This is just a pet peeve of mine. I don't understand why you ask "Are you sure you want to leave this page" when I click back, or try to close the tab. I am sure - that's why I tried to leave.
Actually, it's a Backbone.js application. It uses the browserify library to load other modules, which is what the "require('blah')" bits are. this confused me too when I first read it. so essentially you can run this on a static file server like GH pages.
As far as I remember in order to get the GitHub authentication piece working you need to use an external app simply for the authentication with GitHub. DevelopmentSeed also wrote an app for this called gatekeeper (I think) which I believe is a node.js application.
I've noticed a strange bug with the latest version of Chrome where pages sometimes don't render. Try opening the developer tools, this usually causes the page to render for me.
I've noticed the same bug, but dev tools doesn't seem to do anything and view-source is blank. This one though seems to be a site issue:
$ traceroute blog.ycombinator.com
traceroute to posthaven.com (50.63.202.48), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 10.142.83.65 (10.142.83.65) 0.892 ms 0.719 ms 0.769 ms
2 216-13-232-1.dedicated.allstream.net (216.13.232.1) 1.213 ms 3.646 ms 1.234 ms
3 216-23-136-13.dedicated.allstream.net (216.23.136.13) 2.256 ms 8.470 ms 1.299 ms
4 66-46-123-225.dedicated.allstream.net (66.46.123.225) 18.638 ms 12.393 ms 13.011 ms
5 eqix-ch.godaddy.com (206.223.119.141) 58.324 ms 61.302 ms 60.216 ms
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
I can't recommend Angular.js enough. I've been working with it for the past few months and find it to be really enjoyable. The docs aren't great (though getting better), but I found these tutorials pretty good for getting up and running: http://egghead.io
edit: fixed typo