The other thing that pops up is that the company is reusing an existing term. This obviously can't be just "a word or phrase that already exists"; "Apple" is trademarked.^2 "Y combinator" the CS concept is certainly in the computing realm, but it's very different from a company. Is "technology and computing" one category that you can't reuse terms? Could you not, for example, make a rope company named "Overhand", because that's a type of knot?
Or would you have to call your company "Overhand Ropes"? I admit to being puzzled.
[0] Preemptive snark: my money's on the latter also.
[1] From http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/generic-tradem...
[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/...
I'm not sure what that has to do with an attempt to get a trademark, but it certainly seems like the author has some strong, if unrelated, opinions.
In the news of the trademark, it is the name of a programming idea after all. It's also a very good name of a company given that "It takes a single argument, which is a function that isn't recursive. It returns a version of the function which is recursive."
And Apple's a fruit. I don't really see how applying "YCombinator" to a startup accelerator is generic – did anyone else ever mention the phrase in that context before pg?
(Also, the guy who's bizarrely anti-YC runs a site called YC Universe? All sorts of confusing.)
