mayop100

The original commenter is correct -- this is intended to run fully-client-side. We provide a set of security rules and authentication that allow you to control access. Authentication tokens should alw…

It's not the stability of the node.js code itself that was the issue -- it was the stability of the protocol used to communicate with our servers. We didn't want to put it in the NPM before we were re…

When you're ready to step up your game I'll tell you about the cheat codes that let you choose Twinkie. : )

Most startups I know add analytics of some kind to their products before they launch them, but they almost never allocate time for analysis after the fact. I think this approach of deciding in advanc…

We definitely allow you to manage lists in a consistent manner. Can you email me directly with your exact use case and I can help you get started? andrew at firebase dot com.

Keep in mind that most of our costs are also not bandwidth. Our primary costs are the servers, our CDN, backups, and operations. Bandwidth is just one small piece.

[Firebase founder] I would caution against comparing our pricing to S3 or any other non-realtime storage service. Firebase's use case is primarily for serving structured data (the type of data that li…

Yes! Absolutely. A number of people are doing this already. We don't yet have an official binding for Ember, but we do have one for Backbone [1]. [1] https://github.com/firebase/backfire Update: The…

Firebase persists all data permanently (and we back it up, etc.), so your data is "saved" just by using Firebase. If you want to access the data from your own servers, we recommend actually having you…

[Firebase founder here] We talk about this briefly in our FAQ [1]. Here's the quote: "PubNub and Pusher are both great services that provide simple real-time messaging for applications with a “publish…

Firebase can do this for you. It has a very flexible expression-based permissions model. You can set your rule to: ".write":"!data.exists()" And people will be able to write only new items.

Yeah, that's gonna get pretty annoying : ) That "global sync" option is only for that one slide deck though (for demo purposes). If you upload your own deck, only the uploaded gets to control the slid…

I challenge you to find a way to use fewer servers... WebRTC depends on them for signaling. We're just providing a tool to make that easier. See: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/basics/…

We'll have a free plan, but in general, no it's not free. Neither is DNS though (it's free for the end user of course, but not the developer, just like Firebase).

[Firebase founder here] We weren't trying to be disingenuous with the title. Keep in mind that basically any web technology, including P2P ones, do actually use servers. If you're using a domain nam…

Congrats to Jeff and the team!

This is a technology demo. We wanted to demo our real-time tech rather than show a bunch of sign-up workflow code. Facebook auth lets us save a bunch of boring code.

Please feel free to tinker, fork, send pull requests, etc! It's all open source.

I should also mention that Firebase does let you run trusted code if you want to -- you can run a server as a Firebase client using our Node.js library or using our REST API. Then you can do anything …

[Firebase dev] I've mentioned this in the chat several times, but I should probably mention this on the HN thread as well. We're big fans of Meteor as well. Firebase is just a data layer -- we do high…

[Firebase founder here] We did a ton of interviews with devs, and we found that authentication was one of the areas where developers wanted the most control / customization. We therefore opted for max…

Meteor relies on developers writing server-side code. This is flexible, but it means you need to run your own servers -- meaning scaling, operations, etc are up to you. Scaling real-time / persistent …

The key difference is that we are a real-time backend. We push data changes down to clients when things change and trigger callbacks so the apps can remain responsive. Parse, Kinvey, etc are based on …

[Firebase founder here] This is one of the nice things about running a company that is 100% developer focused. We can communicate in clear terms with customers that actually understand the nuances of …