The deadline for applying for the summer 2010 funding cycle is today at 10 pm Pacific. We moved the deadline earlier this year to decrease the stress for applicants who get offers from the increasing number of other YC-like organizations.

But it seems too much to expect that everyone who will start a startup in June will have decided to by the beginning of March, so this cycle we’re going to try something new. We’re going to consider late applications right up till the summer cycle starts at the beginning of June.

We don’t recommend applying late if you can get an application in by the deadline, because we’re going to be much less likely to accept late applications. Nor can we promise anything about how quickly we’ll respond. But at least now if someone decides to start a startup in April and emails us asking if they can apply for the summer cycle, we won’t have to tell them to wait till the next winter.

You don’t have to do anything special to submit a late application. Just use the normal application url, http://news.ycombinator.com/apply, and if it’s past the deadline the software should tell you you’re now filing a late application. But remember that this is a new experiment, so while we’ll do our best to look at all late applications reasonably promptly, we make no promises about how closely we’ll read them or when we’ll respond.