PG charts acceleration of YC applications since noon | Hacker News Reader

PG charts acceleration of YC applications since noon

chart.googleapis.com

68 pointsnthnclrk46 comments

Oh the server is down: http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=ls&chs=62x300&chd=t:70...

You had me there for about 1.5 seconds. I've seen too many real graphs that look like that.

lol

I knew a lot of people applied on the last day but I've always been curious about the shape of the curve, so I finally wrote something to track it.

The current rate is about 1.3 applications per minute. I'm guessing that will increase smoothly till the deadline, since the curve looks so smooth so far, but we'll see.

So you're looking at ~2000 for the last day? Do you expect this rate to be constant or to accelerate the closer it gets to 8pm?

Just in case anyone else thinks the deadline is midnight, it's 8 pm Pacific Time.

And yes, I think the rate will probably continue to accelerate till the deadline.

Apologies. I updated my post to reflect the correct time.

I always wonder what happens with a resubmit (I must have done it tens of times), does the original date still stand? Does it push it to the end of the queue again? Do you see all the revisions?

I have wondered this too. I would love if PG could address this.

We only see the latest revision. There is no queue and thus not really any concept of a date.

Had exact same question.

That's the kind of graph you like to see on demo day.

so i guess it's passed the deadline now, was your assumption correct?

a little bird told me that the edit/submit links were still active as of 8:20..

It's still active :)

Is this a graph of the rate of change (acceleration) of applications, or a graph of the raw number of applications submitted? Some labels might be helpful.

This is total applications submitted (scaled to fit the graph).

It would be really interesting to see a historical breakdown of acceptance rate by submission time until deadline.

I've always meant to check if that's a predictor, but anecdotal evidence suggests not. I.e. I know some of the most successful startups applied at the last minute, but not all did.

That seems to contradict - "Early submissions have a significant advantage because we have more time to look at them and engage with the founders." :)

But then we saw a team get accepted on stage on Saturday, so there is definitely some anecdotal evidence for advantage of early submission :)

TL;DR: I may or may not have contributed to a point on that curve and I am not sure how to feel about it.

I began filling out the form on the day the application window was announced. Halfway through, I realized the answers I had to some of the questions on the form, were either unconvincing or simply non-existent. As I progressed, I realized that me and my idea both sounded increasingly half-assed, so I promptly stopped, saved the form, quietly went back to the drawing board and started attempting to figure out the answers.

It has been roughly two months since that day, I guess. I still don't have all the answers but I can at least tell myself now that the idea is worth a shot...

How is this being updated? The data is encoded in the url, so the link url must be changing periodically. Doesn't this mean 'nthnclrk' is doing the charting?

I've been updating it manually occasionally.

how do the nonprofit applications compare to the for profit?

According to https://twitter.com/paulg/status/392057586389753856, 5% of applicants are nonprofits.

As PG mentioned, he is updating.

I only picked up the URL via his twitter post.

Not entirely related, but do you think your assessment of a particular application (team, idea or any other component therein) is influenced at all by the quality of applications that precede and succeed it, especially considering the sheer volume and the rate at which you go through the apps?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_resident#Matching_algo... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem offer clues.

Yes, I'm familiar with both, intimately so with the first. I know it occurs, and was wondering to what degree he thinks it does and if there any controls in place.

Thanks for the links, I ended up enjoying reading about them :)

I ended up on:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SultansDowryProblem.html

I doubt it, precisely because of the volume.

It would be interesting to know more about the (historical) distribution of the overall applications, especially how many are settled within the last one percent quantile of time.

Assuming a distribution and working with a simple e-function, around 3.500 total applications with an acceptance rate around 1.25% (batch<50) might be a ballpark estimate.

Considering the creative nature of the whole enterprise it is kind of nice to know I made a very very small part of that curve.

May it be one of the first of many such convex curves.

Reminds me of Nasim Taleb's smile and frown demonstrations vis a vis fragility and anti-fragility.

On the software side, how are you managing to sort through the sheer number of applicants?

An interesting (albeit impossible to track) metric would be how much time the average YC application took - and if the time spent correlates with acceptance at all.

I wonder if that graph would look closer to a bell curve or exponential decay.

An increase in time spent would not increase the success rate. Probably the opposite. More time spent -- less likely that an applicant is on the right track.

Applicants that submit at the last minute have likely been thinking about/living with the problem for a while, and they are able to quickly articulate the problem, their solution, and the reason that they will be successful.

We agree. Both the bell curve and the exponential delay curve would mean the more time spent on the application, the less likely that team is to be accepted.

Curious if you've speculated about the reason for the high volume of late applications, especially since you're pretty clear that early apps have a better chance to get accepted.

It is like the lottery rush hours before the draw.

Any guess on correlation between location of applicant and proximity of application time to deadline? Is the 8pm PST deadline keeping the European applicants up late?

yes.

What's the record amount of applicants per batch so far?

Would like to see this curve if it was a real-time updating chart publicly available on HN :P (P.S Don't forget the username when reading my application!)

nthnclrk just curious where you got the updated chart in your link. the chart link in PG's tweet has much less data...

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