Andy Gross has died | Hacker News Reader

Andy Gross has died

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144 pointsbcantrill36 comments

Andy was a very close friend and the best coworker that I’ve ever had. I recently did a personal reference for him and he was looking to work out here on the east coast. I’m crushed that I just found this out on HN through a friend. Andy was like a magnet. One of those people that you generally wanted to be around. In my eyes he was the perfect mixture of skill, hilarity, and crudeness. I tell stories almost every day of things we’ve done at work and out of work. We drank a lot of beer, did a lot of engineering, and pulled a lot of stunts. At the end of the day he proved to a lot of people you can engineer, sell, and be an insane rebel when it comes to the work environment. This is a life taken way too soon. I’ll miss you andy. -sean

Hi Sean, Thank you for these kind words. I'm Andy's youngest cousin, and I stumbled across this page while doing research for his memorial service this weekend. I was in my early teens when he moved to California, and I hadn't seen him for several years till this past Christmas. All you said and reading about all his accomplishments has shed some light on the person he was. Its nice to hear from one of his friends, and I will share it with the rest of the family. Thank you again. - Frances Gross

"CTO and Co-founder at Opsee, NoSQL pioneer. Author of the Riak NoSQL DB, Riak Cloud Storage, Webmachine REST toolkit, 20 years distributed systems experience."

source: https://angel.co/argv0

More info for those who don't know who he is.

https://angel.co/argv0

Pardon my Ignorance, but who is Andy Gross?

An actual article, blog post, or something would be better than a tweet, even if I knew who he was -- the tweet itself has no more substance than the title of this post... and probably shouldn't be shared on HN because there's no extra context.

I'd like to know who he was, what he worked on, etc... The tweet is too vague.

Tweets have a long established history of being empty yet valid content here.

And this is not to be consisted a full bio by any means, but here are the highlights. Andy Gross was Co-creator of Riak and Webmachine, Chief Architect @ Basho. Formerly @ Mochi, Apple, Akamai, a noted speaker, and lover of cats.

Thanks for giving some context. I appreciate it. Again sorry if I offended anyone by me message/tone.

https://github.com/argv0

He worked at Apple and like erlang... sadly, I know little more than this.

Andy's CV/resume offers some insight into his career: https://github.com/argv0/resume/blob/master/andygross-resume...

Huh, small world. He worked for Mochi Media around the same time as three friends of mine... Mochi recruited them right after they graduated UTD, and they moved halfway across the country for it.

Given how small Mochi was then, I bet they knew each other. Just goes to show you the tech world is a really tiny place.

he implemented webmachine and parts of riak iirc

creator of riak and a part of erlang + many other communities

Linkedin profile -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/andygross/

Thank you. Bizarrely, according to Linkedin, Andy and I both have a friend in common!

That wasn't a joke btw. I was merely observing the over-connectedness of Linkedin.

Graduated in 1999. Probably never would've guessed he had less than 20 years left. Another reminder that life can end at any moment and we must seize the day.

Andy Gross had amazing accomplishments, traveled the world, but suffered from depression as do most with crazy high IQ's. He passed away from an accidental overdose.

Andy was warm, generous, authentic, hilarious as fuck, and an absolute killer engineer. He will be badly missed.

How did he die?

When a 40ish hacker and high-pressure startup founder dies unexpectedly with no announced cause of death, the chance is about 80% that they committed suicide.

This comment is a bit insensitive given the context, but man that hits close to home.

Sending hugs. I hope you're okay.

Some days you crush it, some days it crushes you.

I'm not sure it is quite right to jump to this conclusion. Heart disease and auto accident ('unintentional injury') loom high for probable causes of death for that age group.

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_o...

That said, suicide is third highest on that list when you only look at things that could be sudden.

Usually, when people die of heart attacks and accidents, their friends and family say that when they are announcing the death. But, yes, it is a real possibility. Thus 80%, not 95% or 99%.

Well fuck that.

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