Blog - David Helkowski

Regarding Garry Tan, YCombinator, and Corruption

 A few weeks ago I saw an article on Hacker News new with an entire 2 upvotes that piqued my interest. It was a link to this website. It's a detailed article about how Naive ( usenaive ) is just a commercialized copy of Paperclip ( GitHub - Paperclip ), and is fully breaking the MIT license of Paperclip and hiding that they are essentially just stealing Paperclip.

This article, by my eye, looks well written and undeniable. Yet... the Hacker News post just quietly died with no attention. I posted about it on my LinkedIn. I do not, though, have many followers. Till this moment, nearly a week later, my post got all of 160 impressions.

Durign that time, yet another fucking company has risen in news attention for basically the same shit. Delve. Like how Naive is Paperclip, Delve is SimStudio.

Here is a listing of articles about Delve:

Delve spun up a smoke machine and published this garbage in response. Zero acknowledgement of the license violations.

It got enough attention Garry Tan has been reported as saying "We have asked Delve to leave YC. YC is a community, not just an accelerator. The founders in our community have to trust each other, and we have to trust them. When that trust breaks down, there’s really only one thing to do."

Let's consider. Either Garry knows about Naive doing the same bs with Paperclip, or he doesn't.

If he doesn't know? That's embarassing and shameful.

If he does know? Even worse.

I suspect he does know and is hoping it doesn't reach the level of attention that Delve has gotten for doing it.

This is a major problem and says to me that investors and leaders of YCombinator are incompetant at best, and at worse encouraging this sort of illegal behavior somehow. I don't think it is coincidence that this sort of open source abuse keeps happening.

Let's take a step back from the licensing drama, hacks ( Delve says they were hacked ), denials, etc, and consider something deeper.

Is YCombinator encouraging startups going through their batches to monetize open source software? This is purely speculation on my part but would be VERY interesting if it is the case. YC could be telling startups that commercializing open source is a great strategy. There is nothing illegal about doing that if you meet the license terms.

Consider. What is YC is encouraging startups to do this, and advising them to just meet the license terms but to otherwise keep quiet about how their commercial offerings are actually just a thin veneer on top of free software. If that were so ( and keep in mind it is speculation ), then that would be an explanation for why there are multiple YC companies doing this sort of thing.

Even supposing YC isn't encouraging that sort of thing, I don't think they are going to discourage it either, because it is a common business practice.

NotOnKetamine mentioned these YC startups doing this:

That's four different YC startups doing this so far. All four in a non-compliant way ( at least initially )

So I will leave you with this: How many other YC companies are just thin wrappers around free open source?

Medial Axis Extraction in O(n)

 Around three months ago, I solved a long-standing problem in computational geometry and computer vision:

Extracting the true medial axis from a binary image in linear time per pixel.

No thinning.
No iterative label propagation.
No graph recon...

On AI and the Death of Humanity

Tags: ai

I've been using "AI", as it is currently referred to, for several years now. Mostly I've been using ChatGPT, although at times I've run a variety of different local models, mainly to test what is possible and ascertain for myself whether these things are "dangerous" or not. For the m...

USA: Destination Hell

 I am a US citizen. I don't, though, live in the US. I reside in Japan, and I intend to do so permanently. There are a few major reasons why:

The third poin...

Decoersion

 Something I have believed strongly for many years is that all forms of coercion are unacceptable. Recently I have been thinking about it more, and realizing how pervasive coercion is throughout society.

So, without further ado, I present to you, decoersion ( intentionally spelled w...

Social Media Decline

Social Media: From Fertile Farms to Wastelands

Social media is in rapid decline. What was once a thriving space for innovation, meaningful discussion, and genuine human connection has become a hollow shell of its former self, plagued by corporate greed, algorithmic manipulation, ...

Toddler Investors

Introduction

The investment landscape is moving at an ever-increasing pace, with investors often making funding decisions in mere minutes. The rise of trend-driven investments, such as artificial intelligence, has led to a system that prioritizes popularity over true innovation. ...

Rethinking PCs: A practical approach

Tags: tech

The current trajectory of computer hardware development has increasingly diverged from the practical needs of everyday users. Manufacturers continue to push advancements in speed, power efficiency, and display resolutions—yet for most people, these improvements offer diminishing real-world ben...

Peak Mall Theory

Tags: japan

US mall death, Japan mall life

The decline of shopping malls in the United States is a well-documented phenomenon, while in Japan, malls remain thriving, bustling centers of commerce, entertainment, and community life. This contrast raises an interesting question: why have Japane...

Email is Outdated

 Email seems ubiquitous and irreplaceable. Is it though? It was created for a useful purpose, and worked effectively for a number of years, but I would argue that it is outdated and needs to be replaced by something better as soon as possible.

I explore here why I believe email...

Identity System

 Over my career in software I've repeatedly had to deal with issues of identity. Another way to refer to identity is usernames. The most pervasive identity system in use is email, although it is quickly being supplanted by cell phone number.

Almost every user of the internet ha...

LinkedIn is Buggy

 The main social platform I use is LinkedIn. I've been using it for many years. Over my years of using it I've found it to be very buggy. I began posting the bugs I found as LinkedIn posts. That didn't seem to get much attention or have any meaningful affect, so I created a Github pro...

Hubspot Culture Code

 What follows is a critical critique of the Hubspot Culture Code. This will be an analysis focused on logic. If you are looking for a warm fuzzy perspective on company culture, this isn't it.

A compa...

Pursuing relationships is inherently puerile

Intro

I've seen a disturbing trend online where expressing interest in others for the purpose of being in a relationship with them is thought to be inherently puerile. This view is relayed more simply as "men pursuing women is always sexual and disgusting".

The t...

My time is worth $x per hour

 In the all too recent history I was feeling proud of my day job, and I thought to myself "I can made $x per hour." A bit more thinking I came to the conclusion "I shouldn't do anything that takes me an hour that I could pay someone else to do for less than $x per hour." I believed th...

Should gaming be a gradeschool subject/sport?

 I recently read a post on LinkedIn broadly proclaiming "esports will overtake basketball". My immediate reaction to this was that that is entirely rubbish, and I responded jokingly making fun of the idea. As you might expect, there was a mixed reaction to that.

Some few people...

Job Descriptions

 I am connected to quite a few recruiters and managers on LinkedIn. As a result of this, I often see posts about what candidate's resumes should look like, what information they should contain, how they should approach applying to jobs etc.

Changing the way you apply for roles ...

UMD Data Breach

 A bit over 5 years ago I was involved in the events following a serious data breach at the University of Maryland. I was pulled into the FBI / Secret Service investigation due to my involvement. It may not be clear, but I did not start the data breach. Criminal elements of unknown so...

Blog

 Welcome to my public blog. I haven't blogged publicly in quite a number of years. This is in part due to the overwhelming amount of random information available about me already, and I am unsure about adding to the pile.

I have decided that adding information of higher quality...