursing UCLA Engineering, but it all turned out to be incredibly valuable and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Dr. Eggert is a lecturer at UCLA, and a fantastic one at that (not to mention a huge contributor to various GNU projects). This quarter I have the pleasure of taking his Operating Systems class, and last year I got to take Programming Languages taught by him. I'm really happy about this outcome because people like him should never have to have their brilliance tempered by patent trolls.

Could you filter internships too?

I was contacted by GitHire regarding a Lead Python Developer opportunity. My GitHire stats estimate that I'm in the top 5% of Githubbers (whatever that means). I'm flattered, but as a college student with just a few years of work experience under my belt, I can't imagine being in the top 5%.