

You know you're obsessed with getting into YC when... - edawerd

You know you're obsessed with getting into YC when...<p>10) You custom tailored your application demo with Paul Graham in mind. When discussing your demo with your cofounder, you've started your sentences with "When Paul Graham visits the site..."<p>9) You've spent many late night arguing with your cofounder about the exact wording of each answer to the application questions. You copied and pasted into MS Word so that you can do a word count on your answers. <p>8) You had a mini panic attack when you hit the "save" button on your application and got presented with an expired link message. Then you were really relieved when you hit the back button and realized that because you use Firefox, the form data is still there. <p>7) You've marked November 3 on your calendar<p>6) You scrutinize every word that Paul Graham writes on Hacker News<p>5) You click on "pg" and click on "submissions" to read all the submissions that Paul Graham has made....and then you click on "comments" to read all the comments that he made and then the original submissions to those comments. <p>4) You are very careful about the comments that you post on Hacker News because you're afraid that Paul Graham will think you're stupid and that it will be the reason for you not getting accepted into YC. <p>3) You compulsively check your demo because you're paranoid that your server will crash right when Paul Graham visits your site.<p>2) You've searched your email inbox for "Paul Graham" just in case your accidentally overlooked an email from him<p>1) You check your server logs on a daily basis to look for a non-familiar IP Address. When you find one, you do an IP Lookup to see if it originated from Boston. Then you get disappointed when you realize it's some random crawler probing your site, or worse yet, you realize it was you visiting your own site. <p>I decided to write this because I was driving home tonight and starting thinking about all the crazy things that I've done with my coworker over the last 4 weeks trying to get an interview with YCombinator. It culminated today when, during work, my cofounder and I realized that our demo was offline because his cable modem had died. Fearing that PG would visit our non-functioning demo today, we skipped lunch and quickly drove to his home and moved his Mac Mini server to my girlfriend's dorm room at Stanford, whom I had called 30 minutes earlier to beg to use her internet connection until October 18th. We picked up some fast food on the way home and made it back just in time for my 1:00pm meeting. What a crazy day! <p>Feel free to submit your own stories. Good luck to everyone!

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robmnl
I'm kind of wondering what all the obsession is about? Not that that's not ok,
but, although I'm sure it is very nice to get into YC, does your business idea
really depend on it?

I'm rather torn - don't really need YC for the core biz but for sure would
love to experience those famed crazy three months.

All the best Edward, who knows maybe we'll meet on Nov 3rd.

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rms
Yeah... if nothing else, it seems like something worth experiencing.

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npk
This should be renamed to, "You know you're obsessed with Paul Graham when..."

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jsjenkins168
There are actually 4 partners that comprise YC. So PG may not be the only
person reviewing you app/demo..

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SwellJoe
They split them up for an initial run through, and then all of them read the
good ones, I think. pg is definitely not the only one reading the application.

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anaphoric
Who is Paul Graham?

Just kidding :-).

Actually I wonder if I will win any points for developing my system on the
CLISP platform. BTW does anyone know why Paul didn't end up using CLISP for
Viaweb?

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pg
We did use CLisp.

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anaphoric
Really, I though I read/was told that you guys switched over to a commercial
LISP when you delivered.

Hmm. Nice. Did they ask you if you extended it any way? Also out of curiousity
did you run it as an executable image in the production version?

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pg
No. In fact it still runs on CLisp now, I believe.

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anaphoric
I assume its the linux build because we are having a devil of a time getting
full ISO-8859-1 encodings to work under windows.

But perhaps that's because I want to support Swedish characters. Maybe I
should kill that requirement.

In any case this is great news because I was a bit concerned about going all
the way to market on CLISP. Some manager at Boeing was suggesting to me that I
might need to go with Allegro or something else. It sounded expensive. And my
belief now is that I need to keep costs/prices low/reasonable to enter my
market. But in the end I think the manager was just expressing his FUD about
open source.

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jey
I know nothing about CLISP, but you might want to switch to a Unix platform
just because the Unix ports are probably better maintained. If there's
actually a character encoding bug, it could go for months without being fixed
under Windows.

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anaphoric
Yes we are supporting both Linux and Windows. And Linux definitely has been
better behaved. Still it hasn't been too bad under windows. It's just when we
want to do something like support foreign characters then we run into trouble.

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ALee
The two books- Hackers & Painters and Founders at Work- are the only books you
can talk about. Either that or after reading, everyone insisted on keeping
them around as bathroom reading.

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davidw
MS Word? Uh oh... doesn't sound like hacker material to me;-)

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boucher
We wrote a bookmarklet to count the number of words in the active textarea
(then later as a prompt, so we could write the app collaboratively in
SubEthaEdit)

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cperciva
_You check your server logs on a daily basis to look for a non-familiar IP
Address. When you find one, you do an IP Lookup to see if it originated from
Boston. Then you get disappointed when you realize it's some random crawler
probing your site, or worse yet, you realize it was you visiting your own
site._

I must be missing something. How could you possibly not recognize your own IP
address?

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jsjenkins168
If your ip allocation is not static then it can change

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ratsbane
We have a static IP from Comcast at the office and two weeks ago they changed
it. "Why are we paying for static IP?" I asked. "Oh, it's still static, just a
different static one..." [argh]

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cstejerean
Well, due to a server misconfiguration I managed to bring down the demo and
from looking at the logs (after reading this article) I realized someone hit
our demo site about 2 hours ago (and got a 404). Perhaps I should have been
more obsessed with YC. I'm going to rush to bring it back up, maybe someone
will double check the demo later in the day. I should have read this article a
day or two ago...

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JBiserkov
You know you're obsessed with getting into YC when... you write a post about
it on Hacker News :)

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SwellJoe
"You copied and pasted into MS Word so that you can do a word count on your
answers."

You're doin' it wrong!

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extantproject
wc -w [file ...]

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dfranke
Guilty on 5 and 3.

