[HN Gopher] Martin Kersten, creator of MonetDB, has died
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Martin Kersten, creator of MonetDB, has died
Author : greghn
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-07-28 13:22 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cwi.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cwi.nl)
| nikita wrote:
| Snowflake, SingleStore, Clickhouse, Hyper, sql server columnstore
| index, duckdb, Apache Arrow compute, redshift, the list can go
| on.
|
| RIP Martin and thank for your contribution. The world of data
| analytics honors you!
| homerowilson wrote:
| Kersten led amazing research and MonetDB was really ground-
| breaking in many ways (columnar, shared memory interaction with
| client languages, etc.). A sad day.
| jb1991 wrote:
| My heart goes out to Martin's family, my thoughts and prayers are
| with you at this time.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Martin was an inspiring group leader even after his retirement...
| he was always so upbeat and optimistic. I'll also remember him
| for his flowery and poetic use of metaphors and parables in
| papers and titles.
|
| Anyway...
|
| * The piece-de-resistance: https://www.monetdb.org/
|
| * MonetDB Solutions: https://www.monetdbsolutions.com/ is the
| commercial spin-off of MonetDB. Martin chaired the company hands-
| on after retiring, almost to his last day. They do integration,
| training, deployment, professional support... interestingly, it
| is fully FOSS, and commercial clients who ask for features get
| those features implemented as FOSS.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Why do obituaries avoid mentioning the cause of death?
| henrydark wrote:
| Obituaries celebrate a life, not a death
| dmead wrote:
| it's called respect, fellow hacker news reader.
| swayvil wrote:
| First thought on my mind too.
|
| Is it just me or do a lot of famous software people meet their
| end by cancer?
|
| It reminds me of something from a bit of mystic literature. It
| was offered that serious practicioners of "concentration
| meditation" tend to get the crab.
|
| And software developers are nothing if not concentrated.
|
| Makes you think.
|
| What is this "attention" thing anyway? A field? A ray? A
| wishing machine?
| Scarblac wrote:
| A _lot_ of people in general die because of cancer.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| There are many causes of death, and globally the distribution
| of cause of death is quite wide.
|
| But software developers are generally removed from a large
| portion on it. They're not working with hazardous things,
| typically can avoid low-income related consequences
| (including living in dangerous areas), and have a higher than
| average intellect.
|
| When you remove most of the common causes of death, cancer
| becomes proportionally more common. It's like rolling 100
| dice, tossing out anything less than 5, and noticing a lot of
| 6s.
| swayvil wrote:
| So it's just selection bias?
| aliqot wrote:
| When you're famous and smart, you're likely to live to a ripe
| old age.
|
| Cancer is an endgame disease, like gout being a disease of
| nobility. If you don't get killed off by violence or diet
| first, eventually you live long enough where you begin to
| seeing the result of running a copy through a copy machine a
| few billion times, which is cancer.
|
| Our cells take damage every day, eventually that damage is
| just enough for some cells to lose control of how and to what
| extent they replicate, soon some of their friends join and
| soon before you know it they want their own veinous supply.
| dspillett wrote:
| *> Is it just me or do a lot of famous software people meet
| their end by cancer?
|
| If you live long enough cancer is one of the biggest
| concerns, and people who don't have particularly dangerous
| lives generally live long enough for this to be an issue.
|
| Heart disease is the other top dog on the list. In many
| places this is still the top killer over-all, but it tends to
| take people earlier (obviously talking averages here, either
| can strike at practically any age) and is more deadly among
| those with lesser access to good health care (the non-famous)
| so the better-off may experience both, survive the "heart
| problems" cut, and get hit by cancer later.
| [deleted]
| jeroenvlek wrote:
| RIP Martin Kersten. I took his undergraduate course at the
| University of Amsterdam. MonetDB was his professional baby. Nice
| guy.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Sad to hear of this. MonetDB really is/was pioneering and
| interesting work. I hope development on it continues to progress.
| There's some quality practical research and engineering in there.
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