

Ask PG: Could YC admissions be replaced with a very small shell script? - dfranke

If you train CRM114 (or some other classifier) on all but the most recent batch of YC applications, how does it fare at distinguishing interview vs. no-interview applications in the most recent batch?  How well would it have to do in order to be alarming? :-)<p>There's no particular reason that I'm asking this other than that I just finished retraining CRM to take advantage of the version upgrade and was pretty impressed with the training results.
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pg
We did try this once on startup school applications (after the fact) and it
was a pretty bad predictor.

If we ran code like this on YC applications, I suspect the most useful way to
use it would be to find groups we hadn't been planning to invite to interviews
that deserved a second look.

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dfranke
Huh. For startup school applications that's actually a surprising result. I
was under the impression that the admissions process on that was basically
just to weed out the hackers from the business people, and with an application
that brief I'm surprised that can't be accomplished with a keyword search.

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Alex3917
You mean I changed my name to Lisp MacErlang for nothing??

But seriously, the Startup School application is basically just a list of
keywords, at least the way I understood it. Are there really people writing
essays in there?

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javert
That's not the way I understood it. You can't sell your idea, or your team,
with a list of keywords.

(Anybody who actually got accepted want to back me up? :-) )

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dfranke
We're talking about startup school, not funding.

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javert
Oh... sorry, good point. :-)

