Applying to YC this cycle? Please don't wait till the last minute. | Hacker News Reader

Applying to YC this cycle? Please don't wait till the last minute.

25 pointspg49 comments

The application deadline for the current cycle is tonight at 10 pm EST. If you're applying, we strongly suggest you not wait till 9:30 pm EST to edit and submit your application. Profiling suggests that due to the increase in traffic to News.YC since last cycle, if a lot of people edit applications at once, some of your http requests may time out. To save yourself the stress of wondering whether we got your application, and save us from getting a lot of panicked emails, please don't literally wait till the last minute.

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Parkinson's Law: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion"

Reminds me of:

Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."

nice, that's the first time I read a recursive law...

Recursion is implicit in the rule, "For every rule, there is an exception."

Unfortunately, the recursion never terminates.

haha.... it is like my CS professor. We had to submit our programming assignments before midnight, and if it was more than a minute late, we would get a 0. Needless to say that 90% of people waited until last minute to submit, and his little server will crash often (and you would hear screams from students not being able to submit). Programmers are some of the bigest procrastinators, ever.

So, he decided to give 4 points bonus if somebody submited at least 24hrs before. That actually worked, as more people started submiting earlier. So, pg, maybe you need to give some incentives, or at least look at earlier sumissions more favoribly.

People who apply early do have an advantage, because we read their applications and sometimes suggest changes that would improve their chances.

Also, if you only get 2-3 submissions/day early on, those submissions might stick in the YCers' minds for longer. I suspect even the best attempt at giving all submissions a fair review doesn't quite work out if you've got hundreds of submissions to go through in a week. It doesn't sound like it's an instant decision. (with that in mind, expect my name to turn up in the first lot of winter applications)

"maybe you need to give some incentives"

Am I the only one who noticed how bizarre that statement is?

If you need incentives to apply to YC, maybe you shouldn't apply. AFAIC, if you don't make it in time for this or anything else, tough.

(Don't mean to sound so harsh, but welcome to the reality of the business world. Hitting tonight's deadline is probably the easiest thing you'll have to do in the next 6 months.)

I think they meant "incentive to not apply late" rather than "incentive to apply at all".

So did I.

And that reminds me of my CS professors who used file timestamps to determine if you submitted by midnight. The TAs were the ones who checked the assignments and they got around to it .. eventually. Clever man that he was the prof gimped the "touch" binary on that system to accept no arguments. Sadly for him Stevens includes source for a simple touch program in "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment"

Fortunately the server didn't melt down as feared, even though a large percentage of the applications were only submitted in the last hour.

What was the total number of submissions?

We've stopped quoting that now that we have competitors, because if that became a matter of competition, it would tempt people to do bad things. (E.g. you could encourage single founders to apply, knowing you were unlikely to accept them, instead of telling them frankly that they're less likely to be accepted without a cofounder.)

Why do you care?

I didn't think YCombinator was a very competitive company, and I wouldn't think you'd care about what the competition thinks.

Actually, I noticed pg was pretty grouchy about TechStars when they first appeared. Particularly in the way TechStars abused application numbers to try to appear on a level playing field with YC in the media...even though the startup community, in general, tends to take them somewhat less seriously (they haven't yet proven they provide significantly better outcomes for their startups the way YC has...that may change, but I think it's fair to want them to get legitimacy through success rather than comparisons to the success of the YC model).

What happens to edits you make after 10pm?

We noticed at 10:15 that we had omitted my username from the list of people who can move to boston for the summer. I fixed the typo, saved, and resubmitted, but did it count?

pg: here's an interesting statistic you might publicize in a future cycle - what is the average length-til-deadline of successful applicants vs. unsuccessful ones? While I'm sure there's a lot of noise in such data, my intuition is that people who wait til the last minute do a sloppy job and it affects their chances.

Actually one of the surprising things I've noticed is how many good startups decided at the last moment to apply. I believe there have been some that only decided in the last couple hours.

Hear hear ;-)

Do you have any feeling for why good startups are applying at the last moment? Two possibilities which immediately come to mind are (a) these startups are founded by amazing people who have lots of different options, and they only decided at the last minute that doing a startup was something they wanted to do; and (b) these startups were going to happen and be successful with or without YC, and they only realized at the last minute that YC had something useful to offer them.

How about (c) the founders of these startups were already really busy with their projects when they (barely) got around to applying? I don't know how far along YC startups typically are when they apply, but it seems plausible that the ones that are already moving have an advantage in explaining their idea and situation.

I'm not saying that the better a startup is, the later they apply. Just that the set of people who decide to apply at the last minute includes some who are good.

I think the reason for this is a mundane one: people in their early 20s have flexible lives.

I suspect of e.g. people who visit Finland, the ones who end up staying for a year or more include some proportion who only decided to go at the last minute.

I'm not saying that the better a startup is, the later they apply. Just that the set of people who decide to apply at the last minute includes some who are good.

Oh, I must have misunderstood what you meant. I interpreted "one of the surprising things I've noticed is how many good startups decided at the last moment to apply" to mean that there was a positive correlation between "good startups" and "decided at the last moment to apply".

I've been so focused on the Android Developer Challenge that I didn't even think of apply until this morning, hopefully this bodes well.

Me too:-) Although I've begun thinking about the feasibility of applying for next winter's cycle if I can round up someone suitable to work with. We've had it with Innsbruck, and going back to Italy may not be very feasible, so that leaves the US... and maybe a chance to apply for YC.

Interesting; I've only visited Innsbruck, never lived there long term but it seemed like a lovely city. What don't you like about it, if you don't mind me asking? (I'm in Vienna)

The weather, breathing other people's smoke, not many people to interact with, let alone other hackers - although this is exacerbated by my own lack of German language skills. If you actually had contact information in your profile, I'd write you to talk more about Austria:-)

Fixed.

Wow, I love the Austrian weather. Living in the UK for 5 years was terrible in that respect. It probably helps if you're into winter sports. I guess the "other hackers" issue is just as bad anywhere I've lived so far.

Smoking: yeah, that totally sucks. Well, if this government gets its ass into gear that won't be an issue for much longer. Fingers crossed.

Wait, when did they start speaking German in Austria? :-)

Hah, yeah, good point. :) My friend's girlfriend is from Leipzig and when she first moved to Austria she was almost reduced to tears after completely failing to communicate to a shopkeeper what she wanted. Everyday words tend to be very different. And then of course there's Swiss German - I once tried watching Swiss TV and failed completely.

Swiss German is for all intents and purposes a different language -- it's nearly as far away from German as Dutch. It has different grammar. This is confusing at times because the Swiss write Hochdeutsch but that's not the language that they use to communicate in. Comparatively Austrian German is rather paletable. :-)

Out of curiosity, do you take into account when they started filling out the application (perhaps when a first draft is saved, or when new users signed up)? We started filling it out about a week before the deadline, and I'm pretty sure we didn't submit it until right before the deadline.

actually I applied very early but that was because i couldn't decide during last round.

Good luck to everyone that applied!

Good luck to all the karma seekers in this thread!

Are we allowed to submit joke startup ideas to get your attention?

My friends and I submitted our real idea (GigHello) last week, but I came up with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153760 this afternoon after a brainstorming session. I would never have written it up without all the dumb puns and in-jokes, but it would have been a great website to unveil on April Fool's day :)

I found <a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/waiting-unti...">this</a> incredibly relevant as well. Enjoy.

(I also found that hacker news does not appear to allow markup in comments, heh)

Also, you may find that you can edit posts and don't have to reply to yourself.

Is it too late?

Just kidding... :)

thank you PG ;) for adding competition from another 100 super-smart-and-hungry-geeks who can't wait to launch the next world-changing web application or hardware or whatever it is they are working on. and "good-coding" to you guys, i think you will need that more than "good-luck".

Competition will either break you or make you stronger (maybe both). Welcome it.

Wait, I don't think I want that first one..

Psssst. PG. While no one else is listening: listen, man, I love you, and I wouldn't bother to nitpick but you're an accomplished writer and everything. It's 'til. A till is a garden tool.

Two definitions. http://www.answers.com/till&r=67

>USAGE NOTE Till and until are generally interchangeable in both writing and speech, though as the first word in a sentence until is usually preferred: Until you get that paper written, don't even think about going to the movies. • Till is actually the older word, with until having been formed by the addition to it of the prefix un–, meaning “up to.” In the 18th century the spelling 'till became fashionable, as if till were a shortened form of until. Although 'till is now nonstandard, 'til is sometimes used in this way and is considered acceptable, though it is etymologically incorrect.

That paragraph originated from Wikipedia, and is not really correct. "Till", like "ain't" and "their" (for his-or-her), is old and begrudgingly accepted, but not considered proper English. Sure, Shakespeare used "till", but he also wrote "wherefore". 'til is the preferred form.

Not that any of this actually matters a whit.

citation please? would be happy to fix the wikipedia article

I noticed after turning my application in my server logs 69 hits from a new URL news.ycombinator.com/x . This is the same URL for our Y application.

Makes me wonder is PG telling those not being considered in a subtle fashion via the x? Anyone have a news.ycombinator.com/y in their server logs?

Good luck to everyone!

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