It's a bit more and less than that. Console sessions run in what amounts to a VPS (it's a bit lighter-weight than that so that we can keep the costs down) but your web apps run in chrooted subprocesses of an Apache server as a limited-privileges Linux user. So, in theory your own web app should be just as capable of staying up through an HN storm as our own server. In practise... we're still polishing the security code, so it's possible to configure your web app framework so that it uses enough threads that our per-user resource limitations kick in and stop it from running.
A shorter answer -- we want our users web apps to have no problem handling spikes in usage, but might not quite be there yet.
A shorter answer -- we want our users web apps to have no problem handling spikes in usage, but might not quite be there yet.
And yes, we have scipy -- there's a list of all of the packages we support here: http://www.pythonanywhere.com/batteries_included/