Show HN: I've always wanted a Y Combinator shirt, so I made one. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I've always wanted a Y Combinator shirt, so I made one.

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80 pointsapgwoz32 comments

When I saw the title my first thought was "too bad it won't be a shirt of the actual y combinator", I was pleasantly surprised, will probably be purchasing one soon

I thought the opposite: "Wow, cool someone made a orange HN shirt. I am going to buy one right this minute if he sells them."

I've always wanted a bright orange shirt (#ff6600) like the default topcolor with a nice large Y on the front.

I'm wondering if there is a trademark that would prevent someone from designing and selling one (even after explicitly stating no affiliation/connection with YC.)

Wikipedia Commons[1] says Jessica designed it and has trademark restrictions however...

EDIT:

Followed the rabbit-hole and found this: http://ycombinator.com/legal.html which states This image of our logo is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

..I unfortunately am not familiar with that license, but after reading up on it[2], it would seem fair game, as long as the person(s) gave attribution to Jessica/YC.

Anyone have any counterpoints/corollaries to prove me utterly out of touch with everything, or am I correct in my understanding here?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Y_Combinator_Logo_400.gif

[2]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

They're sold out at the moment, but I bought one here: http://hackertees.com/

Yeah, but I'm talking BIG Y...like whole front of t-shirt Y. And maybe even posthardcore-band-merch Y. Or even grunge-style Y.

But the Y must be massive.

Cool idea, I'd be interested in something like that too, although not out of any implied association with YC (the VC firm). More because I'm a student in a PL group :).

However, there's something about the font/position of the logo...err.. expression on the shirt that doesn't quite appeal to me. Maybe I'll have to design one too!

> However, there's something about the font/position of the logo...err.. expression on the shirt that doesn't quite appeal to me. Maybe I'll have to design one too!

The font is FF Meta, the same font used in the Y Combinator (VC) logo.

It's unfortunate that the Y-Combinator is so long. I tried to kern so it would fit in a single line but be big enough to see on a shirt. Not sure that I succeeded exactly; maybe not based on your comment. :)

I haven't seen the shirt that inspired you, so my opinion probably isn't so useful.

I think I've seen people affiliated with YC with a shirt that just has the orange box with a Y on it.

Other YC shirts I know of: "make something people want", and when you get acquired, you get "i made something people want"

FF Meta is a nice typeface, but I don’t think it works especially well for math, especially the roman font, since math is typically set in the italics of some serifed face. It’s especially rough with the tracking so tight (around the '.'s there’s nowhere near enough space) and with the parentheses vertically aligned to match uppercase letters.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/lr5VW.png

First thought: "Yo dawg. I herd you like Y-Combinator. So we put a lambda in yo lambda, so you can recurse while u recurse."

Recur! To recurse is to curse again! ;)

For those interested, I'd skip the baby-tutorials to the Y fpc and just look at the "math": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_combinator#Y_combin...

Once you see that you just end up applying the function to itself repeatedly, it makes a lot more sense. It's also 5 lines to read, instead of paragraphs.

I would prefer a shirt with the seven primitive operators of Lisp myself.

Seven?!! ...so inelegant compared to the two rules needed for evaluating lambda calculus ;)

Or S and K

[Edit: Or Y expressed in terms of S and K]

For those interested, that's a $5.60 markup. Pretty honest IMHO.

EDIT: I was mistaken. It's a different type of shirt, so the markup is even less!

Actually it's not. It's 17.40 base price for the American Apparel shirt (which I made so I could buy, since that's my preference), so it's a $2.60 markup.

Even at $5.60 it would have been totally fair. Kudos to you for making it available to others for so little.

It took about 30 minutes to do--and, that long because I had to trace a few glyphs from FF Meta (the font) in Inkscape, since I don't own it. I'd be absolutely thrilled if enough people bought one so that mine is free, but, I'm not expecting that to happen.

The other shirts in that shop were marked up to donate to random open source projects. I think all together, I maybe gave $30-40 away from those sales?

I always wanted to make a quine t-shirt, something like

  A t-shirt with the following sentence followed by its quotation: "A t-shirt with the following sentence followed by its quotation:"

but the line is too long to fit confortably in a t-shirt (and it's so nerd even I would not wear it)

Any chance I could get one in orange instead of black?

You could, but the type is on an orange background, so I'd have to upload a just white design, which I can't do at the moment. If you want, ping me and I'll do it later. (my email is in my profile)

From the pictures, it felt that the y-combinator is placed a little high up on the shirt - might work better place to place it lower.

I agree. I also think it should be some what lowered.

Just bought a red one in Small. I'm a girl, BTW. Great work. Thanks !

best to buy this before he gets sued for trademark infringement

How would this be trademark infringement? Can you trademark math?

I don't see why not...you can trademark a fruit(apple) and a a color(pink).

Sure, he does infringe by using the color and the font of YC. But the YC gang know better than to shut down their loyal fanbase.

And even if they were that silly, I'd be pretty confident that a fair use defense (parody) would hold up here, if something so ridiculous were actually to go to court.

By that logic everyone that uses Helvetica in Black on a white background should be sued by American Apparel.

As far as I know, trademarks can cover the proportions of the logo. So, if I created an orange square, put a lambda in it (using the same font) and ensured the padding around the lambda was pinpoint accurate, that'd totally be infringement.

About the only thing that I'm being sketchy on is the use of the Y Combinator name. I tried to use Y-Combinator, when referring to math, and Y Combinator when referring to the company, but the line is a bit blurry...

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