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YC-backed startup means a culture of 'move fast and break things' - works for facebook, but definately not something I would want to store my bitcoin on, since 'break things' means 'losing all my money with no recourse'

This is an example of a pretty good april fools joke - Enough to cause an emotional reaction, but not so far out there that it is obviously fake.

Past performance does not guarantee future results - That is true for all investment types, including home ownership.

Home ownership does have very advantageous tax consequences in the US compared to other instruments - e.g.: deductible interest, tax breaks on capital gains.

But it also depends on your stage of life. If there is a good chance you'll just randomly move to a different city or country in the next few years, then i would not recommend buying a home.

Okay, let's do that thought experiment. Set Sales and marketing expense (Currently $171 million) to zero. So, they would be making $2.3 million a year in profit.

But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Without sales/marketing, you can't expect any growth. And expectation of future exponential growth is the trigger for these very high tech company valuations. Without that growth, I would value it like a blue chip company.

The average P/E ratio of the S&P 500 is about 20 times earnings. That would put the valuation of the company at about $50 million - a far cry from what they want to value it at.

Or, if you do it by sales, the average P/S ratio of the S&P 500 is about 1.7 times sales. Which puts their valuation at about $210 million - still a far cry from what they want to value it at.

So, while they have a scalable and profitable business today, they don't have one which comes anywhere close to justifying their valuation outside the silicon valley bubble. Ergo, they better still be in the search stage.

While it looks impressive, i don't think 'raytraced' is the correct term - i suspect it is just rendered

How many people actually have a net worth > $30 million due to stock options from a Silicon Valley startup? Assuming a billion dollar exit, you would need 3% equity (post dilution) to end up with that net worth, or 5% if you want that net worth after-taxes. The average startup is going to have maybe 2-5 people with that level of equity. There aren't that many billion dollar exits, so my gut is that the total number across all startups in the last 5 years isn't going to be more than about 1000.

I would guess the number of wall street traders with a net worth > $30 million would be higher.

Does anyone know of any real statistics on that?

This is pretty cool. It makes we wonder if it would be possible to create an automatic SVG-to-CSS converter

The unicode consortium got unicode wrong, not java. At the time Java was created, there only was a BMP and Unicode had a purely 16-bit design. Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable for java to assume a 16-bit char. Unicode was later extended to support more than 2^16 characters, but that was after java was created, hence the need for UCS-2/UTF-16

Other languages which strongly value backwards compatibility and were created around the same time have the same issue - e.g.: C#/.NET, i believe python as well

'Even memcached, which is the conceptually simplest of these technologies and used by so many other companies, had some REALLY nasty memory corruption bugs we had to deal with, so I shudder to think about using stuff that’s newer and more complicated'

Does anyone know what memory corruption bugs they are referring to?

I'm hoping for a self-driving car giveaway myself

there is a bright side to it - the 'sold out in a hour' situation last year was ridiculous. While i would have preferred a coding challenge to eliminate that problem, a price increase is another method of fixing it.

His advice for using 'short selectors' for performance is just plain incorrect.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html is a great page describing CSS performance.

Selectors like '.nav a' would not be allowed at all as a part of my team's CSS best practices, as it is a descendant selector that uses a tag as the key. (On the other hand, most sites, expecially non-dynamic sites, don't need to optimize CSS at all, as there are usually other things which are the bottleneck)

it does, but you cannot predict future legislation.

In 2010, you may not yet know that the timezones will change in 2012, but you might still need to store a 2012 date in your database.

So, the best you can do, if storing in UTC, is store that 2012 date using 2010 timezone rules, as you don't yet know what the 2012 time zone rules are going to be

There is an apache incubator project

http://raffaeleguidi.wordpress.com/

Awesome article, if anyone knows of an equivalent article about moving to London, please provide a link

GWT has a fair number of sessions at google i/o as well - so not a dedicated conference, but a dedicated track at a conference.