Gregg Kellogg has died

[weinzierl]

Very sad to hear.

If you read Gregg's Health FAQ be sure not to miss the "You seem oddly calm about this." section. You could otherwise get a wrong impression.

Life really was not kind to him, but he doesn't seem to have let it get in his way.

https://greggkellogg.net/health-faq.html

[wjnc]

"If you know Rebecca (many reading this won't), you know how amazing she is. She's worked with many cancer patients, though her work at Commonweal, and her numerous award-winning cook books. She would call me her "rock", but really, she's mine. I have been unbelievably lucky in life, and particularly in my relationship with Rebecca.

I've really accomplished my life goals – my family is well looked after, I've had a very rewarding career in Tech; particularly the last 15 years working with some amazing people at the World WIde Web Consortium. If there's ever a good time to go out, it's now. Anything else would just be gravy on top."

The only goals that really matter. Love, family and professional and personal joy.

[languagehacker]

I really admired Gregg early on in my career. He gave a fantastic talk in Austin, Texas back in about 2007 or 2008 for a Semantic Web Meetup (at a venue called "The Boom Boom Room" funnily enough) back when I was working as the resident search expert and linguist for an SEO consultancy (remember those?). He talked about RDF, OWL, and SPARQL, and some of the iterative ways we could get there on the sites we're building in a way that had me enthusiastic for the web's future. I spoke with him after the conference, and if I remember correctly, he encouraged me to start looking into Lucene after hearing about my job.

Several years later, I'm living in the Bay Area and working for Wikia (now Fandom), acting as their resident Solr expert after taking his advice to heart. Wikia was investing in their structured data initiatives, and ended up bringing Gregg onto exactly the team I was attached to in order to investigate how to apply his area of expertise to our vast store of user-generated, semi-structured data. The opportunity to work with such a talented researcher in a consultative capacity was a tremendous learning experience.

I felt privileged to get to work with someone I had admired early on and made an impact into the trajectory of my career. The takeaway from this is probably that you don't necessarily know whose future your might touch with a presentation or with friendly advice casually offered at a conference or meetup.

Something tells me I'm one of countless cases where Gregg didn't just push the science of structured data and the semantic web forward, but helped to mold expert practitioners through his kindness and enthusiasm for the work. In this way, his legacy will be long-lasting and inestimable.

[poszlem]

> In August 4th, I went into the MarinHealth Emergency Room, due to increased stomach pain on top of symptoms which became more acute in June. I've had a reduced appetite, with consequent weight loss, for about the last year. I had been fighting to keep weight on for some time, then in July, Rebecca and I went back to our usual haunt at the Hotel Wailea in Maui, which we love. Towards the end of the trip, I had a sudden and dramatic loss of appetite, more than the usual.

It’s incredible that someone could have such symptoms for a year and not a single doctor ordered an abdominal ultrasound. Given the outcome, this might have been a blessing, he was able to live his last year without knowing about the disease, which realistically isn’t curable. But at the same time, it could just as easily have been another abdominal tumor where a year’s delay would have made a huge difference.

May he rest in peace and bless his family.

[Findecanor]

Don't underestimate human incompetence and pettiness. I have a similar story, and now have to live with an ostomy and chronic latent cancer that could flare up at any time.

[tedggh]

You always need different opinions. It took me three different doctors to finally get the prescription for cancer screening due to family history. One would thing this kind of stuff is protocol but many times it is subjective, completely up to the doctor's opinion. For doctor 1 it may not be alarming enough and for doctor #3 crazy you didn't start the screenings 5 years ago. That was my experience, and this was at the same hospital network in the same city.

[canucker2016]

Especially given that (from his FAQ 'You seem oddly calm about this.' )

  "I first was confronted with my prospective early mortality back when I contracted Hodgkin's Disease (and later ITP) in my 20's and early 30's."

A cancer survivor who is losing weight for unknown reasons should set off alarm bells.

[xunil2ycom]

Did he see a doctor about it before the ER visit? This is a good reminder to not shrug off things like unplanned weight loss - see your physician!

[dcminter]

Pancreatic cancer can be curable in some cases - see the Whipple procedure:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy

That said, it would depend on several other factors, not least catching the tumour early enough - and it looks like a pretty tough thing to go through even if successful.

[andsoitis]

I you don't know who Gregg Kellogg was: https://greggkellogg.net/foaf

[canucker2016]

His resume link 404'd.

archive.org copy is at https://web.archive.org/web/20110913122328/https://greggkell...

He worked at NeXT and Go Corp.'s Eo spinoff, two hot startups of the late 80s/early 90s.

[jeneleski]

Sad and sorry to hear of Gregg's passing. I've known Gregg since day one. his father knew my father. we took 2 week long family ski vacations together in Sun Valley, Idaho. Im missing Gregg's smile and laughter. He laughed when his sister and I wrapped my brother in a Scott ski boot box and presented to Gregg for his birthday. or when thought we were so funny following Gregg into the movie theatre. we stacked my brother on my shoulders and put a raincoat over the two of us thinking the theatre ticket person would let us in because of the height created by stacking my brother on my shoulders. Gregg just laughed at our silly pranks. Gregg left me with the best life lesson he shared. pay attention to what can be " Certainly, seek out meaningful work, but prioritize loving relationships over it.

[jeneleski]

Sad and sorry to hear of Gregg's passing. I've known Gregg since day one. his father knew my father. we took 2 week long family ski vacations together in Sun Valley, Idaho. Im missing Gregg's smile and laughter. He laughed when his sister and I wrapped my brother in a Scott ski boot box and presented to Gregg for his birthday. or when thought we were so funny following Gregg into the movie theatre. we stacked my brother on my shoulders and put a raincoat over the two of us thinking the theatre ticket person would let us in because of the height created by stacking my brother on my shoulders. Gregg just laughed at our silly pranks. Gregg left me with the best life lesson he shared. pay attention to what can be " Certainly, seek out meaningful work, but prioritize loving relationships over it

[Waterluvian]

I read his page about his health (I’m thankful for those who choose to do this) and I’m wondering if someone can help me understand how a year of reduced appetite and weight loss doesn’t trigger any alarms.

Is that something that can just happen to people and be no meaningful signal that anything is wrong? Ie. can a perfectly healthy person struggle to gain weight if they’re trying? I guess I’ve always perceived it to generally be the opposite.

[tedggh]

That was fast, which feels oddly positive. My brother died from cancer and spent a full year in agony. I do cancer screenings every 3 years given my brother died relatively young from stomach cancer. Lately I have been thinking on adding whole body MRI scans to my screening process but I keep reading conflicting evidence on their effectiveness. My brother’s cancer was detected late and would have been easy to treat and perhaps even survivable if detected early. I also have two close friends diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in their 30s, again both with high survival rate on early detection.

[sgt]

Black ribbon, Dang?

[toomuchtodo]

email hn at ycombinator dot com

[kinow]

Very sad to hear this. I interacted with Gregg a few times in Open Source projects, and he was always very easy to work with, even though he appeared to be quite busy and involved in multiple initiatives.

[jaygray0919]

Gregg helped me and my team many times - pro bono. I once made a silly typo in some code that he kindly reviewed. When he found the error, he pointed to it with a wink. Always helpful on big stuff and small stuff. His tools are first class. And I had an online dialog with him within the last 2 months and had no idea about his condition. Will miss him.

[lolive]

Holy cow! I litterally convinced TODAY my data governance team to investigate the adoption of JSON-LD at scale on our web service internal portal. Kudos man! Your heritage is still alive!

[kakapo5672]

I worked with Greg many years ago, back at EO. Very smart and all, but what stood out most was that he was just a really good person. Very sorry to hear this news.

[smm11]

First saw his name when looking into the RhapsodyOS boot process. Might still be in every iPhone to this day.

[pfdietz]

Pancreatic cancer is horrible. It killed my mother within two weeks of the confirming biopsy.