

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

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

~~~
brent
Reminds me of:

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

~~~
ph0rque
nice, that's the first time I read a recursive law...

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

Unfortunately, the recursion never terminates.

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ardit33
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.

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

~~~
pmjordan
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)

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

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xirium
What was the total number of submissions?

~~~
pg
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.)

~~~
dcurtis
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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).

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plusbryan
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.

~~~
pg
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.

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cperciva
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.

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
cperciva
_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".

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rms
Good luck to everyone that applied!

~~~
xlnt
Good luck to all the karma seekers in this thread!

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cthulha
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 :)

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zapnap
I found <a href="[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/waiting-
unti...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/04/waiting-
until-t.html)">this</a> incredibly relevant as well. Enjoy.

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

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

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hendler
Is it too late?

Just kidding... :)

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rokhayakebe
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".

~~~
edw519
Competition will either break you or make you stronger (maybe both). Welcome
it.

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

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sabat
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.

~~~
rms
Two definitions.
[http://www.answers.com/till&r=67](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.

~~~
sabat
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.

~~~
rms
citation please? would be happy to fix the wikipedia article

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paul9290
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!

