Héctor Garcia-Molina, 1953–2019 | Hacker News Reader

Héctor Garcia-Molina, 1953–2019

rjlipton.wordpress.com

121 pointsfurcyd16 comments

> In 2001, Garcia-Molina was invited to join the board of directors of Oracle Corporation, a position he held until his death. He forged personal and professional bonds with many leaders of the database company, including founder and chairman Larry Ellison, who offered this statement: “We will all miss his contributions. I will miss Hector’s pleasant and persuasive way of discussing complex ideas. Hector’s gentle and considerate personal style captured my enduring respect and affection.”

still trying to reconcile this with "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison."

Perhaps he thought the most likely way to reform Oracle was by being on the board?

I had to look up that.

"Definition of anthropomorphize. transitive verb. : to attribute human form or personality to. intransitive verb. : to attribute human form or personality to things not human."

Byran M. Cantrill: https://invidio.us/watch?t=34m00s&v=-zRN7XLCRhc

> trying to reconcile this

It is generally considered quite rude to speak ill of those who are no longer with us, even if they were adversaries when they were alive. This goes doubly when speaking publicly and in a professional setting.

On another note, that anthropomorphizing quote is quite possibly my favourite use of the word ever.

> It is generally considered quite rude to speak ill of those who are no longer with us, even if they were adversaries when they were alive.

This was a shot at Ellison, who is still very much with us.

In 2011, I was applying to Stanford for Ph.D. (I didn't get in, and eventually had a bad experience starting at KAIST in Korea). At the time, I was living in Vancouver, and I took a couple of weeks to visit friends from exchange programme in California, and briefly passed Stanford. I emailed a couple of professors to try to meet (and maybe get a foot in the door...).

Héctor very kindly replied to my email! He also invited me to the InfoLab lunch, which was about MOOCs that day. He was very friendly and knowledgable, and even though I was but fresh out of university in the UK, he welcomed me warmly, humbly listened to some of my crazy ideas about data management, and encouraged me to pursue serious research.

It's sad to read of his passing. I'm grateful that he's well-known enough to be memorialised here on Hacker News; he deserves the recognition.

Hector was on my thesis committee. In addition to being one of the most cited authors in Computer Science (http://lintool.github.io/scholar-scraper/index-stratosphere....), he was a kind soul.

I still own a copy of "Database Systems: The Complete Book" (by Hector Garcia-Molina, Jeffrey D. Ullman and Jennifer Widom). I highly recommend it. Those books with such deep knowledge are very rare these days.

Me too. Products cycle too fast those days so there is less need for those great books.

His p2p research group was extremely influential in the design of second generation Gnutella search algorithms around 2002, particularly those integrated into LimeWire. Sad to hear of his passing.

Oh man, I totally missed this, I don’t remember seeing anything on the Stanford report either.

I audited CS245 and my coworkers did as well, among other things I showed up to. Hector was a wonderful person and a great teacher.

Well, that's a familiar name. He wrote the intro textbook with Ullman and Widom for Databases that so many courses use.

Rest in peace, one of the most influential personalities in CS in the Valley and an inspiration to his students

Peace!

p.s. anyone else bothered by the ads on the post?

I think the point of ads is to bother you. The more expensive the ad, the more it bothers you.

I don't think there is a "solution" (yet) to the ad-as-a-model problem.

Edit: The only ad I see there is for their book. Maybe try Firefox?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com