I know YC typically gives small investments which works well enough for web startups, but do they give more to hardware companies like Senic that need things like materials, machines and parts?

Nope, all companies receive the same funding (as in base amount + x per founder up to 3)

I'd love to hear about a hardware team's experience in the YC program. Senic, how's it going?

Three months is a really short time for a hardware company which forced us to postpone sleeping until after Demo Day :) Money wise, it was kind of tough considering the cost for prototyping, 3d printing, flights from Germany etc. But I would say it gets you where you need to be if you're resourceful enough.

As nice as the machined metal looks, they'd cost pennies to produce as injection molded parts and would be just as functional.

Sounds like a job for latent semantic indexing. This is a very accessible piece on how LSI works and how it can be applied. http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/

thanks this is fascinating!