So I noticed a few things as I looked around:

- When I first hit the linked blog post, I saw a blank page for four or five seconds. Not so bad, because I know what's happening, but jarring.

- Then I see a footer for five or six more seconds, with no page content. Again, I know what's happening, but I can see that looking sketchy for people who aren't developers: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d1mezohgixlneeu/Screenshot%202013-... - and it's going to be worse on a slower connection.

- I see that same view on several different pages when I initially navigate to them.

- Hitting the home page occasionally freaks the browser out. I don't know what it's doing, but I get multiple animations of the main banner and some flickering etc.

I may have been a bit dismissive - sorry about that. I do get that "dogfooding" a tech stack as it were is pretty important. What Meteor's going to be good for though is highly-interactive, collaborative apps, and it'll be really nice to see some demos of that, rather than yet-another-could-be-static site.

No, I love the insight! Thanks for replying with all this, we will take a look at these things. We've built 15 production apps and we are still learning every day.

Try loading any Meteor-based site (such as the linked story, or http://www.meteor.com/ itself) with cookies disabled on Chrome or Firefox and watch them break.

(Meteor doesn't appear to trap exceptions when using localStorage/sessionStorage, and even something as simple as "if (window.sessionStorage) ..." may throw an exception.)

One thing I noticed: The live count of how many people are reading this post is cool. However, every time it updates, it makes the author's picture flash, which started to give me a headache.

curious what browser you're using?

I do too. Chrome 30 on Ubuntu. Can't/Couldn't figure out if it was intentional (to attract my attention to the user presence count) or a glitch.

Chrome 30 on OSX Lion

hmm - i don't see the author picture flash - i'm chrome 31 on osx mavericks but i don't see how that'd be very different :(

Fair enough, maybe it only affects a small number of people. Still, if there's an easy to spot solution (like if the photo and counter are in the same <div> or something) it'd definitely be worth checking out. Especially if you plan on using that feature in the future.

And for the record, I really dug that feature. I often wonder exactly how valuable HN exposure is, it was nice to see a real metric.