by benreesman | 2026-02-23 14:19:58+00:00
Obituary for Heroes

Suchir Balaji
November 21, 1998 — November 26, 2024
He started coding at eleven. Built his own computer at thirteen. Made the U.S. Computing Olympiad as a high schooler. John Schulman recruited him straight out of Berkeley. He spent four years at OpenAI, where his work on data collection was, in Schulman's own words, "essential" to the success of the product.
Then he looked at what he'd built and decided it was wrong.
"If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company."
He left. He went public. He told the New York Times that OpenAI had violated copyright law — not as an abstract legal argument, but as someone who had done the work and seen the pipeline from the inside. He was prepared to testify. On November 18, eight days before his death, lawyers for the Times named him as a witness with "unique and relevant documents."
He was twenty-six years old. He had plans to start a nonprofit. His mother described his mood as "cheerful" two weeks before he died.
The medical examiner spent forty minutes in his apartment. His mother was given the keys at four o'clock and told to collect his body the next day. The official autopsy was not released for three months. When it was, it showed alcohol, amphetamine, and GHB in his system.
OpenAI said they were "devastated." They are valued at $157 billion. The product Suchir helped build is the source of that valuation. The product Suchir said was built on stolen work.
He was right. He said so. He died.

The Unnamed
Over fifty gig workers murdered on the job since 2017, working for platforms incubated, funded, or accelerated through Y Combinator's network and its imitators. Uber. Lyft. DoorDash. Instacart. Their names appear in police blotters, GoFundMe campaigns, and a spreadsheet maintained by an advocacy group because no one else was counting.
Bella Lewis. Shot by her passenger while driving for Lyft. Her sister found out later that day. Lyft says they tried to contact the family but couldn't reach them. The family says they never heard from the company. There were no survivor benefits. There was a forced arbitration clause.
Elijah Newman. Found in his driver's seat in St. Louis with a gunshot wound to the torso. A Lyft light on the dashboard. A bullet casing on the seat.
Fifty more. Sixty-three percent of them people of color. None of them employees. None of their families entitled to workers' compensation. Every one of them signed an arbitration agreement that said they couldn't sue. Every one of them classified as an independent contractor by companies whose founders were told, in a room in Mountain View, that labor law was a problem to be disrupted.
The companies will not say how many of their workers have been killed. They are not required to. They say each situation is "unique" and that they have "programs in place." The programs are not described. The situations are not unique. The workers are dead.

Drew Houston's First Application
In his first Y Combinator application, Drew Houston wrote that he'd be willing to sell Dropbox for one million dollars. Paul Graham tells this story because it's charming. The company is now worth billions. "It's really convenient that no one wanted to buy Dropbox early on," Graham says, laughing.
This is the story Y Combinator tells about itself: scrappy founders, absurd early ambitions, staggering eventual success. The story is told in offices and on stages and in the pages of magazines.
The other story — the one about the people who deliver the groceries, drive the cars, and build the datasets — is told in medical examiner's reports and arbitration filings and a mother standing outside her son's apartment in San Francisco asking why the autopsy took forty minutes.

What an Obituary Is
An obituary is a public record that someone was here. That they had a name. That their life was not a line item in someone else's valuation.
The people listed above — Suchir, Bella, Elijah, and the ones whose names I don't have because no one was required to record them — were here. They did work. The work made other people rich. And when they died, the systems that profited from their labor could not be bothered to count them.
This is not a memorial. A memorial implies that the killing has stopped.
This is a record. While it continues.

"6 kids dead, not counting Suchir."
— benreesman, Hacker News, February 23, 2026
On a thread about the tears of Donald Knuth
The moderator asked him to stop.