I would be interested to hear what you think the pain points may be. In truth I just started this up on a whim and didn't look into things too closely.

Biggest issue is basically that meteor has an ecosystem of dependencies that need their source code modified to work with Meteor, Meteor also relies entirely on global variables and a number of other uglies.

I have been involved professionally with developing two medium-large applications on Meteor, and it's terrifying.(first time was when it was in alpha, so I forgave it, second time out of alpha, and it's almost worse).

I think that HN is run from this https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki or something similar. (there's a run-news script in there which IIRC instantiates something a whole lot like HN).