Original discussion 18 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840032 .. it'd be interesting to hear how it's changed since then as I believe it's under active development :-)
A lot of things have changed. There are a lot more features now (things like invites, notifications, tags, more granular settings, RSS feeds, a simple API, etc.).
Right now I'm working on making the app more modular by extracting these features into separate, oprtional packages. It will make the app even more customizable, and easier to maintain as well.
It creates a bad impression of Meteor when you click the first link in the demo that contains a couple hundred comments and the entire browser freezes for 8 seconds:
http://demo.telesc.pe/
Don't make the mistake of trying to open the Firefox debugger on that page either or the freezing lasts even longer.
That one page makes 807 HTTP requests totaling 953KB to display about 20KB of text.
Part of this is that the demo is using a pretty old version of Telescope/Meteor (like 6 months back), and also that it's running on a free *.meteor.com instance that's not very powerful. I need to fix both of these, sorry about that!