It's been slow for me as well past 1-2 weeks and yes, it's problem with static files - they take 20-30s to load.
Caching seems to be fine - I'm getting 304s for stylesheets and images (and they are served from local cache according to firebug and chrome dev. tools) which means it actually takes 20-30s of wait time for the server to just return the headers.
I wonder if it might be problem with Keep-Alive which is on (with 15 sec. timeout I think) - there's probably bunch of apache processes / threads sitting idle waiting for connections to close and with the amount of traffic hn gets I would imagine there's quite a few of them.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think their niche overlaps too much with paypal customers. So why would they market themselves as a direct competitor to paypal? Why would they, given this premise, advertise to paypal customers at all?
If you read the whole story you will get the impression they are paypal competitors - that is, unless you visit their website and read comments here. You will find out they are nothing like paypal and they won't replace it.
There's been a lot of negative opinions about paypal coming from this very community but, in my opinion, if they position themselves as paypal competitor a lot of people will be disappointed in their offering right now.
Do you think it's a good way to market themselves? Or should they focus on their core audience via other channels? Or maybe paypal customers are indeed wepay's customers in the making?
OK, so I don't have any experience with Rails myself but after having a quick glance wouldn't it be current_user.choices (plural) since user :has_many choices instead of singular, no? (haven't actually checked relationships between your models and whether they make sense).
Here's a very interesting article from CX Partners (http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/cxinsights/web_forms_design_guid...) which analyses different form layouts, labels placement etc. on few popular websites (Google, Yahoo, etc.) in which they used eye-tracking to find the flaws in the forms design and to identify common usage patterns which users follow.
From the previous threads about design I would recommend "Non-designer's Design Book" which includes simple exercises. I also found this (http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/169/) article very helpful. And "Designing for the Web" book (http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/) which focuses on core principles of design and how to apply them for the web. For basic understanding of usability I recommend "Don't Make Me think" by Steve Krug which is an excellent book.