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Re:How to get to YC interview - Insider's Guide to YC W13 Ap... by gleb on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @03:49PM (#4694707)
Thanks.

"things useful in a startup" does seem like misleading advice. Because people applying don't yet know what's useful. So it's obvious to me that having won an Olympic medal is super useful, but it's probably not obvious to the applicant. Hmm, and "useful" is probably not quite the right word here ... I'll try to cover this more in emails.

You comment above rates 6.5. Your writing style is very unusual though. It remains easy to understand despite being somewhat complex linguistically. 6 is about the maximum I can usually understand in a single pass. And after reading a bunch of applications my abilities degenerate. Best direct response copywriters consistently rate at 4.

Re:How to get to YC interview - Insider's Guide to YC W13 Ap... by balsam on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @07:33PM (#4695566)
Would it be in the category of "if you have to ask,..." to ask for a tightly clustered list of actual impressive things? It's easy to say "a Nobel" or "a knighthood", but I suspect the mean is lower down the log scale. After all, if you've won the holy grail you might not be motivated to spend your next 5 years on a startup :).
Re:How to get to YC interview - Insider's Guide to YC W13 Ap... by jelpern on Monday October 29, 2012 @03:32PM (#4714028)
If I recall correctly from my AP Journalism class a billion years ago, mainstream journalists - we didn't have such a distinction then but I'm imagining that would be the equivalent - are taught to write at a 6th or 7th grade level. Of course the site just rated the above at 18.2. I'm going to have to work on this.
Re:How to get to YC interview - Insider's Guide to YC W13 Ap... by biscarch on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @04:38PM (#4694956)
Is this linguistic scale available somewhere?
Re:How to get to YC interview - Insider's Guide to YC W13 Ap... by napoleond on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @05:13PM (#4695082)
gleb linked to a grader in the article. It probably uses one of the formulae listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability
Re:How to get to YC interview - Insider's Guide to YC W13 Ap... by biscarch on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @05:48PM (#4695224)
Ah, thank you. Missed that when I was skimming.