I got hired for a summer internship off of hackernews. The total time from my response to a job offer was about two weeks. We're serious and we have some very intriguing problems to solve related to how to scale existing systems with custom database backends (Not just mongo or mysql or riak) to higher levels of performance.

It is. Heroku.com is down.

  % host devcenter.heroku.com                                                                                                                                                                          
  devcenter.heroku.com is an alias for iwate-88.herokussl.com.
  iwate-88.herokussl.com is an alias for elb002001-124710749.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
  elb002001-124710749.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com has address 107.20.144.56
  elb002001-124710749.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com has address 23.21.215.77
  elb002001-124710749.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com has address 107.21.227.222

It's 100% on Heroku, it's just also using the ssl:hostname add-on (https://addons.heroku.com/ssl) which requires different DNS settings (http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ssl#hostname_based_ssl).

return ''.join(`num` for num in xrange(loop_count))

is better than

return ''.join([`num` for num in xrange(loop_count)])

The latter will allocate all of the integers and then free them as they're joined. The former will allocate one integer, then add it to the string and free it, then allocate another integer.