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You know you're obsessed with getting into YC when...
You know you're obsessed with getting into YC when...
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..."
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.
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.
7) You've marked November 3 on your calendar
6) You scrutinize every word that Paul Graham writes on Hacker News
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.
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.
3) You compulsively check your demo because you're paranoid that your server will crash right when Paul Graham visits your site.
2) You've searched your email inbox for "Paul Graham" just in case your accidentally overlooked an email from him
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.
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!
Feel free to submit your own stories. Good luck to everyone!
- cperciva 19y agoYou 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?
- edawerd 19y agoMy ip address changes on occasion. Also, I checked my demo from work, which had an IP that I didn't recognize right away
- jsjenkins168 19y agoIf your ip allocation is not static then it can change
- ratsbane 19y agoWe 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]
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- npk 19y agoThis should be renamed to, "You know you're obsessed with Paul Graham when..."
- robmnl 19y agoI'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.
- rms 19y agoYeah... if nothing else, it seems like something worth experiencing.
- davidw 19y agoMS Word? Uh oh... doesn't sound like hacker material to me;-)
- boucher 19y agoWe 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)
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- jsjenkins168 19y agoThere are actually 4 partners that comprise YC. So PG may not be the only person reviewing you app/demo..
- SwellJoe 19y agoThey 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.
- anaphoric 19y agoWho 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?
- pg 19y agoWe did use CLisp.
- anaphoric 19y agoReally, 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?
- pg 19y agoNo. In fact it still runs on CLisp now, I believe.
- anaphoric 19y agoI 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.
- jey 19y agoI 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.
- ALee 19y agoThe 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.
- dfranke 19y agoGuilty on 5 and 3.
- cstejerean 19y agoWell, 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...
- SwellJoe 19y ago"You copied and pasted into MS Word so that you can do a word count on your answers." You're doin' it wrong!
- extantproject 19y agowc -w [file ...]
- JBiserkov 19y agoYou know you're obsessed with getting into YC when... you write a post about it on Hacker News :)