I love this tradition; and for the first time would like to make a similar offer:

Anyone who got rejected from YC S13 forward your rejection email to freewine@undergroundcellar.com and I'll send you a $25 gift card for free wine from http://UndergroundCellar.com

I'm not suggesting you drink your problems away, but a relaxing glass of wine can be a nice way to wind down before you get back to those 14 hour hack days.

IDology has a service for what you're looking for I believe. It's called KYC or "Know Your Customer". I use it on my site to verify identities before opening bank accounts in their name. For my use, we require SSN, DOB, and address as inputs. It checks credit agency and other public data. If user enters any of this info incorrectly, it switches to OOW "Out of Wallet" method and will prompt user to answer questions only they should know, like "What year did you purchase your Ford Bronco?" If they answer 2 out of the 3 of these questions correctly it assumes they are who they say they are.

Not sure what your use case is; but rather than identifying the PERSON is unique, you can identify that their PHONE NUMBER is unique. Require a text message code be entered on screen. Most people have only 1 cell phone; and if push comes to shove their real name is linked to their cell phone in most cases, so they could be found out via court subpoena.

Thanks Benferhat for the links.

However, zip-tax is SaaS-only and charges monthly fee. And zip2tax sells the database for $660.

Seeing as how this is not proprietary data and that I am a lean-startup (read: poor), I find it hard to justify paying $660 for an excel file that likely many other people have loaded up in their e-com platform. If you do have it please let me know :)

I hear you, but are you sure that would be legal? It's public information, but the compilation wouldn't be cheap or easy to build and maintain. I'd think they'd want to get paid. I heard of a similar issue with time zone data compilations a while back.

btw, PayPal provides this service for free.

To further clarify, only need data on USA zip codes. Thanks in advance.

I'm going to show up for an interview anyways.

A lot of people do that, and unsurprisingly some people (maybe all) working at YC do not appreciate it. Personally I would advise against it and think of a different way to get to the partners, n.b. Instacart, rather than show up to YC when everyone is extremely busy and putting YC staff in difficult positions.

You can't sell a generation on the never-say-die entrepreneur ethos and then tsk-tsk when they show up at your office uninvited.

Yes you can.

No startup, I should think, would get funding by gatecrashing a VC in meetings about potential fundraising for other companies. It's just a stupid idea: you're slapping someone in the face by intruding like that.

Have fun being escorted out of the office by the cops

Don't do that, but do consider going to Silicon Valley and talking with other startup founders, users, etc. and I'd recommend startup school in the spring, and applying to s2013.

Showing up uninvited during interview days will probably just get you escorted out, and won't help your chances to get in in the future -- you'd be "that crazy stalker guy from last year, should we call the cops?"

afaik that's a terrible idea.

Can you at least get someone to video it so we can watch the fail?

In marketing analytics there is a saying... "Don't waste time testing things that don't give you actionable metrics".

Meaning... 1 view, 5 views, 100 views... what will you do differently even if you knew this info? Not a thing :)

So spend your time working on your business. Thursday will be here soon enough.

I'd be very interested in following this project if you go ahead with it.

The value would be to identify how Tweets from major corporate and political figures affect related stock prices. For example, how Tweets from @benbernanke affect the trading price of ETF's. The goal would be to try and identify signals that provide statistical significance as well as a lag time from when Tweet was published and stock price reaction. If we can find these arbitrage opportunities we could use an API to auto-trade based on the Tweets...

me too! This idea could be very valuable!

Very interesting to hear the attitudes towards TV during the early adoption phase of the technology.

You can hear the excitement in the announcer's voice as he describes a TV broadcast.

It reminds me of how I felt when I connected my modem to the computer and dialed onto the internet for the first time.

Keiferski that link you referenced is relating to the interview stage.

I think the purpose of the application demo is to provide a visualization of what you wrote in the YC application. They say they only view demos from the most promising submissions, so if they're viewing it you already piqued their interest. Short of a live working prototype, I'd create a page that can most effectively show 1) how your app will generate revenue, 2) key differentiators of your app from similar ones. Regardless of the demo format, their time per submission is minimal so be clear and concise.

There was no confirmation email sent out. You can check to see if your application was submitted properly by going to http://news.ycombinator.com/apply and if you get the message "Sorry, this application is no longer editable" then you're all good, and will get a response from PG and crew on Monday.