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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153441

by pg • 18 years ago

25 49 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

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".

edw5193• 18 years ago

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

attack• 18 years ago

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

ardit33• 18 years ago

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.

pg5• 18 years ago

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

pmjordan5• 18 years ago

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)

edw5193• 18 years ago

"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.)

randallsquared• 18 years ago

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

jackdied• 18 years ago

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"

plusbryan• 18 years ago

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.

pg5• 18 years ago

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.

brianlash• 18 years ago

Hear hear ;-)

cperciva2• 18 years ago

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.

aschobel• 18 years ago

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.

boucher• 18 years ago

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.

ubudesign• 18 years ago

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

danielrhodes• 18 years ago

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

brent• 18 years ago

Reminds me of:

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

ph0rque• 18 years ago

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

zapnap2• 18 years ago

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

zapnap2• 18 years ago

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

pmjordan5• 18 years ago

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

rms3• 18 years ago

Good luck to everyone that applied!

xlnt• 18 years ago

Good luck to all the karma seekers in this thread!

pg5• 18 years ago

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

xirium• 18 years ago

What was the total number of submissions?

pg5• 18 years ago

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.)

fuelfive• 18 years ago

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?

sabat2• 18 years ago

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.

rms3• 18 years ago

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.

sabat2• 18 years ago

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.

paul9290• 18 years ago

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!

hendler• 18 years ago

Is it too late?

Just kidding... :)

cthulha• 18 years ago

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 :)

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

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