We hear you! And we're working on it.
4,250 karma · joined September 17, 2008
We'd love to know what limitations you've run into and how we can do better! Send me a tweet: @startupandrew
I want to help put your mind at ease. Google is 100% behind us. If you have specific concerns, please ping me on Twitter: @startupandrew
Google is 100% behind us, and we're continuing to make big investments in the platform. If you have concerns, feel free to ask me questions on twitter: twitter.com/startupandrew
We're not going anywhere. We have strong backing here at Google and are continuing to make big investments in our platform. You'll see big things from us soon.
What makes us different? Firebase is very complementary to Google's other product offerings. Cloud for one, as well as Angular, Polymer, GCM, etc.
I want to take this opportunity to personally say thank you! The community here has been instrumental to our success. You’ve been our supporters, beta testers, fans, and critics. Even the comment threads here have been a valuable source of feedback :)
I want to reiterate a point that James made in the blog post: Firebase is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google. Our entire team is joining Google, and James and I will continue to run things day-to-day. You’ll still see us around the tech scene at meetups, conferences, and hackathons, and we’ll still be active here and on Twitter.
Thanks again -- big things are coming!
HN is the first place we go to tell the world about new features, and each time we’re always eager to hear everyone’s thoughts. We’ll have more updates soon, in fact : )
Lemme know if you want t-shirts, stickers, Hot Sauce (yes, we have our own hot sauce), etc: andrew@firebase.com
The open data sets are in turn being populated by a script we (Firebase) operates that pulls data from the NextBus API. It is live, real-time data, though the API does have inaccurate data from time-to-time.
Check it out: https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-05-13-introducing-firebas...
A special thanks to Tom, Yehuda, and the rest of the Ember crew for helping us make these.
It turns out this is an issue with any game that runs on the client though -- regardless of if you're using Firebase or not. Preventing cheating is tough because at some step in the process here you're relying on the client to tell the server the truth. Since the game runs on the client, you can't ensure that the code hasn't been tampered with, or that an AI isn't playing the game, or that the user hasn't cheated is some other way.
With Firebase security rules, you can enforce that only that user can set the score, and you can enforce that the score is of a valid format, but fundamentally there's no way to ensure that the score is "real".
There's a screencast on our website that explains how this works here: https://www.firebase.com/docs/security-quickstart.html
For example, World of warcraft peaked at ~10% of their users online at any one point recently: http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/wow-pandaria-1-million-con...
Also note that we bill at the 95th percentile, not peak usage, so you can spike well above those numbers without consequence.
If you want to know how many concurrent users you'll need, sign up, drop in our script, and have your clients connect to Firebase (but do nothing). You'll be able to see concurrent user counts under Analytics in Forge.
We use Firebase to power the dynamic portions (obviously), but you can use plain old AJAX requests as well.
The age of the dynamically-generated HTML page is coming to an end.
Firepad is fully client-side code, so there's no server software for you to set up.
The other big reason you might use Firepad is to get all of the other goodies that Firebase provides, like the automatic scaling, Forge debugger, declarative security, etc.
If you want to try it without other people messing with it. Click the "Private Firepad" link in the upper right corner.