RIP Martin Schaedel: 1985–2009 | Hacker News Reader

RIP Martin Schaedel: 1985–2009

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58 pointsfraserad32 comments

I knew Martin very well.

He was part of a design agency I build in 2005 with Morten Lund and a brilliant designer called Michael Nilsson.

He had built a site called Vacation Valley that we helped him redesign and after that we joined forces.

Together we where involved in a bunch of fun projects (among others zecco.com which was originally build out of Copenhagen Denmark by hello)

He was a young and very very smart guy and knew a lot of people and was a great thinker and yes SEO wiz.

Who knows what he could have been today. I often think about him.

What an interesting story.

Did anyone here ever meet him?

Makes me wonder how many other people there are like this living incredible lives fit for a movie. And here I am staring at excel.

Maybe 1/10 of 1%? The rest of us are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs.

We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.

I thought that sentence was too good for an offhand comment, and sure enough, it's a quote from "The Green Door", a short story by someone called "O. Henry".

Not suggesting you're stealing it, probably it is more famous to you, but I'd never heard it, nor of the story, nor of the author before.

I thought he was more well-known!

His most famous short story was probably "The Gift of the Magi" but I quoted "The Green Door".

http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/ohenry/the4m15.htm

Many lives are incredible, sometimes small details, sometimes extreme events, but only a few make it a point to broadcast and paint that persona of themselves, real or not.

I knew him from SEO land - we met in London in 2002. My favorite thing about Martin is that he would call (always on the phone, never by email) out of the blue with completely random requests. The last one I got from him, two weeks before he died, was to run a Hitwise report on some random website. Because it was Martin, you never asked why, but he was already ready to return the favor in any way he could.

I remember when Shak told me that he died. It was a sad day indeed.

Martin and I crossed paths a few times, at first jousting and later as friends. He was truly a character.

Someday I'll tell the story of how one of his unwelcome SEO explorations led to us setting a creative snare. But that story will keep for a few more years.

That's a story I'd like to hear. I have this inherent expectation that the "best" SEO's are super technical and figure out effectively doing SEO utililizing tech mere marketers can't reverse engineer easily, but given the rangenius episode, I wonder if it's really true.

OT: The page was very hard to read on my iPhone. Black text on a dark blue background with light blue headers does not make for the best reading experience.

I never knew of Martin until today but his untimely death was tragic and I am sure many people miss him.

23 , just too freaking young. RIP Martin

> When he realised I wasn’t a mod, he didn’t want to know me.

So if you weren't useful to him, you were nothing to him..

> Martin seemed much more interested in helping others than amassing personal wealth

.. but naturally, he just loved helping people. This guy just waltzed into famous people's offices and added them to his network, and now he's left everyone posting adoring memorials about him, gushing about what a charming and wonderful person he was. Now there's a god-mode-sociopath if there ever was one.

He was 23 and he WAS very helpful I can attest to that.

You can't understand human nature well enough to be sure that he has a god complex and you don't have an insect complex.

The paragraph after is even more telling:

This was a common theme when I spoke to people about Martin: he didn’t network in the normal way; instead, he was ruthlessly selective about who he wanted to befriend and charm. Soon enough, Dave and Martin were friends; on one occasion, Dave had just arrived at an SEO conference in San Jose and got a call from Martin at 2 AM: “Am I okay to sleep on your floor? So you can get me a free pass? Free bedroom?”—he expected a lot from his friends and in return he “was loyal – like no one else”.

Also, the fact that he apparently made his fortune through SEO should if nothing else make people suspicious of him.

Small planes are death traps...

Probably still safer than driving though.

Maybe not, found this on http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re... :

"How dangerous is flying? There are 16 fatal accidents per million hours of general aviation. It is fairly safe to assume that when a plane crashes and someone dies, everyone on board dies. By contrast, the death rate for automobile driving is roughly 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles. Car crashes don't always kill everyone in the car so let's use this statistic as provided, which is for an individual traveling in a car rather than for the entire car. So considering that the average airplane accomplishes a groundspeed of at least 100 miles per hour, those million hours of flight push the occupants of the plane over more than 100 million miles of terrain. Comparing 16 fatal accidents to the 1.7 rate for driving, we find that flying is no more than 10 times as dangerous per mile of travel. And since most accidents happen on takeoff or landing, a modern fast light airplane traveling a longish distance might be comparable in safety to a car.

By Philip Greenspun at http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety (whoever that is, I don't think he is making things up)"

EDIT: fyi, "general aviation" refers to non-airline civilian traffic

As a private pilot, small a/c flying is as safe as you make it. As much as pilots understand the concepts, they tend to fall back to baser instincts when an engine goes bad at the worst time.

Right, this is where the experience comes in I imagine, and the requirement for X amount of flight hours for Y job. It's not about how easy it is to fly in nominal conditions, but rather how those one in a thousand or million events get handled, in between the hours of "tedium".

Not to mention the absurd number of small planes that go down due to running out of fuel.

My father was a flight instructor for the Air Force in the 1950s. He said the most common causes of accidents were running out of fuel, flying into bad weather, and failing to warm up the engine before takeoff.

> As the single-engine Marchetti climbed during takeoff, the engine suddenly quit.

That's the symptom of failing to warm up the engine properly - it quits just after leaving the ground.

I think this is the right a/c:

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20090128X...

Had fuel, wrong tank. Not enough altitude to try to make it back to a runway. One reason why I appreciate my glider rating - we always know where/when we're going if our engine (tow plane or winch) stops.

Or those who are flying in poor weather ('marginal VFR').

So many accidents read as the pilot really shouldn't have, but did anyway.

These can be greatly mitigated by ensuring that pilots stay current, for instance the clubs I belong to demand 6 monthly re-testing, rather than 2 years the license demands. Not to mention, if you don't fly for 4 weeks, you have to pass a mini re-test. In my clubs long history they have never lost a club plane or pilot.

My father has his pilots' license and took me on many long-distance trips when I was young. I've toyed with the idea of going to get my license but when I talked to him about it, he tried to talk me out of it. Small planes are dangerous, he says, not because the planes themselves are inherently dangerous, but because the pilots flying them are typically inexperienced and don't have enough hours behind the stick to instinctively deal with emergencies when they happen. I'm pretty sure that your statistics would be lop-sided if you broke down the number of accidents into quantiles by the pilot's flying hours.

I would love to see better breakdowns of small craft accident stats, at the very least for one country.

The biggest issue is that the stats are skewed by commercial aviation. When you remove that, it's relatively risky per passenger-mile.

Small planes are certainly not safer than driving. I'm a private pilot and i've studied it at length (and I love flying).

I don't have time to braindump my research, as it's slightly hard to compare fatalities per passenger mile in autos vs per flight hour with light non-commercial aviation. It's about 100,000 hours per 1.9 fatalities which includes commercial travel. It's SIGNIFICANTLY higher in small planes.

The way I summarize it to people in casual conversation is: Flying a Cessna is safer than riding a motorcycle but more dangerous than driving a car.

I've tried to do this myself, and found it's pretty difficult task. When you remove really stupid mistakes pilots make (and we'd never do any of those things... we're not THOSE pilots... right?!) it starts to look a lot safer.

Driving is also probably substantially safer if you don't make stupid mistakes.

Of course, you're also more at the mercy of others making stupid mistakes.

Yes, but given the distances involved in aviation, mid-airs are less likely than traffic collisions.

It is comforting to know that if you are religious about your preflight checks and your planning, and never fly in weather you aren't comfortable with, your odds of survival are greatly increased. How much is hard to tell, but making a hobby of reading NTSB reports shows you that the unavoidables - like wings randomly falling off - are pretty rare. Stupidity rules the day in aviation accidents.

Especially small stunt planes...

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