For those of us that don't spend every waking moment on Hacker News and thus have no idea what Meteor is, could someone please give a quick rundown of what this is and what it means and why I should care?
It was one of the all-time biggest product launches on Hacker News, with 1300+ upvotes.
It's a realtime JavaScript framework that makes it very simple to sync data between multiple clients and a server. When data changes, views are automatically updated and re-rendered.
I am surprised that the collective hn memory seems to fail so terribly.
When Meteor was announced, people upvoted and commented like crazy. There was genuine excitement. A lot of people saw the potential for this being the next Ruby on Rails.
The commenters (including me at the time) only found two major flaws with Meteor: a) the license was too restrictive for a framework and b) security/authentication was still missing.
The Meteor team fixed a) right away and now they finally address b).
For me this means I am finally going to spend some time digging deeper into Meteor. And I thought people here would be similarly excited.
Do people here really forget that quickly, or is it just the weekend?
When Meteor was released it was floating on the front page of HN for a while and attracted a lot of attention. One of the biggest criticisms people had was the total lack of authentication, which the developers said would be released eventually.
The issue with Meteor was that all clients have full write access to the server-side database, including other users' data. Which is problematic, to say the least.
This actually isn't true. One can easily remove the "autopublish" package to disable the behavior of publishing all data to the client, and selectively publish only certain records to the client. Then, all client-side database modification methods can be disabled, and using server-side functions, an authentication system can be built and you can build your application's logic.
As a consequence of its design, HTTP Basic auth wouldn't have worked as expected with meteor. All it could've done is prevented access to the whole website, users would still be able to see each other's stuff.
This is almost identical to what we were doing at Bungie Labs in 2008, except Meteor is much better. Bungie suffered from defining their own language (they didn't think this could be done in JavaScript); having a proprietary, web-based IDE; not having self-managed deployments; and being too early in the market (and probably some other stuff, too).
Without auth Meteor was interesting but not very useful. With auth, though, it becomes much more exciting.
This is the future of hackathons, free code days and weekend dev marathons.
Yet I'm not sure how soon any serious company will trust it with serious applications.
I'm not putting it down, this is incredible progress, the money (x millions in funding) behind it will give it a good amount of momentum, but it just seems a bit too easy, a bit too gimmicky to be taken seriously. I hope I'm wrong.
The fact that flat adverbs exist doesn't make this usage correct. The fact that it's incorrect however doesn't warrant comment. We all know what the writer intended.
The link in my previous post has more background. Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, Jane Austen and so on were hardly writing in "American English." In fact the non-ly adverb is a relic of Anglo-Saxon declension and is present in all modern Englishes, much like the few remaining English accusatives ("him," "her," "them", etc.).
Contrary to the comment above, "awful curious" isn't incorrect usage. It's only ambiguous if you start from the assumption of an error (missing punctuation, missing conjunction, or missing -ly).
English is rich with similar constructions that are widely mistaken for errors due to prescriptions in basic style guides, which is about as far as most folks' knowledge of the language extends. Another common one is the comma splice, which isn't an error as long as you know to call it asyndeton or parataxis.
With a few noted exceptions (often where the -ly form has another meaning) flat adverbs are considered archaic at best. That the examples you cite are from early modern English is hardly surprising - American English usage did not develop in complete isolation from its roots.
That occasional use of this earlier form has persisted in American English dialect is also unsurprising; there are other examples of anachronistic language forms, often in slang, topolect or sociolect, where common usage has otherwise died out.
The GP poster correctly observes that non-standard use of flat adverbs is more common in American English, sometimes associated with a "deep South" topolect.
Yes flat adverbs still exist in common and accepted usage, usually for good reason, but this does not make using just any adverb in plain form "correct", or less jarring to the educated ear, unless done so for stylistic reasons (which was not the case here).
I still feel the correction was unwarranted in this particular social context, but perhaps that's just me.
