I'm extremely envious (in a good way) that Aaron and David were friends since grades school and were at the same time brilliant people at similar calibers, and went to the same college and studied programming together! Having a friend like that is better than winning the lottery.

Ladies and gentlemen, the submarine in action. How many media hits are we going to have for AppJet?

AppJet does seem pretty cool though. I wonder what happens if your app really takes off though? AppJet will own you.

Appjet doesn't have a PR firm, and neither does YC.

In a way, YC is a PR firm and Hacker News is its primary outlet.

A minor nit. The 6.270 content is only partly a programming contest: the contest has students design, build and program LEGO based robots.

Way cooler than just programming.

As a bonus it is organized and run entirely by students.

I took the class in '93 and helped teach it a couple of years after that; it was a fantastic experience from both sides.

Maybe she meant 6.370 (http://battlecode.mit.edu/2008/)?

You're totally right. A little Googling would have filled me in.

I was just excited to see 6.270 up in lights!

Yes, my typo. It was the 6.370 contest.

Is that PG in the background of that picture?

So it seems...

Wow! Judging by those credentials, maybe VCs are the easier route to funding for hackers! Very impressive team and product.

With SimpleDB (combined with EC2), building and scaling a service like AppJet just got a whole lot easier.