Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

I don't know if ending another human's life leaves any possibility of redemption for a person, but reading this I still empathize with the sense of loss and powerlessness that emanate from this letter.

Speaking in general terms, not to the specifics of Hans Reiser's crimes - I dont see why it wouldn't allow for redemption, people do stupid things and get blinded easily.

Drunk driving is a stupid thing people do. Murder is an act of evil.

Only if you believe in evil.

I'm not christian so I don't see the world like that.

He killed his s/o, like what 15 years ago now?

People change and deserves a second chance.

Evil is not a religious concept.

Dude. Good & evil is such a central concept in Christianity it is practically ingrained in your society if you live in a christian country even if you are secular.

Goodness and evilness predates Christianity by millenia. Read about Mesopotamian religions, or the Hindic ones.

It's not relevant since those religions are no longer practiced.

Christianity is, and is still influencing our world, like I wrote above.

Hinduism it's pretty much alive, and Christianity it's just a fork of Judaism.

When Cristianity didn't even exist, the Chinese already had a good chunk of philosophy perfectly set and written, and even modernish rules for war and diplomacy: Tao Te King, and The Art of War.

Heck, America from Canada to the Patagonia didn't even know about Jesus until the Europeans arrived 1500 years later. 1500s damn years. For a huge continent mass spread over from almost the North Pole to the South pole.

So much for an 'Universal' God. So universal that Aquinas had to rip a good chunk of Greek philosophy to adapt (more like smash it down with nails and duct tape) ancient Middle East fairy tales into the less-desert bound Europe as the modern Christian canonical sources.

If any, the Western world is shaped by the Roman architecture and law, and the Greek worldview, mindset and math.

> It's not relevant since those religions are no longer practiced. >> Christianity is, and is still influencing our world, like I wrote above.

Hinduism it's pretty much alive, and Christianity it's just a fork of Judaism

Okay, so you're a hindu or a jew.

Are you arguing my point about christianity influencing "our" world? I guess I expressed myself rather western-centric.

I am not neither a hindu or jew. Christianism in Europe is larguely cultural, our values shifted a lot since the Enlightenment times. The US, not much, they have a large sense of prudeness which affected even policitically left leaned people.

I mean, here people it's Christian by name only. Technically, even the Southern Spain with infamous street parades with large walks carrying a big structure with a Virgin, most of that it's just a showoff and a way to say "look how loaded we are, so much that we can build great golden clothes for our Virgin".

If any, lots of lore in Europe it's just paganism with a Christian disguise.

Even Christianism itself it's so-so Christian-wannabe unlike the original one which came from the Middle East; it was largely repurposed with Greek values so people here could assimilate better these alien customs such as not being able to eat pork or nonsense about alcohol when the risk of dehidrating in Europe was near nil.

Kinda like North Korea with Communism. Marxist? Today, in name, maybe. Because Juche it's almost a copycat of right wing fascism with Asian features. Kinda like the Japanese one, but with Koreans.

The English words for good and evil are pre-Christian in origin. So are their cognates in other European languages. Greek philosophers were debating “good and evil” centuries before Jesus of Nazareth was born. So there is nothing inherently Christian about those words, or the concepts they describe.

You are correct, but you are also ignoring the fact that we are no longer living in ancient greek time.

I did not claim that Christianity invented good & evil. I claimed that it is a central concept in Christianity.

Your way of reasoning here is often referred to as a straw mans argument.

Christianity also features the premise of marriage, so does that mean no secular conception of marriage can exist? Most people think otherwise.

Christianity doesn't own "good and evil", even though it features it, and nor are these premises even owned by religion generally.

Evil as a moral judgement isn't. Acts can be good or evil. In more secular terms we prefer to say "harmful" or "unjust" but the meaning is arguably the same.

But the idea that "evil" is an attribute a person can possess is 100% a religious one. If you're not religious, there can be no evil person unless you think there is an "evil" gene or an "evil" psychosis - "sociopath" and "psychopath" are often used this way but usually in ways that have very little to do with diagnostic criteria and more with trying to sound more profound than just calling someone a bad person; in pseudoscience this also sometimes manifests as the idea that some people are more predisposed to crime, though usually nowadays this more often manifests as vague notions of "racial culture" than measuring skull shapes, but this too is just a more elaborate way to call groups of people inherently bad.

As a religious concept, "evil" can be somewhat nebulous where people just take some wrong turns and "evilness" seeps into them making them irredeemable: many Christians (especially certain sects of American protestantism) believe "sins" (i.e. disobeying God's rules, not necessarily causing measurable harm to others in secular terms) work kind of like this where habitual sinning in one way can lead to sinning in other ways as sinfulness takes over the person's life (like an addiction spiraling out of control). It can also be a much more literal idea of outright demonic possession (e.g. the kind of thing you need an exorcist to help with) or demonic presence (e.g. evil people actually being lizard people masking themselves as fellow humans to hide among us). And yes, I'm labelling certain fringe conspiracy movements as religious as they operate on a similar framework and often have direct ties to religious traditions and concepts.

Conversely, not only are "evil people" a religious concept but so are "good people". If good is something you do that means you need to continously demonstrate your "goodness" by doing good things. But if good is something you can be then any accusations of wrongdoing are highly suspect because a good person would do no such things. This is why most people don't take kindly to being told even in the most polite terms that something they did was kinda racist (or sexist, or misogynist, or...) because "I'm not a racist" (i.e. thinking of it as an innate attribute of their character rather than one of their actions and hence something they can and need to actively control) - mind you, liberals did not do a good job with this distinction either over the past decade because as it turns out even self-professed non-religious people often have religious upbringings that stick with them (i.e. self-applied labels like "feminist", "anti-racist", etc should only ever be read as statements of intent and dismissed if they do not manifest in their actions which they rarely do).

Evil is an attribute that people may come to possess through various means (ideology is a big one), which becomes manifest through their actions when they demonstrate severe selfish disregard for the lives of others.

The above does not rest on religion. Christians/etc having their own theories about evil is irrelevant. When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.

When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.

Well, no. Most people I've heard say something like that would mean that he was innately evil as a person. They wouldn't spell it out like that but the underlying assumption is that a "normal human being" couldn't do what he did and therefore he was a freak mutation in some way. Most people even struggle with the idea that there was a time in such a person's life where they weren't "evil" yet. Even when talking about Antisocial Personality Disorder ("psychopathy") they rarely know that this is often in part caused by severe early childhood trauma, e.g. sexual abuse or parental abuse and emotional neglect - most seem to believe these people are "just born evil" and any prior period where they didn't do anything sufficiently evil were just a mask.

This is easiest to see when talking about the Nazis. Instead of trying to gain a systemic understanding of how the Nazis came to power or how "ordinary citizens" could be made to commit massacres and genocides we single out the big names as uniquely evil and make up excuses for the rest. For the longest time I had been told that soldiers who participated in massacres were implicitly threatened with death or at least physical punishment but we know that this was not the case and the mere threat of social ostracization by the other members of their unit was enough. The majority of those involved in the massacres saw themselves as victims for having to carry out those commands and deal with the trauma because denying their own agency helped them cope with what they had done.

So no, they don't mean "a person who has done something evil" when they say a person is evil. They usually mean something more transcendental than that. When most people say Pol Pot or Hitler or Milosevic was evil they mean he wasn't human the same way "normal humans" are human. They may not think he was literally possessed by a demon or the physical manifestation of a demon but they will think there was some essence of evilness inside him that would inevitably manifest. He wasn't evil as a result of doing evil things, he did evil things because he was an evil person. This is called essentialism and it's extremely widespread and antithetical to a systems theory based understanding of social dynamics and behaviors.

Again, well said!

Pol Pot wasn't "innately" evil and I doubt many people would say such a thing. Pol Pot is evil because he did evil things, not the other way around. For that matter, most Christians believe that all people are prone to sin and the difference between people is whether they seek forgiveness after giving into sin. The innate sense of evil exists in all people which is why Christ had to sacrifice himself to atone for that sin. Personally I am not a christian and blood sacrifice (of anybody or anything) to atone for sins doesn't make logical sense to me, but that's what their bible says and that's what most of them preach. A few, like Calvinists, are notable exceptions.

Well written and pretty much summarize what I think and tried to convey above.

I wish I was as good expressing myself like you are!

What do you mean by "I don't believe in evil"?

I think many people can agree that inherently "evil" people are very very rare. Usually people who commit an "evil" act have a reason or justification. It's portrayed in literally every movie with an antihero and spawned the "villain origin story" meme.

But even if they have a reason/justification, that does not make the antihero or villain any less evil.

What do you mean by "I don't believe in evil"?

I mean that the popular idea of evil is a childs story and should not blur our reasoning.

One can consider an act "evil", but if you saw the other side of the coin, perhaps it was done out of necessity, revenge, fear or another "non-evil" reason.

(I am not trying to rationalize away horrible deeds).

I believe in selfishness tho. That's a real thing.

If you don't believe in evil (I don't) that not only means he isn't evil but that he also didn't murder his ex because he was evil. So there must still be something to him 15 years ago that made him plan to and murder his ex, hide the body, use elaborate lies to deny his actions and then only admit to it when offered a deal to disclose the location of the body to allow the victim's grieving family to bury her.

That's a lot. The prison system is neither equipped nor designed to resocialize or rehabilitate people. He hasn't demonstrated any considerable change in his character or outlook on the value of human life that makes me believe he changed for the better.

He didn't make a mistake. He intentionally planned out the murder of his ex and how to hide the body and explain her disappearance and he did this to keep his children he neglected, which was the reason for her breaking up with him to begin with. And then he acted out that plan and stuck to it for months. Most people don't even commit to their gym memberships as long as he did to his cover story.

People aren't evil. But people also don't improve by rotting in prison. You can argue that means we need something better than prison and I would, but you can't argue that means he should be treated as redeemed or released early.

Dropping a feel-good out of context MLK quote to try and impress a future parole hearing is not a demonstration of character growth. Still referring to his victim as "my wife" when she had already broken up with him is not a demonstration of character growth. If he seeks redemption he needs to address those surviving his victim. If he wants to demonstrate rehabilitation he needs to do more than just get older and memorize meaningless platitudes.

If you don't believe in evil (I don't) that not only means he isn't evil but that he also didn't murder his ex because he was evil. So there must still be something to him 15 years ago that made him plan to and murder his ex, hide the body, use elaborate lies to deny his actions and then only admit to it when offered a deal to disclose the location of the body to allow the victim's grieving family to bury her.

For sure, there were reasons. We just don't know them.

but you can't argue that means he should be treated as redeemed or released early.

I'm not. Was just saying people deserve another chance.

Christians believe in evil AND believe in redemption. If you are looking for people who believe that positive change is impossible, try genetic determinists.

Religion-free definition of evil: inclined to increase someone else's suffering without regard (that is, without caring enough to try to reduce that increase).

If you’re not religious, what’s the basis for saying anyone “deserves” anything? If he’s just meat, then he’s clearly a defective model. Just take him out. How is society better with him alive?

Has Hans Reiser changed and does he deserve a second chance?

His first parole board certainly didn’t think so and decided to keep him in for 5 more years.

The true Übermensch would never give a second thought (or the light of day) to such a piddling subject as this, one who exhibits all the frailties and animal passions of the last man! "Second chances" and "forgiveness" are just as much symptoms of christian morality as good and evil themselves. Remember always that justice died with God. Our only arbiter is the creative life, is the aesthetic domain.

Thus spoke Zarathustra..

I don't understand and can't accept why crimes committed while drunk get you a lesser punishment than a crime committed while sober.

tl;dr https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea If you don't want to accept it, that's more on you, refusing to understand it is weird though.

Recklessly drinking when you know you are going to drive immediately afterwards means that there is mens rea. Perhaps not for murder but certainly for deliberately increasing the risk of harm to an innocent party.

Which is why killing someone while driving drunk is treated more harshly than killing someone because you got distracted by something on the side of the road. Another example of mens rea.

So, this is a reasonable thing to be confused and frustrated about. It's worth remembering that the underlying philosophy of justice, crime, and punishment isn't actually something a society agrees upon. Ask five different people a question about the law, the courts, or the prisons and you'll get five different answers. And the system we get out of that is a hodgepodge of extremely path dependent features based upon who was in control of what levers of power at the time a given law was passed or a given punishment decided to be cruel and unusual (or not).

Broadly speaking, there are two independent axes the judicial system is trying to satisfy:

- punitive punishment. There are some actions that cannot be undone and some catastrophes for which there is no "making whole" the victim. Our system factors in a certain amount of eye for an eye retribution in these cases that dates all the way back to Hammurabi. If you're looking for a justification based on societal structure and survival and not just "vibes" (and make no mistake, there's a huge amount of just vibes in the way law, crime, and punishment come about)... It is believed a general understanding amongst the people that committing irrevocable transgressions on their neighbors will cause society to inflict transgressions upon them keeps the society from degenerating into infliction of individual violence on each other in the common case. Does it work? Depends on who you ask. But that's the idea, at least from the Machiavellian "stable society" standpoint. In that context, it doesn't matter if Reiser completely overhauls his philosophy of life in jail; he took something that he cannot give back, he took something no one can give back, and a certain amount of punishment is necessary to inform everyone else this is not acceptable ("thus always to the enemies of the country," etc).

- rehabilitation and rebuilding of trust. We humans broadly speaking divide other humans into two categories: those who would never and those who would. Certain transgressions bump a person from the would-never into the would category, and that opens a fissure that can never be closed. The fissure can be diminished by the transgressor demonstrating that they understand why that's unacceptable and providing reasons for the public to believe they will never commit that transgression a second time. Under this theory, crime commission is contextual; if a person can demonstrate that they will never be in the context again that would cause them to commit the crime, a certain amount of trust can be reestablished.

And here we get to the question of why drunk driving is treated less severely than, say, premeditated murder. As an individual, it's very hard to guard against premeditated murder. And people premeditating murder look like everybody else; It's hard to generate signifiers that would rebuild trust if somebody does such a thing. So the state has a large interest in discouraging it via "the olde ways," because the state has a hard time detecting it coming or defending the victims. In contrast, crimes committed under the influence of mind-alterers we generally feel would be something the transgressor would not do if the influence were removed. It's a lot easier to reestablish the trust gap in theory if somebody who drives drunk swears they will never drink again.

... That having been said, in practice, I totally agree with you. I think the numbers on drunk driving recidivism are ridiculous and it is completely unacceptable to maintain the status quo trust model on this issue; drunk driving should be an immediate revocation of the ability to use a licensed vehicle for life without extraordinary circumstances (on the order of pardon from the governor) to allow someone to retest for a license. We treat pilot licenses thusly; we should treat vehicle licenses with similar scrutiny.

... Problem is, in the US at least, we've built a society so heavily dependent upon cars in most of the country that doing this in the general case would be a sentence worse than the location constraints we put on sex offenders, and there's an upper limit on the state's capacity to actually enforce a law.

Someone once said that society forms laws and such mainly to prevent vigilantism, and not really for much else. The remainder is post-facto argumentation about how it was "ok" to do so.

I don't understand and can't accept why crimes committed while drunk get you a lesser punishment than a crime committed while sober.

Where I'm from, most people who kill other people while driving get off without any punishment at all.

Because our justice system believes intent is an element of criminality, not just effect.

"Impaired judgement". I'm not supporting it, just stating that's the claim.

and if either happened to kill someone, the person would likely receive a similar sentence for manslaughter.

Drunk driving is worse than stupid. It's up there with shooting a gun into someone's house.

There’s “Stupid thing”.

And then there’s murdering your ex, hiding her body over two days, lying to your children that she’d left for russia and they’d been abandoned, and only revealing the location of the body so you could plea down to second degree murder (a good 18 months later mind, we’re not talking quick change of heart).

Oh and then filing a civil suit against pretty much the entire legal system, including the trial judges and your attorney.

And when sued for damage by your children’s grandmother (on their behalf) assert that you killed your ex to protect your kids (which you had basically never been there for, which was the entire reason your wife left you).

I’m not saying redemption is not possible, but I’d think some reflection and atonement would be the baseline, and I’m not aware of Hans Reiser having done any such work.

That he still wrote "in prison for killing my wife Nina" when she wasn't his wife anymore at the time indicates IMO that he still doesn't get it.

Legally speaking, she was, since the divorce wasn't finalized.

I don't think that matters much. To all practical intents and purposes she was no longer 'his wife' and given that he killed her the fact that the divorce was never finalized shouldn't give him extra rights.

How is he supposed to refer to her? ex-wife is incorrect. By name doesn't provide enough context for people that don't know about him.

The fact is - he killed his wife.

To all practical intents and purposes she was no longer 'his wife'

It doesn't work like that, though. My soon-to-be-ex-wife is still listed as spouse on our health insurance because I can't remove her until the divorce is finalized. I still have to specify her in many legals documents as my wife.

Even outside the legal field, many in my personal life consider her as my wife, go "call me when it's finalized".

That's besides the point, the question is whether you still think of her and refer to her as 'your wife'. And then extrapolate to the - obviously hypothetical - situation in which you murdered your soon-to-be-ex-wife and still refer to her as 'my wife' many years later. It's bizarre that this needs to be spelled out. This isn't a legal issue, it's a bit of insight in how Reiser feels about the person he murdered.

I'd say that saying "my wife" makes it worse for him than saying "my ex-wife", maybe that's just me.

Doubly so because she's, you know, dead.

That's how I read it as well.

Well, in my mind, he is referring to the state at the point of murder. The fact that they were going through the divorce process isn't important here (to us bystanders, to the investigator it's a motive).

I think this is just bs for his next parole hearing tho.

Redemption requires that a person change and provide restitution. What Reiser did wasn't a stupid mistake, it was a calculated action that he took. His only mistake was getting caught. He didn't accidentally kill someone, or do so in the heat of a unique moment in his life. He decided that he could make his life easier by killing someone else and did so with no intention of facing the consequences of his actions.

While I won't say redemption is impossible. He is going to have to serve his time and dedicate the rest of his life to helping others to even come close.

Since the prosecutor's office offered him a sentence of 3 years if he'd lead investigators to where he buried the body, the burden is on you IMHO to support your assertion because obviously if the informed professionals in the prosecutor's office thought it was a pre-planned murder they wouldn't've been that lenient. (In the US, pre-planned murders are routinely punished by life in prison without parole; California might be a little more lenient than the rest of the country, but not that much more lenient.)

What sentence of 3 years are you talking about? The judge offered (and prosecutors agreed to) a plea guilty of second-degree murder (down from the first degree murder he was convicted of) if he revealed the location of the body and gave closure to her Nina’s children and family.

He got 15 to life, the maximum for second-degree murder, and his first request for parole was rejected so he’s doing at least 20 for now.

Remarkable. Would it really have been 3 years if he'd accepted? That seems far too low.

On the other hand, the first degree homicide seems absurd given the evidence. Did they just give him that because he refused to cooperate, and not because it was actually an accurate verdict?

Everything I've seen indicates that the "court" seemed to think it was a case of "murder in red blood" or whatever they call getting angry and killing your wife these days, with a dose of "very intentional coverup afterwards".

Had he driven the car with her dead body directly to the police, he probably would have received the three year sentence or even less.

More has come out since the trial (and mostly on account of Reiser himself making very hard to walk back claims on the record in another court case).

Not saying they were right, but that's likely what they were feeling (and maybe even the family was pushing for - they clearly knew she was dead, and just wanted the children out of the whole thing).

Did more come out or did Reiser make up claims that he though would help his case? That would make him an idiot but doesn't really give any real evidence towards the murder being pre-meditated considring all his other bad decisions in court.

What you describe happened after the trial. The offer of 3 years happened before the trial:

An Alameda County Superior Court judge confirmed today Hans Reiser was presented a deal last year in which the convicted murderer would have only served three years in prison. During what was supposed to have been Reiser’s sentencing hearing – which has been delayed due to this week’s events – Judge Larry Goodman, in an effort to clear up what he called inaccuracies in the media, said that Reiser was given the opportunity last September to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter. While voluntary manslaughter can carry different prison terms, Goodman said he agreed to give Reiser three years – the lowest possible term – to spare Nina Reiser’s family the turmoil of going through a trial and having the couple’s oldest son testify. Goodman pointed out in court if Reiser had accepted the deal, he would have been released in May 2008. However, Goodman said Reiser chose to “roll the dice,” and a jury convicted Reiser April 28 of first-degree murder in the killing of his wife.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2008/07/09/reiser-rejected-volun...

do stupid things

Yes, we've all done stupid things we regret. But this is not it. This is way to bad to fit in the "stupid things" category.

I’ve said and done stupid things that hurt people I cared about. Anyone who’s been a teenager and yelled “I hate you, Dad!” in a moment of hormonal overload has.

Ain’t killed anyone, though.

I suspect many are aware of this but for those uninformed:

Reiser committed premeditated murder of his (ex?)wife Nina around 2006 and hid her body so well they could not find her. He made his children think either that their mother abandoned them. He had thought without a body he could not be charged and convicted.

I believe he waited until it was apparent he would lose the trial and then plead down so that they could recover her body.

I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.

He was far less of a mastermind than he fancied himself at the time.

If I recall, he bought a book on murder investigations and a socket set after his wife's disappearance (which was easily tracked back to him), removed car seats (blood) from his car, and willingly testified in court that it was his manly dream to sleep in the car, or something along these lines.

He could have likely gotten away with it if he kept his mouth shut. Luckily he had the arrogance of believing he had actually come up with a convincing story.

I will always remember the Slashdot comment that said that removing the passenger seat of your car so you could sleep in your car was a reasonable thing to do, and everyone saying it was suspicious was a hater. (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)

I think it was my first experience with absolute egregious fanboism.

It is reasonable, although niche enough to be a bad defense.

Here is a popular Instagram account where someone does exactly what you are saying is unreasonable: https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic

Here is a popular Instagram account where someone does exactly what you are saying is unreasonable: https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic

Except they don't. First post shows them asking themselves if there's a more comfortable way, second post shows them installing a flat surface.

https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic/reel/CyGu0vUuXsz/

https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic/reel/CyWqTSSJV7U/

Except they do. They don’t reinstall the seat. And hence removing the seat for the purpose of camping was indeed a reasonable thing to do.

I will always remember the Slashdot comment that said that removing the passenger seat of your car so you could sleep in your car was a reasonable thing to do, and everyone saying it was suspicious was a hater. (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)

(Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)

(Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)

Do you dig it ? A car floor is not fucking flat. That's why it's suspicious to remove the passenger seat without installing a flat surface over it. That's why the instagram poster did install a flat surface. Because they didn't want to sleep on the car floor. Because it's not flat. It's not comfortable. And because it's not comfortable it's not reasonable.

As investigators follow Hans, they discover the missing CRX, but something is missing, says prosecutor Paul Hora. "He removed the front passenger seat. Then he completely disassembled, removed the rear cargo area of the car, threw away the carpeting that covered the spare tire and the cover that covered the spare tire."

When it was Hora's turn, he asked Hans why he had removed the front passenger seat from his car. "He said he removed the passenger seat in order to make a Honda CRX a more comfortable place to sleep," Hora recalls. "His explanations were ridiculous. I mean, they were lies. A Honda CRX is an awfully small car that wouldn't be comfortable no matter what you did to sleep in it."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/betrayal-29-12-2008/

On October 11, 2006, law enforcement officials said that blood spatter had been found in Hans Reiser's house and car. Forensic testing (including DNA analysis) could neither confirm nor rule out Nina Reiser as the source of the blood. Officials had not located the missing passenger seat of his car. They also indicated that they had found in the car two books on homicide investigation purchased by Reiser on September 8 — five days after Nina Reiser's disappearance: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, and Masterpieces of Murder by Jonathan Goldman.[28] Daniel Horowitz, a high-profile defense attorney, joined the defense team[6] but dropped the case on November 28, citing Reiser's inability to pay for his services.[29]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser#Murder_investigati...

It has never been mentioned that the car was modified to accommodate for sleeping on the floor in a comfortable and reasonable way. The passenger seat, carpeting were removed but that doesn't make the floor flat.

JFC.

It warms my heart that almost 20 years later, the same thread is playing out again.

All this has happened before,

and it will happen again.

I don't understand how slashdot can still troll me, I never even made an account on that site. I'll let this go, the hour is getting late.

So say we all.

I will always remember this HN thread.

One could imagine being in the process of installing a flat surface after removing the car seat.

Of course! Who doesn’t decide that they would rather sleep in a car the moment their significant other goes missing? It’s just to get away from the press and the house where you had all those memories! And of course you’ll start researching crime scene analysis and cleaning methods right after she goes missing as well, because you know you’re the number one suspect, and you just want to help find the guy that did this.

The real killer is out there! And Hans and O.J. are on the case!

Seriously though. If this isn’t suspicious behavior, what would characterize as obviously suspicious behavior from a suspected murder?

Of course! Who doesn’t decide that they would rather sleep in a car the moment their significant other goes missing? It’s just to get away from the press and the house where you had all those memories!

Well, this depends a lot on what kind of people you spend your time with. I know at least two people in my circles (let me put it this way: they both slightly schizophrenic traits) about whom I would not be surprised if they came up with such ideas.

I guess I have a light tendency to gravitate towards smart mavericks in my social life. :-)

You’re out of control bro.

That /. thread was amazing. So many people trying to justify behavior that cleanly pointed to murder. Not every action by itself, but the combination of all of them: buying crime books, removing the seat, cleaning his car and there were more actions. But the slashdot technical community defended him until the moment he confessed.

It was really cringey.

Don’t forget, leaving his cell phone at home on the day of his wife’s murder when he otherwise always carried it with him.

It's certainly not common, but I had a friend in highschool that took out the front passenger seat of his VW bug, to make it easier to get surfboards into the car. He normally just had a folding chair for passengers.

Did this friend also do it exactly when the murdered wife and mother of his children went missing?

The fanboys spilled over to HN as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098

They were even at it after Reiser led police to his wife's body: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240814

Best comment on that thread, calling out their ridiculous takes:

I gotta say it: the guy was a f-cking murderer and yet you guys are arguing about whether he got a fair trial, even after he led the cops to the strangled, decomposing corpse. And then complaining about the sheer brass neck of a journo who fails to show appropriate respect to this f-cking murderer. What, just because he hacked on Linux once upon a time? Jeez, you really couldn't make this stuff up.

It wasn't fanboism, it was something else entirely: solidarity of the ingroup.

Hard to believe for the younger folks around here, who grew up in a culture that praised and valued technical skills, but Slashdot was a place for the prior generation, for whom technical skills were mocked and ridiculed.

Hans was "one of us", and it's a very human thing to believe that a member of your specific outcast group would ever be one of the baddies.

It was probably him.

He could have likely gotten away with it

He had a plea deal offer for not much more than time served so he even had a definite option to a form of getting away with it.

Why didn't he take it? It's pretty much the best what murderer on trial can hope for.

... then again, if he was reasonable he'd probably never commit murder.

You can get the details from the contemporary coverage linked in the sibling comments but it seemed like he felt he'd go to trial and be acquitted. If I had to guess, having to admit he'd been lying to everyone through the whole process was probably also a factor - the deal was something like plead to a manslaughter charge and reveal the location of the victim's body.

If I had to guess, having to admit he'd been lying to everyone through the whole process was probably also a factor - the deal was something like plead to a manslaughter charge and reveal the location of the victim's body.

I didn't realise this when I was younger, but I'm pretty sure everybody lies to themselves. Like not about grey issues, but simple cases of black and white.

Yes, even most people reading this lie to themselves about facts. We might not be murderers, but we do.

I have an important conversation once where I told someone what they'd done wrong, and how to make things better, in a very mature way. I *remember this conversation.

Years later I took a drug that is known for causing an 'ego-death' and realised what actually happened was that I was angry and tried to hurt the person as much as possible with my words.

I fully believe there is a layer of Reiser that was convinced he did not do this thing.

There's a book on this topic called "Night of the Gun".

Which is what he ended up having to do anyways, but with life attached. He's an egocentric moron. At least, that's my opinion as an outside observer.

I figure it was because he thought he was so intelligent that he could run circles around the court.

I briefly worked with Hans around 2005. My impression at the time was that he declined the manslaughter plea because he thought he was smarter than everyone around him.

For those interested in the trial, the SF Chronicle's Henry K. Lee ran a very detailed blog on it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080501184401/http://www.sfgate...

I go back periodically and read the Wired article about it.

It is totally bananas:

https://archive.is/BcMRF

The wildest part was the friend who had an affair with his wife who blurted out unprompted on the stand that he had killed 7 people. They let that guy go!

The 'weird nerds' defending Reiser brought this up time and again during the trial. But Reiser showed them all up by leading the authorities to where he had buried the body afterwards so I guess that that particular angle is now settled.

Yeah, some follow-up reporting found that the guy was lying for some weird reason. He said as much. I forget the reason.

Apparently it's a moderately common enough phenomena that cops intentionally keep aspects of a murder scene out of news and reports, so that they can check if someone knows them or not. People are sick enough for fame that they'll murder, and being sick enough for fame to confess to someone else's murder isn't nearly as bad.

Makes you wonder how many people do actually get away with it.

It really depends on what you're looking to get away with.

If you're looking to get away with orchestrating the murder of someone you know, it can be difficult.

However, if you're just looking to get away with murdering someone in general, that's surprisingly easy. Just go a town or two over and knife a random someone in a random parking lot. Police success rates are comically low.

Police success rates on completely random murders are insanely low partially because they're insanely rare.

Complete success is something like 50% overall, but in general in many of those cases that "aren't solved" they know who did it, they also know they can't prove it.

Considering the number of people in prison who get exonerated, I'm glad that the ones "they know" did it aren't actually in jail. Because that seems like random chance that they're actually right.

But it's also why I qualified my statements. That if you're looking to kill a particular person, that's way harder than "getting away with murder" in general.

Police only have so many tools at their disposal. And if there is no link between victim and perpetrator, the job becomes way harder.

This is why I'm against the death penalty. I don't think that executing 95(97?) actual murderers is worth the chance of killing 5(3?) completely innocent people. That's not justice, that's just good odds, and it shouldn't apply to human life. Lock them up for life. Give an option for execution if they want to take that way out.

I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.

I think it would be ridiculous for me to presume that I can possibly have any view into whether or not someone has sincerely changed, but why should the fact that someone was calculating once affect whether they have changed? I could see doubting the apparent demonstration of change, because they might have calculated the appropriate words to say, but I don't see any reason that a calculating person is less able sincerely to change than any other.

I consider it a Bayesian approach to understanding potential internal drivers. Someone who is not cold and calculating likely has less capacity to completely present the appearance of redemption whereas someone who is calculating has that capacity.

So, someone who is demonstrated to be calculating has higher odds of faking a behavior if it is beneficial to them (e.g. leaving prison).

It's for him to know, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to question.

I'm with you on that one. I read the whole thing closely and my conclusion is that some of what's there is playing to an invisible audience. And some of the rest of what's there feels like 'the real Hans' shining through because he hasn't really changed, but is actively trying to change how he is perceived. I could try to enumerate those bits but it doesn't matter all that much, it's just the feeling that I get from reading the text.

my conclusion is that some of what's there is playing to an invisible audience

My impression was that he got an assignment in class to write a letter where he reflects on bad interactions in the past, apologize, and try to put them behind him.

I also got the impression that he really wants people to write/call him and discuss computer stuff, so this might be part of the motivation for writing it.

But I don't know him, so who knows what's going on in his head?

I've not done it, so I don't know, but I suspect you can never fully get to "I completely regret what I did because it was wrong" without having somewhat of "I completely regret what I did because I got caught".

I do think we wants to discuss computer stuff; he seemed entirely unaware of SSDs and how that has (and should) change filesystems, and still thinks Slashdot is a place to post things.

Slashdot is a place to post things

It is! But this isn't there :)

Same. Pretty much any instance where he mentions prison groups or classes, it is very specific and emphasizes strongly that they have changed him. And he knows his mail will be read by the prison staff anyhow. The only benefit of the doubt I have here is maybe the groups/classes promote discussing topics like this precisely because they know a parole board gives them consideration. In which case, he'd be an idiot to not play along if he's angling for parole. (And if that is the case, it wouldn't surprise me if the prison system is being duplicitous in telling prisoners that so they can be demoralized when denied, ie. "I followed the rules and did what you tell me, but you still won't let me go?")

It's for him to know, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to question.

My reference to ridiculous was to the ridiculousness of my thinking that I have any insight into Reiser's character—a disclaimer at the beginning that I was not presuming to offer any. I was in no way meaning to call you or your statement ridiculous.

I consider it a Bayesian approach to understanding potential internal drivers. Someone who is not cold and calculating likely has less capacity to completely present the appearance of redemption whereas someone who is calculating has that capacity.

Yes, that was exactly what I was meaning to say. Someone being known to be calculating should create a higher evidentiary bar—they need to do more to convince me that they have changed. But I don't think that it offers any evidence against their having changed. And maybe this is what you were saying:

I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.

I read this as "the fact that he is calculating makes it less likely that he has changed." But maybe you just meant "the fact that he is calculating means that I require stronger evidence that he has changed"?

Great comment. For me that fact means that I don't just read it with 'a higher bar' but with the possibility that what I'm looking at is created with the express purpose of deceiving me so some of it reverses in meaning.

Hans is probably high on the psychopath scale, and if you do any reading about psychopaths, the main takeaway is that you can never believe what they are saying. From Google:

What is a psychopathic person?

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder characterized by interpersonal deceptiveness and calloused, remorseless use of others, as well as behavioral recklessness, impulsivity, and overt antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression, violence). From: Encyclopedia of Mental Health (Third Edition), 2023.

Thank you for the well-reasoned reply, I misunderstood the thrust of your commentary.

I read this as "the fact that he is calculating makes it less likely that he has changed." But maybe you just meant "the fact that he is calculating means that I require stronger evidence that he has changed"?

That's a fair point. I need to reflect more on that. It is not my place to proclaim absolutely likelihood, you're correct. I think the latter statement is closer to the thrust that I'm getting at. My burden of proof for redemption is higher than a less calculating criminal/crime.

A "higher bar" is basically "evidence against" because you're saying you need more evidence for.

Then again, everything I've read leads me to believe he's impulsive at times (even says so in the letter!) and the calculating part was afterwards not before or during (if it was, he was notoriously bad at it).

the assumption here is that your judgement of calculating is accurate.

Source on premeditated?

Everything I saw made it look like it was spontaneous (and then he put a lot of work and some poor planning into trying to hide it).

I could obviously be wrong, I didn't really spend that much time on it.

(Note: I know he was initially found guilty of first degree murder but it appears that first degree murder doesn't necessarily require premeditation.)

Yeah, I don't think the murder itself was premeditated, but he did treat the event with a sort of self-serving callousness that gave the perception that he did not care about Nina's life beyond how it affected his.

that's not what premeditated murder is though. That's trying to cover up the murder which is also a crime, but a far cry from premeditated murder which is one of the most heinous crimes recognized by the legal system.

Which is why I said I don't believe the murder was premeditated.

He was able to plea to second degree in exchange for the location of the body and essentially a confession.

They convicted him of first degree because without the body, there was no evidence that he didn't plan on the murder as well. Ironic in a way. He hid the body to try and hide the evidence that she was dead, but turns out that only made things worse for him.

If he had called the authorities and copped to it as an "accident of passion", he'd probably be out by now.

High levels of calculation in times when high levels of calculation are required to keep you out of prison are not a sign of anything.

Humans are amazing at compartmentalizing things like this away, even while they are happening.

It is impossible to know from this single datapoint if he is remorseful or not, but it is not at all outside of the realm of possibility.

As a child I merely punched my brother and I tried to kill myself afterwards because of the guilt. In the moment I could not have been more prescient about what I was about to do and what I was doing. I recalled how I had observed him fighting others, how he threw punches, how he swung his arm based on how angry he was, and I planned an arc that took advantage of his habits and clocked him. Knocked him out in one punch.

The instant he hit the floor I felt remorse like I had never felt before. Who the hell am I to take an action like that?!

Anyway, how someone feels while doing something like that does not necessarily reflect how they feel at any other time in their lives. It also may reflect how they are at all times, or anywhere in between.

There is no foolproof way to know.

ending another human's life leaves any possibility of redemption for a person

You realize the volunteer soldiers that enter a battle to kill other humans also fall under this scope? Yet in many countries we celebrate their return and service, despite what they may have done.

I agree these are not quite the same thing, in how a deed is carried out, but the end result is in fact the same.

You realize the volunteer soldiers that enter a battle to kill other humans also fall under this scope?

Yes. And I strongly believe there's something wrong with their brains. Not so wrong as with the brains of murderers. But to let someone's words override your innate blocks against killing is some weaknes of the brain, easily exploitable with disastrous consequences for humanity.

It makes wars feasible.

i think if you take a look at human history, the animal kingdom, etc, you will find that in fact it is you who has something strange going on in your brain

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/28/natural-born...

Humans and other primates are more prone to this deficiency of the brain than other mammals.

But even so, only 2% of humans were killed by other humans. And since many killers usually kill more than one person killers are a miscule minority even in such deficient species as humans. Even with all the cultural pressure that glorifies killing in the "right circumstances".

Given that anyone who volunteers to be a killer has something wrong in him. Falls on the far end of some spectrum.

anyone who volunteers to be a killer has something wrong in him

Consider the native american indian warriors who volunteered to defend their land against the invaders. Or jews in Poland who volunteered to defend against the Germans in WW2.

Does your statement apply to them as well?

Of course. Some of them.

Not everone who joins the army is a volunteer killer. Some people just want to help. Treat wounds. Recover wounded. Scare the enemy away. Some tentatively accept that some people might die in the process. People tend to accept that in war people die. They are more like armed robbers who'd love to have their goals met without killing anyone but some are accepting that someone might die in the process. But fraction of people are killers. They participate in the process in order to kill. Those are the most deficient ones. They are present in every place where people die, on both sides.

Are you a pacifist who thinks that it is never OK to take a life, no matter the circumstances? In that case I understand what you think, even if that is not my way of thinking.

If you are not a pacifist, then I don't understand how you think a peaceful society should act when an aggressive neighbor tries to kill all of them?

I think it's ok to take life if it's your own life or help someone to take their own if there are good reasons for it.

I don't know how a peaceful society should act if neigbour tries to kill them. I think if that's the case, they made a lot of mistakes already, if they reached that point.

Probably the only thing to do is gather your killers and send them to kill and tell everybody it's ok this time. And most likely just die regardless of what you decided to do. If this society somehow survives it's way ahead because they not only repelled foreign killers but culled their own. That's pretty much was the result of WW2. Europe was destined for prosperity after it no matter who won. Just because higher fraction of killers than normal people died.

I don't know how a peaceful society should act if neigbour tries to kill them. I think if that's the case, they made a lot of mistakes already, if they reached that point.

There are literally thousands of examples throughout history of smaller ethnic groups that were completely wiped out by their bigger and more aggressive neighbors.

Do you think these small groups were provoking their neighbors? Why? Did they all have a death wish?

How do you appease someone who is determined to take over your territory while getting rid of your people? What does the compromise look like?

Europe was destined for prosperity after it no matter who won.

Wow. If the Germans would have won, they would have cleansed large parts of Europe. Do you call that "prosperity"?

Same thing with Stalin. If he had gotten a free rein across Europe, I don't imagine there would have been many Scandinavians left today, for instance. The few left would live somewhere in Siberia.

There are literally thousands of examples throughout history of smaller ethnic groups that were completely wiped out by their bigger and more aggressive neighbors.

Exactly. Figting and killing didn't help them in any way.

Do you think these small groups were provoking their neighbors? Why? Did they all have a death wish?

The wrong decision in that case was deciding to be separate from their neighbors despite the fact that they presented overwhelming force. They were multitude of ethnic groups who survived by getting assimilated into their stronger neighbors. You might argue that it's not a survival if culture disappears. But that's just words. Genes are what matters in any broader context.

If the Germans would have won, they would have cleansed large parts of Europe. Do you call that "prosperity"?

They would possibly kill all the Jews which is unfortunate and a terrible loss. The rest of the populace would just become the part of their empire. And running an empire is a troublesome thing as countries like Britain found out. India used to be a British colony. And today more property is owned in London by the Indians than by native British people. Some regions of London are minority white. Nobody designed it like that. It is just a result of previous attempts at exploitation of their acquired empire. Same happened to France. Germans would eventually succumb to the same fate.

Stalin is a different thing. Just because Russians are terrible at everything. I'm still sure they wouldn't manage to keep whole Europe under their shoe for long. And if they did that would mean they seriously stepped up their game, so prosperity of sorts.

Appeasement didn't work in 1939, it wouldn't work now.

I'm not talking about appeasement. I'm talking about peacefully losing all there is to lose.

Edit: Reading your comments again, it does look like you are a pacifist?

I think it's ok to take life if it's your own life or help someone to take their own if there are good reasons for it.

I read this as you think it is never OK to take a life in self defence, even if that means that tens of millions will be exterminated?

If so, you can disregard the rest:

Figting and killing didn't help them in any way.

There are also many examples of much smaller ethnic groups who avoided complete extermination because they had a very competent army.

If you don't resist a neighbor who wants to exterminate your ethnic group, then the outcome is given. If you do resist, you still have a chance.

The rest of the populace would just become the part of their (WW2 Germany) empire.

No. That is only true for northern and maybe western europe. Eastern europeans were considered vermin by them.

They were multitude of ethnic groups who survived by getting assimilated into their stronger neighbors.

That can happen. Doesn't mean it's a given. I feel your overall logic reasoning leaves a lot to be desired? Do you strive to make logically sound arguments, or is that not important? If not, I don't think we can take this any further.

There is a sliding scale here. You have everything from pressure to align your country with the bigger neighbor all the way down to 100% extermination.

Germany's plans for the Slavic peoples were complete extermination. There was nothing the slavs could do or say to convince the German leadership to change their mind.

I'm Polish. How much good do you think killing Germans did for Polish people in 1940?

Maybe you think that Germany didn't plan to exterminate all poles. Ok, let's just pretend that's the case. By advocating that Poland shouldn't have resisted, you're at the same time advocating handing over the 3 million Polish jews to Germany without a fight, knowing what would happen to them. Are you really OK with that?

Stalin is a different thing. Just because Russians are terrible at everything. I'm still sure they wouldn't manage to keep whole Europe under their shoe for long. And if they did that would mean they seriously stepped up their game, so prosperity of sorts.

Sure, the Russians would have had a hell of a time keeping western europe under control. Stalin's answer to such problems were simply killing enough people until the problem disappeared. Not letting them do their own thing.

During the 1930's, Stalin sent out his underlings with orders to kill a certain quota in given area. The quotas were in the hundreds of thousands.

This is such a naive point of view. Imagine seeing somebody getting assaulted, genocided, murdered in front of your eyes and then closing your eyes for the sake of 'peace,' or the idea of it that you have in mind anyway.

You should tell the Polish people in 1940s that they should only treat wounds and not fight back.

I'm Polish. How much good do you think killing Germans did for Polish people in 1940?

Compare to France and other western European countries that immediately retreated, lost one battle and peacefully folded and stayed down till the end.

Some fraction signing up so they can gun someone down, sure, those people have bad motives and should be found and excluded.

But being willing to say "I'd kill to protect X if there is no other option" is not that.

Someone who becomes a surgeon so that he can kill a patient now and then and get away with it obviously has something wrong. Someone who becomes a surgeon and now and then causes a patient to die unintentionally (even if they intended to do the surgery, knowing it could result in death) is not the same.

I strongly disagree with you on that one. I can totally see myself volunteering to come to the defense of a country against invaders, I can absolutely not see myself volunteering (or even being conscripted) into helping some country to invade another (or to enlarge their territory).

I'm a conscientious objector against military service which at the time that I did so still carried a prison sentence and even if I ended up not going to prison (through some luck and a sympathetic police officer) I was more than willing to do so rather than to be used as a tool. So that takes care of the second part of that statement, the first has so far not been put to the test (and let's hope it stays that way).

I would never serve for an offensive war, but for example I would have been proud to serve the Allies in WW2.

It's called the department of defense for a reason, even if in plenty of cases the military is used offensively.

Volunteer soldiers that go abroad to try to annex another country at the behest of their local overlord are looked at differently then volunteer soldiers that defend their country from annexation. It's not that the 'end result is in fact the same', it's that circumstances matter. In some cases killing another person is acceptable, in most others it is not.

That's why we have so many very specific terms to describe the different situations in which one person kills another, and which of those applies is a big factor in whether we see the killer as having acted justifiably or not. Reiser is on the extreme side of that scale in terms of not having acted justifiably, then he compounded that by his stance during the subsequent trial.

Volunteer soldiers that go abroad to try to annex another country at the behest of their local overlord are looked at differently then volunteer soldiers that defend their country from annexation.

Are they? Americans seem to think very highly of their veterans ... who all fought in distant wars in countries that were not an serious immediate threat to the US.

Context matters

"Ending another human's life" covers a wide range of cases. My recollection of this event, which is now long in the past, is that he was cold, calculating, did not value human life, and was quite comfortable with his kids moving on without their mother. He didn't just do something to her. He permanently damaged his kids, her family, and all of her friends. He made his decision knowing all of this.

Redemption? Possible I suppose, but don't make the mistake of looking at this from your perspective, because he's not like the rest of us.

because he's not like the rest of us.

He's human and killing other humans is something a humans can do, given the right circumstances.

Yes, but normally you have a fairly high bar to cross before you would resort to such an act, and it would be in the context of self defense or something equivalent. To kill your wife in a premeditated manner is not something most humans can do, even given the 'right' circumstances, most people would resolve a conflict at that level in a different way.

you don't know his emotional state, he could have very well passed that high bar internally.

From my recollection, his wife was sleeping with another man, or there was some conflict between the two that was related to another man who I _think_ was supposed to be a friend to them both.

it's been a while, but the point remains, he very well could have been in a state that allowed him to "pass that bar".

Reiser himself is on the record as stating that he killed her because he was protecting his children. Whether that passes that bar or not I'll leave up to you but for me it rules out that this was a 'heat of the moment' thing. In my opinion he knew full well what he was doing, he understood that his kids would move to Russia and be raised there (she got sole custody) and this was his way of putting a stop to that.

I didn't say heat of the moment, I said emotional state.

If someone plots the death of a person who sexually abused their child no one would claim that it being premeditated implies they were not in a heightened emotional state.

That's fair but it would still count as premeditated in a legal sense, but there would be circumstances that would likely weigh in as to the severity.

regardless of legal definitions, I posted responding to what seemed like a belief that the only way to "cross a high bar" is to do so in the moment.

I've given a clear example where that's not the case.

Kids taken to Russia in 2006? He very well may have saved their lives. What a fucked up mother, they may have been borscht soup in a trench in Ukrain by now had she lived .

Yeah I don't get how some frame this as a mistake that just happens or how it shouldn't define the person. When, no it doesn't happen!! And yes it absolutely should define how we perceive them? Maybe I just live a sheltered life but murdering your wife is probably a sign of.. something bad in you as a person? And it's super super uncommon and extreme.

GF mentioned having an ex-bf who before they dated had accidentally run someone over and killed them. She said he had this ever present air of guilt about him. Like nothing he could do would make up for that. Then you got Reiser who likely just cares that he got caught and his life is now fucked. Not everyone is the same. But way more people are psychologically like my GF's ex.

He's human and killing other humans is something a humans can do, given the right circumstances.

Absolutely not. Average human needs to be ordered to kill and lied to and desensitized throughly to be able to do it. People who can kill out of their own initiative are not like the rest of us. Most cases of killings happen only because humans are so fragile in context of our technology. Intentional killing is something very unique.

you can't define human that broadly i guess

what peop le want out of this word is a decent enough amount of compassion and altruism, something that would prevent that kind of harm to others (but i forgot if there was some heated arguments before he decided to step onto the murder path).

unless passionate crime is what you had in mind

because he's not like the rest of us

I don't think we can know this, and there's no point speculating. I would say that the letter doesn't read as someone who's imperfectly simulating regret.

Of course - this entire thread is nothing but speculation.

That said, the premeditated murder of someone, let alone your wife and children's mother, is not something that the average person is capable of. It is entirely different than the crimes one may commit out of rage, fear, or passion (i.e. when your amygdala is driving).

I don't believe in capital punishment or lesser forms of punitive justice, but I have a hard time believing that psychopaths can ever be meaningfully rehabilitated. They are just humans that shipped with a fucked up firmware and that's all there is to that.

The letter reads like Reiser thinks the firmware bug is fixable, and it’s more a case of nurture over nature. Don’t know if that’s true, but it’s not unthinkable.

I've certainly encountered the opposite - folks who probably would have lived healthy productive lives, but were subject to some terrible event during some formative time and negatively impacted by it.

To be quite frank, redemption isn't really for us to decide. His family, her family, they have a say in it.

We only have a say insofar as we're part of the society that determines the laws that form the judges who will decide when it's appropriate to let him back into society.

I'm always wary of how manipulating some people can be. To be clear, I'm not declaring this letter or Reiser is that way necessarily, just how people have that capability.

That said, to me, some of the specific phrases used felt that they were for a parole board rather than the broader audience, or charitably, both. But perhaps I've become too jaded.

too jaded

I don’t think you are. The number of times the person inferring I’m jaded is later found out to be a manipulator is very high. Calling people who are perceptive of lies, “jaded”, “negative”, “pessimistic”, etc is seemingly a common tactic employed by sociopaths to socially empower themselves while simultaneously weakening those that might call them out.

Good thing the lizards who pass the US throne back and forth don't have souls that need redemption!

I think about Hans Reiser pretty often, incidentally, because there is a quote from him I read as a teenager that stuck with me.

"The utility of an operating system is proportional to the number of connections possible between its components, than it is to the number of those components."

— Hans Reiser (from http://web.archive.org/web/20040126210110/http://unununium.o...)

It's hard to reconcile good things a person might have said and done, with the bad. That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote, without entering into a huge discussion on the pain Reiser has caused. This is the only time I feel I am able to share that quote, on a thread that hopefully tries to look past the right and wrong of his actions.

Just as no one is truly good, no one is truly evil either. It is good for one's soul and humanity to acknowledge that a bad person might have done something good in their life.

ReiserFS was pretty cool as well, sad to see it go, but no one uses it anymore. I hope they'll find redemption and peace.

That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote, without entering into a huge discussion on the pain Reiser has caused

That's a shame. He did something awful, but that's nothing at all to do with the idea in the quotation. Ideas shouldn't be cursed because the wrong person said them; they should stand or fall on their own merits.

Certainly, I have an issue with this idea that everything a person does gets cancelled because the person gets cancelled. Particularly in this era of intense political polarization.... It is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The world is full of examples of art and science from troubled individuals; much of our foundational understanding of certain areas of science is derived from the learned experiences of inhumane research conducted by nazis or WW2 japan. Yet one guy murders his wife and suddenly we are all rejecting a perfectly cromulent filesystem.

ReiserFS and BTRFS are the only 2 Linux filesystems that truly ate my data. Everything else I was able to substantially recover from.

I had XFS eat some data once. I somehow got it into a state where it wouldn't mount and wouldn't fsck. Luckily for me it was "just" my backup disk, so after a week of fighting with it I just gave up and reformatted (as ext4) and didn't end up losing much. Was eye opening though. I'd rather have a slightly less featureful fs that I have a chance of recovering…

I had the same issue with xfs. Seems to be fixed recently.

ReiserFS and BTRFS always seemed like the two big "performance over reliability" Linux file systems.

I've had really bad experiences with fat32 and xfat... back in the day it was pretty common to lose data due to hard drive or filesystem bullshit.

In any case, I was a technology journo at the time this happened, and I covered this story, but I don't recall encountering a lot of technical discussion... it seemed to be mostly "ew this guy murdered his wife". Which is entirely deserved. (If a little unfair to the creative work)

I wasn't much of a programmer yet so maybe I wasn't looking at the right discussions.

Certainly, I have an issue with this idea that everything a person does gets cancelled because the person gets cancelled. Particularly in this era of intense political polarization...

I think it's the crazyiness of this era. We expect people to be either "100% good" or "100% bad".

Of course we, as a society and as individuals, are (unsurprisingly) deeply surprised when we find out somebody we like isn't "100% good" and can't accept that somebody we don't like isn't "100% bad".

[edit: this is not 100% related to Hans Reiser, of course, more on a general tangent].

No, ReiserFS was unreliable by itself. Run fsck on a ReiserFS filesystem with a ReiserFS loopback image/wm, then your whole partition it's trashed.

Certainly, I don't have a problem with the quote. I just don't want to face the inevitable "Hans Reiser? Isn't that the one that..." quagmire that pretty much everybody is going to step into.

Just attribute the quote to Voltaire or Franklin.

...there's an Abraham Lincoln quote somewhere about that.

I have a Bill Cosby quote that I attribute to Dr Huxtable. It is sufficient citation, old heads will know but don't react, and new heads will just nod and not get triggered.

    Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. 

    I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. 

    The evil that men do lives after them; 

    The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

(What's interesting to me is that it's often black and white; dead people become either perfectly good or perfectly evil, depending on where you fall - only if they're "not important" are they allowed to be human and gray.)

Lots of people who do good work have done awful things.

I love Oscar Wilde's plays, but he was a paedophile sex tourist. Eric Gill created beautiful stuff, including typefaces most of us probably use or read fairly often, and he sexual abused his children and his dog.

"Pedophile" back then often just meant "gay". In French pedé (pedophile) was the regular way to say "homosexual".

Also the age of consent was lower back then, and untold numbers of "normal respectable ethical people" who back then would otherwise condemn Wilde as "pedophile" did marry girls at 14 or so. Before the 20th century basically after 13-14 kids were considered more like short adults than as a special category of teens. Wilde surely wasn't any kind of pervert going with prepubescent kids or anything like that. In fact, the guy he went to prison for being a lover to was 21.

As for his "sex tourism", it was basically travelling in countries you could have gay sex with locals and the local authorities would turn a blind eye.

Yeah, right.

Yeah: right.

No. He had sex with boys, and he had sex with boy prostitutes while traveling abroad.

In fact, the guy he went to prison for being a lover to was 21.

Yes, he had sex with adult men too. Also with adult women too - he was married to one and they had kids.

It's not like I didn't already cover that in my comment above...

Oscar Wilde's ... was a paedophile sex tourist

I've never heard of him being into children, have you a link for this, thanks (also, 'sex tourist'?)

Apparently he went to North Africa and Italy. Plus he was what would be called a rapist today.

Mind you, I don't know if this is a reliable source.

https://thefederalist.com/2018/09/18/time-left-stop-idolizin...

I'm not really a fan of applying modern standards in historical contexts. Times change, but even today the age of consent is 16 in the UK. Condemning him for being 30+ and having sex with 15-16 year old boys just doesn't make sense to me. It seems people try to apply American puritanical standards to a historical person from Europe, who lived in the 1800s Victorian era.

If we were to apply modern standards, you should be condemning over 1B people around the planet for following the teachings of a 30yo+ guy who married a six year old girl.

Even if you accept that, the age difference and the hiring of poor boys as prostitutes makes a difference.

Differences of an year or two in age of consent is one thing and some variation is one thing. The article you link to mentions a 14 year old. How far will you take "it was acceptable in their culture". Child brides in modern Yemen or many other places? Romans being into little boys?

Legal does not mean socially acceptable either. 16 might keep you on the right side of the law here in the UK, but a 40 year old who is found to have had sex with a 16 year old is likely to be badly regarded.

If we were to apply modern standards, you should be condemning over 1B people around the planet for following the teachings of a 30yo+ guy who married a six year old girl.

A lot of them claim he did not have sex with her until she was much older. I would condemnd them if they had sex with six year olds themselves.

It's complicated.

and the hiring of poor boys as prostitutes makes a difference

I'd say absolutely yes, that is wrong, but at the time it was not considered so wrong. I understand the age of consent was introduced for girls to stop them being used as prostitutes, and some men at the time were against this legislation. The question is, who defines 'right'?

Child brides in modern Yemen or many other places

Sadly in their eyes, this is considered acceptable, even good. In our eyes, and mine, it's unacceptable. How do we define 'right' in this context? If we are right then how do we make them understand they are wrong?

Why they do it is simple; it is done in their culture so it is right. I see exactly the same kind of thing appearing here on HN where somebody condemns something they don't like (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981118) because "you're wrong because you're not right", essentially.

but a 40 year old who is found to have had sex with a 16 year old is likely to be badly regarded

I'm not so sure. Such cases have existed, I remember on TV maybe 25 years ago a woman of 40 who married her husband of 16, it seemed to work and nobody seemed to upset about it. I personally knew of a couple, she was 19 and he was 60 and it was a good relationship while it lasted. I think people would take such age-unequal relationships on their own merits, and that is actually a good thing because otherwise it would just be intolerance.

Extremely informative, thanks. Agree with you about the difficulty of interpreting morality over timespans and cultures.

paedophile sex tourist

Did you lift that quote from here? https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo99...

Oscar Wilde was a paedophile and a sex tourist.

I Googled for: was Oscar Wilde a pedophile?

There is lots of debate. Not so straight forward.

No, not seen that. Multiple articles and I read some letters etc by Wilde, Gide and others years ago.

Some defences either ignore the key evidence - for example the first I found was this which just looks at his attraction to adult young men, and ignores his attraction to teenagers: https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2016/12/20/the-t...

The others base their case on distinguishing between a paedophile and an ephebophile. It may well be true, but the latter is still a criminal offence in most countries (albeit lesser in some countries). Combined with travel and prostitution it is still pretty horrible behaviour.

Isn't that a restating of Metcalfe's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

[EDIT: I have misunderstood Metcalfe's Law for over 20 years, assuming that "connections" meant edges in the following quote. Metcalfe intended to mean that the value of the network grows as the square of the number of nodes because "connections" here aren't edges, they're fully reachable pairs of nodes. Thanks, again, HN, for helping me through that]

The financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2).

Generally speaking, "the value of a graph is proportional to the square of the number of edges"

rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locally_linear_graph

Generally speaking, "the value of a graph is proportional to the square of the number of edges"

No, what Metcalfe's law assumes is that the value of the graph is proportional to the number of edges (not their square). And from that assumption and the fact that the graph is fully connected follows that it's proportional to the square of the number of nodes. (Because you can have (n-1)*n/2 edges with n nodes in a fully connected graph.

And hence, the Reiser quote above is similar but it emphasizes something else: it states what Metcalfe's law (I think) uses as a premise (or implicit claim) that the value is in the connections. Because it's not necessarily a fully connected graph.

Edit: originally I've given (n-1)*2/2 as the number of edges instead of (n-1)*n/2.

So, the wikipedia first line is wrong, you're saying? "Metcalfe's law states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system"

Later in the article it seems like the original stating is more consistent with what you said, but everything I've ever learned in network theory and practice shows that it scales as a power of number of edges, and the logarithm of the number of nodes.

The number of connected users is different from the number of user connections :)

The first is the number of nodes, the second edges.

Uhh, are you sure? I believe "connected users" refers to edges. Otherwise it would be stated as "users connected to the network".

It could explain my misunderstanding, and also seems consistent with the explanation later in the article, but it's also completely the opposite of what we observe on the internet; for example, the value of the web is definitely not in its in number of pages, but in the value and quality of the connections between the pages.

Two users in the network: A and B; one connection: AB. Three users in the network: A, B, and C; three connections: AB, AC, BC. Four users in the network: A, B, C, and D; six connections AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD.

Metcalfe's law says value increases as 1-3-6-... instead of 2-3-4.

In graph terms, users are nodes, connections are edges, and in a fully-connected graph edges are in order of the square of nodes.

Yes, I see I had completely misread and misunderstood the original law.

But ethernetworks aren't fully connected (they tend to have lots of local connections that then are connected to each other through routing).

I think the difference between logical and physical connections is what drives the confusion here. If two nodes can reach each other somehow then for Metcalfe's law they are connected, even if there is no direct connection between them.

Yes, I realized that shortly after reading the replies. Thanks for stating it explicitly. Once again, my brain's inability to parse english caused a multi-decade misunderstanding.

Realistically, the only metric that I can think of that makes sense here isn't proportional to |V| or |E| but to the betweenness connectivity of the graph and the average distance between nodes.

You actually have a very valid point: given that there is such a thing as the maximum ttl at some point that 'logically connected' network will become more and more sparse depending on how 'wide' the network really is. I wonder if there are already parts of the V4 net that are so far removed from each other that this is an issue.

Promotional to the number of _edges_. Edges are proportional to the square of the number of nodes, so the value of the network overall is proportional to the square of the nodes.

Think of it this way, for every new user added to the network: * the new user is enriched proportional to the number of existing users * every existing user is enriched by the 1 new user

This double-counting is what gives it the quadratic growth.

Yep. That's what I was saying too. The first line of my comment quotes the GP and I was correcting that.

It did sound something that could be applied to much more than the niche of OS design. The focus is to make the connections between things composable, rather than adding a lot of subsystems. Think UNIX or Lego bricks.

Thanks for those links, I did not know Metcalfe's law, but it expresses a similar concept in a much more succinct way.

Your observations are right but your conclusions are shoddy . We can and should separate ideas from the person . There are plenty of truly evil people though . No indictment of Hans I don’t know his case . But of truly evil people there are countless numbers

I disagree, but this is personal philosophy I do not feel comfortable going too deep with on an Internet forum.

From my point of view, people that are born with evil streak are vanishingly rare, as much as being born with two heads. What happens later is simply a product of nurture, upbringing, context, and chemical imbalances. Pure black and pure white do not exist in nature.

A 27-year-old Queens man is in custody for two subway stabbings on Wednesday -- at Columbus Circle and in the Bronx.

The suspect was spotted in the Bedford Park station in the Bronx at 7:20 a.m. Thursday, and after a brief chase, was taken into custody. He was in possession of two knives at the time of the arrest.

He has multiple prior arrests, including five in the last 12 months for charges ranging from assault to sex crimes.

Not evil ?

FWIW this is highly related to what I think of as the "narrow waist" architectural principle. You may like these articles I wrote:

The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html

The Internet has huge utility because TCP/IP is a narrow waist. It has architectural connections to Ethernet/wireless/... on one end, and HTTP/BitTorrent/... on the other.

For the most functionality, you want fewer code components, and more interoperability. You want O(M + N) pieces of code to give O(M * N) functionality.

The narrow waist architecture does that -- it gives O(M * N) connections to O(M + N) amounts of code.

You don't want to write O(M * N) code, though many people and systems are stuck there!

This generally works the best when the connections are data-oriented and protocol-oriented, not oriented around source code.

---

A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html

I mention Metcalfe's law, which is related but distinct. Metcalfe's law is about O(N^2) network node connections ("dynamically"), while the (usually) O(M * N) narrow waist is about system architecture ("statically").

They both produce network effects! If the Internet already exists, then the easiest design to implement is to attach your new network to it (e.g. a network in space), not create a new, incompatible network.

---

Incidentally, this seems like what's wrong with the Kubernetes ecosystem -- it has an combinatorial explosion of code due to lack of protocols and interoperability.

It's not data-oriented, like Unix is.

(An important point is that lots of people complain about Unix-style unstructured byte streams because it's suboptimal LOCALLY, while missing the global interoperability / scale / system economy issues -- they get stuck writing O(M * N) code to avoid parsing and serializing )

---

Newer article from last year - Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/ysh-design.html

Software modularity within a process is much different than modularity between processes -- it's a bit more like networking.

You need an exterior narrow waist. To pick an example, a consequence of that is that encodings like UTF-16 don't make sense in any channels where you don't have metadata, and there are a lot of those

e.g. the URL comes BEFORE the Content-Type header in HTTP!

Yeah, I can see the similarity. Thanks for the links.

Also, vaguely related, and a way to achieve this goal of making things composable, is the "everything is an X" pattern: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/everything-is-an-x-patter...

Yup, the "Everything is an X" link is in the appendix to the second post :)

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html#wiki...

I call it the Perlis-Thompson Principle, after Perlis:

It's better to have 100 functions on 1 data structure than 10 functions and 10 data structures.

and Thompson:

A program is generally exponentially complicated by the number of notions that it invents for itself. To reduce this complication to a minimum, you have to make the number of notions zero or one, which are two numbers that can be raised to any power without disturbing this concept. Since you cannot achieve much with zero notions, it is my belief that you should base systems on a single notion.

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/08/history-trivia.html

Fully agreed.

We also have to remember that a lot of the historical figures we glorify through their great achievements were terrible people in many respects. And that often goes undiscussed.

We also have to remember that a lot of the historical figures we glorify through their great achievements were terrible people in many respects. And that often goes undiscussed.

...or we focus on how terrible a person was, and insist on completely disregarding their great achievements.

This is the only time I feel I am able to share that quote, on a thread that hopefully tries to look past the right and wrong of his actions.

Well, people would still use the theory of relativity if Einstein was proven to be a serial killer, so intelligent people who don't play it "hollier than thou" should be able to separate between some person's acts and their unrelated achievements or expressions.

Scientists would, while Twitter and average Joes will be discussing ad nauseam whether to rename the theory and delete the name Einstein from history books.

Wasn't there a similar discussion about renaming the James Webb Space Telescope? He was not even a murderer.

Great quote! Isn’t the number of connections instead of number of components related in some way to metcalfs law?

You accidentally omitted a word, that should read:

The utility of an operating system is more proportional to the number of connections possible between its components than it is to the number of those components.

It's hard to reconcile good things a person might have said and done, with the bad.

It's very easy to reconcile that a person that has done very bad things can say insightful things or be competent.

Being bad doesn't mean being stupid.

I also remember him saying, (paraphrasing here) “I’m not particularly smart, there are people out there that are much smarter than me. What I am really good at is poking around in the dark with a stick and seeing what happens”

That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote

Just rephrase it. It is not like you need to bring him up to discuss the idea, or as if this is the only form the idea can be expressed.

In fact I would say the quote as it is is confusingly written.

That principle has been stated and developed in other context. For example, there was an earlier HN post about composition of features (https://lea.verou.me/blog/2023/eigensolutions/?latest)

Another example is in ecology. Resilient ecology has many possible interactions among members of the ecology (including humans). An "invasive species" isn't necessarily one that is not native to the ecology, but one that is able to exploit a resource while having a minimum interaction with the rest of the ecology.

Dr. John Todd's ecovats are essentially self-contained ecologies that self-organized around a pollutant. They are created by taking samples from a number of ecological systems and putting them together into vats, and then running contaminated water through there. It's because the possible interactions are so high, that somewhere in there, was a path to breaking down the contaminant. In such a way, Dr. Todd was able to break DDT down in a matter of days through a system like that, and has worked on cleaning up superfund sites with this method.

To go one step further than number of interactions, Christopher Alexander's ideas on pattern languages was more than just about interaction of components, but actually about the _grammar_ of design patterns. Such a grammar can be constructed in a way that all possible combination coming out of the grammar results in a cohesive design. This allows inhabitants of an architecture or an end-user to reconfigure anything (as long as it follows that grammar) to suit their current needs, and it would still come off as a cohesive design.

To circle back to addressing the idea of evil and people who do bad things. I think you can find truth anywhere, and Han Reiser certainly touched on an insight (though it was not exclusive to him). I would further suggest this though: wouldn't this also mean that there is value in _relationships_ among people? In, not just the exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but the exchange of shared experience and feeling?

I don't know what went through Reiser's head when he killed his wife, and I can believe that there are a kind of madness that can consume someone. I think perhaps, Reiser saw an insight in systems engineering ... but did not see how that same principle was also present in the day to day life as well. (Or maybe he did see it, and was consumed by a madness anyways)

The word "more" is missing from the first half of the sentence: "more proportional".

I was impressed by this quote from TFA:

Through force of will, and hard work, he made himself into a programmer of extraordinary skill ...

also slightly reminiscent of perlis https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6016271/why-is-it-better...

That was fascinating. It sounds like he’s done some real introspection during his lockup, and I hope he’s able to apply those learnings to future situations.

I felt bad for him[0] while reading. He was a brilliant young person with a big dream, yet without the interpersonal skills to help him realize it. I’ve seen that so often. Maybe this will help me look past the next person’s challenging communications, and think here’s someone who means well but doesn’t know how to explain it. Reiser wants to learn how not to be an ass. I can try to learn how to recognize when someone being an ass is caught in the same traps he was. That, and how to be sure I’m not the one being the ass.

Best of luck on the continuing personal growth, Hans.

[0]Minus the obvious, of course.

I don't believe he did. He's just angling for his next parole date as he got denied this year.

He was denied two years ago.

He planned the murder of the mother of his kids, I'm pretty sure he can plan well in advance for a parole hearing. I wouldn't put anything past the likes of Hans Reiser or Peter Madsen.

Was there something I missed? I just reread his wikipedia page, and it seems to confirm the crime-of-passion narrative that I remember from 15 years ago. That said, I would not disagree with your character evaluation.

A crime of passion does not normally include studying up on body removal, ways to hide further evidence and not owning up to the crime for years because you - wrongly - believe that you can't be convicted if the body can't be found. This was premeditated murder, not a crime of passion.

Those things happened after the murder, and don't necessarily preclude a crime of passion. When someone does commit a crime of passion, they don't always just come out and confess as soon as they're clear headed again.

Reisers' own evidence precludes a crime of passion.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/software-guru-ordered-pay...

What part of that article supports your point? The only thing I see there is that he made up multiple different stories to try to explain her absence.

That he claims that he killed her to protect his children. You don't make up a reason like that on the spur of the moment while involved in a crime of passion.

"His defense essentially was that he killed his wife to protect his children from her."

That he made up different stories at different times is besides the point, the point is: you can't believe a word he says either way so any defense of a crime of passion is just as baseless as this one, though this one is actually much more believable and fits the evidence available. All of it points to a very smart guy who killed his wife because he thought he could get away with it but failed at that (and not for lack of trying) and who now thinks he can present himself as 'a changed man' when really he isn't.

Premeditation means planning it beforehand.

The books were purchased after the deed was done.

A crime of passion can be covered up without making it premeditated.

I'm not going to split legal hairs here, merely point out that 'sudden strong impulse' (a requirement for 'crime passionel') is incompatible with subsequent testimony by Reiser claiming that he had 'killed their mother to protect his children'.

That's one of the problems with all of the Reiser defenders: they are usually unaware to what degree Reiser has incriminated himself.

I take offense at being called a "Reiser defender". I think we can all agree that he's a creep, a manipulator, and a murderer. I don't hear anyone defending him.

The guy strangled his wife. I don't think that's the kind of thing you premeditate. He's also a liar; I wouldn't read too much into his attempt to manipulate his later civil jury. The crime-of-passion narrative would still find for the plaintiff, so he made up some nonsense that the jury saw right through.

He hid the body for 2 years.

"According to a later confession by Hans Reiser to authorities, on September 3, 2006, Nina Reiser dropped their two children off with Hans Reiser at his mother's house, where he was living at the time. The pair got into a heated argument over Nina Reiser taking the children to the doctor, with Nina referencing that she had custody over the children, and so was free to do as she wished. Defense lawyer William DuBois later said that Hans Reiser alleged that Nina Reiser was fabricating illnesses in the children. Hans Reiser hit her in the face and strangled her to death."

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

I do not read this as planned, but as "Handlung im Affekt", dunno the English term.

He later made the argument that he killed her to protect his children.

That's very possible. Some of his phrasing sounded like he hoped the parole board would be reading it: I accept responsibility for my crime, I'm using the skills I'm learning in prison, etc. etc.

Still, if you asked me about my own sins, I might say similar things: I accept responsibility for acting like a jackass, I'm using the skills I've learned from mentors and through meditation and mindfulness, etc. etc. I'd be completely earnest about all that. I've behaved poorly in the past, decided I wanted to be a better person, and genuinely try to do that. If I want people to take me at my word and believe that I'm trying to be better, I have to take him at his word until proven wrong.

(One of my sins was unnecessary cynicism. I have the luxury of it not mattering to me whether he's sincere or not, and I think it's a healthier mindset for me to accept stories like his at face value than to default to mistrusting everyone. I'm not naive, though. The people in his life need to weigh that a lot more carefully than I need to.)

Some of his phrasing sounded like he hoped the parole board would be reading it: I accept responsibility for my crime, I'm using the skills I'm learning in prison, etc. etc.

This is true; but it also struck me as being very similar to things I've heard from recovering addicts going through 12-step programs -- I'm an addict, I'm sorry for all the harm I caused through my addiction, I'm learning skills to help me overcome my addiction, etc. -- so my hunch is that it's there as a result of the anger management program he's going through in prison.

Definitely, and I hope for his sake that's the actual explanation, and that it's sincere.

That is, while we're talking about a specific person here, that person is someone I have zero connection with. I hope all the Hanses around the world are working on themselves with good intent. That's obviously untrue, but I can still wish it.

California is comically light on crime, I'm sure he'll be out within 2-3 parole hearings.

... He's spent 15 years in prison (the original sentence) and has been denied a parole already. Not sure what i'd describe as "comically light".

I was talking about the state in general, it's a liberal state that is soft on crime.

Would there be anything he could say?

Honestly? No not really. Not until he gets his parole I guess. The stakes are way too high for him to be honest. He might very well be, but the phrasing is just very "list checking" to me still. As someone else said, it's like the generic stuff you learn from therapy (at best, if we assume he's honest).

I get that, but at the same time it seems like a bit of a dystopia if there is no path to this person being rehabilitated despite his sins (i wanted to say "forgiven", but that seems like a whole other thing i guess). I don't know, maybe he doesn't deserve to be treated like a normal person ever again. But then is he just condemned forever? Is there no way for him to obtain grace for lack of a better word? How horrific that feels.

Hell, i dont know. Maybe there are no good answers in the face of such things.

Maybe he wants to learn, or maybe he's a psychopath trying to upgrade his human emulation software so he can get out sooner. Even experts find it hard to tell.

Psychopaths are still people even if their brains are broken. It is indeed hard to integrate them into society, especially if their family did a bad job of it in their childhood.

In a better country he'd be in therapy rather than in prison. Alas the US legal system only exists to detain people, not to allow them to become unbroken.

I wholly believe psychopaths can be redeemed and live a fulfilling life without hurting anyone if given the proper support and guidance. I don't for a second believe the US legal system is equipped to do that, especially the prison system.

He'd be in prison and receiving therapy.

Closed institutions are a thing. You can be in therapy under close supervision and unable to leave until it is safe to allow you to do so. Arguably that is better than therapy in prison because even with trained staff on site a prison is still a prison. You could say that closed institutions are functionally a form of prisons and you'd be right but the difference in motivations matters: mental institutions exist to provide mental support, prisons exist to lock people away.

Philosophical question: if "fake it 'til you make it" allowed someone to emulate a human (I like your phrasing here) well enough that they, indeed, act like a human... isn't that good enough?

The biblical advice to "judge not, that ye be not judged" seems relevant here. It's pretty obvious to me that it refers to a person's heart, that is, their internal desires and motivations that no one but them can truly know. If that motivation leads to a person acting the way I'd like them to, and they claim it's for reasons I agree with, and I'm not on the parole board or one of their family members where I have a need to look deeper, then fine.

It would if you would be sure that they'd never break out of character. But that's a tricky question: if someone who has already murdered someone in cold blood with substantial premeditation presents a changed exterior do you perceive the chances of them doing that as premeditation as well as larger than the chances that they've really changed? I'm happy I'm not on that parole board, and I hope they have budget for a good psychological evaluation.

Yeah, you and me both. I acknowledge it's a lot easier for me to wax philosophical about some person I don't know, safely far away in prison, and with almost zero chance our lives will ever cross. If he were my son-in-law, or dad, or neighbor, the issues would be way more complicated.

with substantial premeditation

You really need to come up with actual evidence for that if you keep repeating it everywhere.

I mean nothing personal by it but all I see when I see posts like yours (and many others in this thread), is that the average person understands nothing about psychopathy. What he did was premeditated. His brain is wired in such a way that killing his wife was always an option. No amount of neuroplasticity will override this baked-in reality of who this man is. Teaching psychopaths social skills will not provide them with the idealized "personal growth" you imagine. I highly recommend, "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson (of "The Mean That Stare at Goats" fame) as an amusing but on-point introduction.

Is he a diagnosed psychopath? I'll grant that murdering one's wife seems like good supporting evidence, but I'm not aware that he's known to be one.

It's not even the murder so much as it's the premeditation. Even the most non-psychopathic mentally ill individuals with the most awful intrusive thoughts will still have an active conscience telling them not to do the things their minds are telling them to do. This is a big part of the torture schizophrenics are going through. Psychopaths do not have a conscience and psychopathy is not a diagnosis. The diagnosis given to psychopaths is typically Antisocial Personality Disorder, of which I have no idea if Reiser personally qualifies. But yes, premeditated murder is going to rank quite high in the scoring criteria. Hans believes/believed that he had the right to kill his wife. Even if he legitimately feels sorry (and I would be highly skeptical), the question becomes whether he actually feels sorry for the murder or the fact that it has landed him in prison (and that he only really feels sorry for himself).

What's your evidence that the murder was premeditated though? As far as we know he didn't even look into how to cover it up until afterwards.

All the known facts are congurent with someone who acted in the heat of the moment and then tried to get the best result for himself considering the very bad situation he got himself in. Trying to cover up the act and mislead the court is certainly not very ethical but it is a far cry from the murder itself being premeditated.

Why can’t people in US prisons access the internet?

Because not being able to freely communicate with the larger society is part of the punishment? I dunno, always seemed like an obvious thing.

Why should prisons be about punishment rather than rehabilitation?

“Rehabilitation” means that a person is suffering from some condition, and they are not personally at fault for their crimes. While there is some partial truth in this point of view, taking it at 100% face value is unfair, to say the least. People can be actually guilty of something.

Okay, if someone cannot be "rehabilitated" where is the value to society or to that person in punishing them to make them suffer more on top of separating them from the public?

One of many possible values to society is that punishment reduces the motivation of vigilantes. For example if person A killed person B’s child, then person B (or a mob encourage by B) might be less motivated to seek vigilante punishment if there is some chance that a legal system could punish person A instead.

This is a very hard subject and mountains of paper have been produced debating it without any clear resolution in sight. I don't think a HN discussion is going to resolve it one way or the other.

The value is delivering justice and deterring would be criminals

Hard disagree. Rehabilitation means you take something that wasn’t working and you fix it so it can be useful again. Most convicts will eventually be released. In an ideal world, each of them will have learned how to participate in decent society so that they can be a good neighbor, employee, boss, friend, or whatever.

I’m not saying that from a bleeding heart “prison should be a resort campout!” strawman perspective, but as someone who wishes people came out of prison kinder and more sociable than they went in.

This is all conditional on the prison system of a country being a retributive or rehabilitation oriented element. The USA strongly leans towards retribution.

Even if it did mean that, so what? Shouldn't the goal of public policy be to benefit society? What's more likely to benefit society: Sticking people in big expensive torture boxes or trying to cause people to not do things that convince a bunch of other people that they deserve to be stuck in big expensive torture boxes?

'Rehabilitation" means a few different things, depending on context. In the context of penology it means "giving a prisoner a way to integrate back into society and reduce their chances of recidivism". This is not only useful for the prisoner, but useful for society, since most prisoners are eventually released.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology)

There's a difference between rehabilitation and giving people access to the internet when serving a sentence for killing your wife and tormenting her family for like, 2 years because you hid the body even though everyone knew you killed her. Also, why shouldn't it be a little bit of both?

I don't have strong feelings about general internet access, but right now, I am probably spending $200k / year in tax dollars to keep him locked up behind bars. I'd be getting my money's worth.

I would much rather he be contributing to free software from behind bars. That's true more generally too. A plumber behind bars should be allowed to plumb. A carpenter to carpent.

Why shouldn't people in prison contribute back, if willing and able?

I am probably spending $200k / year in tax dollars to keep him locked up behind bars.

At most you are spending $200K divided by the total amount of tax levied multiplied by your share of that total. Probably less than $1.

I grant you a trophy for your extreme talent for reading too literally, and then stating the obvious.

Here: U+1F3C6

It’s supposed to be both. There’s three components actually: punitive, deterrence and rehabilitation

Aren't you forgetting the most important reason for locking people up: protecting the rest of society.

They should be about rehabilitation.

That said, I think at least part of it is related to risk to the outside population.

i.e. Inmates performing illegal activity or otherwise directing people on the outside to do so.

Yes, You can do that with phones and visits as well, however those are a bit easier to monitor.

You'll find lots of variations of the following:

The Purposes of Punishment:[^1]

- Incapacitation: prevents crime by removing a defendant from society.

- Rehabilitation: prevents crime by altering a defendant’s behavior.

- Retribution: prevents crime by giving victims or society a feeling of avengement.

- Restitution: prevents crime by punishing the defendant financially.

- Deterrence: Specific deterrence prevents crime by frightening an individual defendant with punishment. General deterrence prevents crime by frightening the public with the punishment of an individual defendant.

[^1]: https://open.lib.umn.edu/criminallaw/chapter/1-5-the-purpose...

I believe you'll find a lot of people here in the US that believe prison, at least for the worst crimes, isn't about punishment or rehabilitation, but "containment".

It is some of both. Hans murdered his wife, tried to cover it up, and lied about it. His actions make him a danger to society, part of his incarceration relates to the danger he poses to society. While he is removed from society he should also be rehabilitated.

Because human beings feel it is appropriate and fair to punish people for wrongdoing, and without the state handling it individuals are more likely to take justice into their own hands. Making the criminal justice system sufficiently punishing is one of several checks against vigilantism.

Even in supposedly soft prison systems like Norway's prisoners are denied access to the Internet because it is believed that they would use it to further their criminal or terrorist activities.

"Bruk av internett i fengsel

Innsatte i fengsler med høyt og lavere sikkerhetsnivå har i utgangspunktet ikke tilgang til internett.

Unntaket er innsatte som tar utdanning under soning. De kan få begrenset og kontrollert tilgang til internett i undervisningsøyemed."

Translated by Google because I'm too lazy to type it all:

"Use of the Internet in Prison

Inmates in prisons with a high and lower security level do not initially have access to the internet.

The exception is inmates who take education during their sentence. They can have limited and controlled access to the internet for educational purposes."

Edit: forgot to add the URL

https://www.kriminalomsorgen.no/bruk-av-internett-og-sosiale...

When I was much younger, I actually wanted to end up in a Norwegian prison for the free food and so that I did not have to risk unemployment/starvation after hearing about how great it was.

But no internet? Definitely motivation for me to work hard in life and not end up imprisoned.

Googling for a bit it seems like it depends on the state [1] and not the federal level. But, email can be sent or received using CORRLINKS but you have to pay a fee for sending and receiving. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_prisons

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Fund_Limited_Inmate_Comp...

Probably because you can use the reason of a gang leader orchestrating things from the inside to justify staffing to screen every email and then you charge inflated rates for that staffing.

Despite what everyone says, few things are ideological in the USA. Most things are a savvy entrepreneur locking in income from an unconventional method to draw from taxpayer money.

I think there are two issues here: why aren't they allowed and why shouldn't they be allowed.

Some prisoners certainly shouldn't be allowed to access the internet. If you're in organized crime, being able to access the internet would give you an effective way of continuing your control from behind prison walls. Many prisoners might use the internet to continue attacks on people, albeit virtual. Does this apply to all prisoners? No. Should it apply to Hans Reiser? Maybe, I don't know enough to comment on that, his relationship with his kids, etc.

The US prison system is also often punitive beyond necessary which answers why they aren't allowed internet access in most circumstances. I think if you ask most Americans about prison, they'll say that people are raped and beaten in prison. Many Americans even seem to think those are appropriate accessory punishments to imprisonment. The news reported that Reiser was beaten in prison: https://web.archive.org/web/20090609172728/http://www.kcbs.c....

Should some prisoners be allowed more internet access? I'll leave that for others as my lunch is over.

Medium to maximum-security facilities are probably less likely to allow/provide internet access to their prisoners. Partly due to security, and partly due to punitive measures.

Although in this case, Reiser seems to be at a minimum-medium class facility.

here is a discussion related to this question that may provide some insights:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38454735

Not "people", "some people". The more serious your crime, the less freedom you have during your incarceration.

From Wiki:

On August 29, 2008, Reiser was sentenced to 15 years to life, the maximum sentence for second-degree murder. As a result of his plea bargain, Reiser cannot appeal his conviction or sentence

That would be August 2023, anyone know if he's out of prison?

A couple paragraphs below on the wiki:

As of 2020, Reiser was housed at the Correctional Training Facility near Soledad, California, with a tentative parole eligibility date of August 2027 after parole was denied in 2022.

How does he end up imprisoned 4 years longer than his sentencing indicated?

15 years to life means his sentence is life with a possibility of parole after 15 years if the parole board thinks it would be better for society that he's out of prison. The parole board did not think so at 15 years. He'll get more chances in the future.

Thank you!

"15 Years _to life_"

His sentence, according to above, is 15 years to life, so his sentence could end up being a life sentence.

sentenced 15 years to life

The letter in this link is dated 26 November 2023 and in the opening he writes he is still in prison.

I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.

From the letter dated November 2023

The letter makes it clear he is still in prison

He was found guilty by the jury in April 2008 and led police to her body in July.

The contents of the letter are interesting in their own right, but there are 2 aspects that strike me as particularly interesting. First off, he doesn't seem to regret killing his wife, more the consequences of his crime. He doesn't mention her by name or say that she didn't deserve it.

Secondly, the person he's corresponding with, Fredrick Brennan is fascinating in his own right. He's one of the 3 central characters inside the HBO documentary, Q: Into the Storm, and has a totally bizarre relationship with Jim and Ron Watkins, the two figures currently steering the ridiculous QAnon set of conspiracy theories. It's a very strange confluence of interests.

QAnon

I have never heard of, seen or even got wind of a "QAnon" member, group, theory, website or whatever they say it is outside of mainstream news. According to them it's some huge group of evil people but I can't tell myself that they're a real thing. If anyone has any real world, personal experience I would love to hear it.

If you have a subscription, the HBO documentary I mentioned, Q: Into the Storm is excellent. I think that the struggle mainstream news orgs have in talking about QAnon is that it's very difficult to encapsulate all the interlocking conspiracies and figures. There's also a wide degree of variance for what various bits and pieces mean, but there are a few central tenets. The main one is that there's a mysterious high ranking figure in the government, Q (who gets his name due to the Q-level security clearance he or she has). Q makes very abstract posts on 4chan -- and then other sites -- that seem to suggest that there's a massive pedophile ring inside the government and that Donald Trump is working to expose it from within. Many figures are implicated and, by strange coincidence, they happen to be figures that the far right detests. The Clintons and Bill Gates take starring roles but honestly it's impossible to keep track of it all.

Into the Storm is centrally focused on the identity of Q, but in the process of pursuing the answer the creator of the documentary, Cullen Hoback, ends up going on an absolutely wild hunt. I find documentaries of this sort to be a bit hit-or-miss, but this is one of the best of its subgenre. The subculture and background surrounding QAnon is interesting in its own right but, of course, the real highlight is the characters. Fredrick Brenan, Jim & Ron Watkins, and Hoback himself are fascinating individuals.

I would find it easier to believe there is a pedophile ring inside the government and Donald Trump is involved, especially considering his association with Epstein.

You can get personal perspectives here:

* https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/

the ridiculous QAnon

QAnon is a creation of MSM, and doesn't even exist, hence it's really ridiculous.

The real thing is called the Q intel drops (many times just questions), inviting followers to do research on their own, which is never ridiculous.

QAnon (often shortened to Q) is the name given to the persona that has been adopted by a few different individuals and is almost certainly currently controlled by Ron (principally) and Jim (secondarily) Watkins. Calling the posts "Q intel drops" is coded language the tells me you are intimately aware of the QAnon conspiracy group. Let me be clear: Q is some random dudes larping on the internet to give their own pathetic lives some level of importance they do not deserve. Q is a fictionalized persona.

I don't mean this as an insult, but after looking through your post history, you should consider psychological counseling. I recognize the coded language you are using. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you are in a cult. These people are taking advantage of you.

He mentions her by name in the first paragraph (after the cover letter):

I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.

He doesn't get into whether/why he is sorry:

I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.

Hans Reiser has previously explained why he believed the murder was justified. It is not clear to me, from this letter, whether he still believes so.

He regrets “killing” other’s dreams about working on his file system.

He’s a psychopath. The whole write up does not discuss anything that was asked and he just wants recognition and fame for inventing something (queryable file system) that was already released long before that, namely BeFS, by the real file system god, Dominic Giampaolo who also wrote APFS

He does mention her by name once, but only in passing:

I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006. > I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.

Secondly, the person he's corresponding with, Fredrick Brennan is fascinating in his own right.

I had no idea that was that person (I am terrible with names). Thanks for pointing that out.

I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename? I always thought it a bit weird that we were naming parts of Linux after people. We already did that once and that kinda uses up your freebie.

Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.

> I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename?

Yes. But that requires someone, or a group, to take responsibility for that and support the fork. Maintaining a filesystem can be a complex undertaking.

> Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.

I think it was more like he was the core of the project with others contributing. Once he was out of the picture no one else had sufficient passion and/or time for it to take on the mantle of project lead sufficiently (to push Reiser4 onward and eventually getting it merged into the mainline Kernel and maintaining Reiser3 in the meantime & further forward).

While Reiser4 is still maintained, it has never been merged into the mainline kernel limiting its support in common Linux distributions. I don't know if that is because the current maintainers have tried to have it merged and failed for some reason, or if they have not pushed of its inclusion at all.

What is deprecated and due to be removed is Reiser3, which is not actively maintained. There are some technical issues that would need addressing soon if it were to remain, and in any case an unmaintained filesystem is a dangerous thing to rely upon if you can avoid doing so. It isn't being removed because of who started it, it is being removed because it is not well enough supported for mainstream safety.

Reiser3 won't be removed until some time in 2025, and unless you need the latest latest kernel at all times an active setup will keep working for a while after that (until the older kernel it uses falls into EOL), so you have plenty of time to migrate if you need to.

If a lot of people were relying on Reiser3 there would be a lot more noise about this. People using Reiser4 are building their own modules (or patching a kernel tree and building it in) already and this will not affect them.

If I remember correctly (and I followed the discussions on LKML at the time, but it was a long time ago), Reiser4 was not merged because it had some "cool" features that could cause problems.

For example (again, IIRC), it allowed directories to have hard links. Al Viro was adamantly against it, showing that this potentially creates some very serious problems. In particular, it allows for cycles in the directory graph (it's no more a tree), and Viro has shown that detecting or preventing such cycles may by prohibitively expensive, and undetected they would cause any program that does directory walking (like search) to loop infinitely.

This was not the only problematic feature, just the one I remember more vividly (in part, because of Al Viro's caustic argument style :-) ).

I didn't follow LKML directly, but from what I saw elsewhere that seems right. I remember there being technical arguments against Reiser4, and the discussions about them getting interesting (not combative, but very direct) in part because Hans wasn't one with a "nicey nicey" discussion style either!

Though until Hans was out of the picture, those discussions were still on-going.

Remember that XFS was added to the kernel in 2001, and was already well-supported by most (all?) distros by the time the Reiser3/4 issue was beginning.

People who encountered issues with Reiser3 usually migrated away, and never looked back, Reiser4 was already DOA imo before all the other stuff happened.

Instead, people integrated the interesting ideas of reiserfs into ext2, and made ext3. This is also a perfectly fine way to handle disagreement.

Also, people quit him way before that thing. He mostly supported the filesystem alone.

I don't think Reiser's name had anything to do with the removal. If I recall the situation was more or less as follows:

Reiserfs3 was out there, and while it had plenty fans (good performance and efficient disk usage), it had a fair amount of corruption issues. Reiserfs4 was about to come out. Reiser insisted that Reiserfs3 was done and an obsolete relic, and reiserfs4 was the new hot thing.

Reiser ran a consulting company of some kind. IMO this may have put a bit of a damper on contributions.

He also had a contentious personality, with quite a lot of people disliking him, and him having trouble convincing people to merge reiserfs4.

Right about that time the whole murder mess happened. So reiserfs3 was apparently abandoned, reiserfs4 was uncertain if it was going to get merged. Namesys, Reiser's company of course fell apart and the existing employees had to find something else to do.

So that was probably about the worst timing possible. Reiserfs4 didn't get merged, Reiser was dealing with the trial/prison, and other filesystems started showing up as well.

There is just no need for such FS today. Everything is bloated, random access is much faster (SSDs, NVMe), storage is cheaper.

It's the only FS that I lost data with.

ReiserFS is the only Linux file system that has lost me data. Back in the day it had performance advantages when dealing with small files. But now I'd be very surprised if ext4 isn't superior to it in every conceivable way.

There's an argument for copy-on-write filesystem options but it's pretty hard to argue there needs to be more than 2 or 3 "traditional" journaling filesystems like maybe ext4 and XFS.

His letter contends that ReiserFS was intended to be more than just a filesystem, and that jibes with what he was saying about it at the time. I think that it was meant to be a queryable database that happened to be good at implementing traditional filesystem semantics, but also optimally useful through some other kind of API.

Can you explain what that means? What are 'traditional filesystem semantics' and how would it be useful through 'some other kind of API'?

Well, you know how to R/W data with a normal filesystem. You can chdir() to the location you want to be, look around there with readdir(), open() and read() or write() files in there, and all that.

You could also have a SQL-like API where could "select count(1) from all_files where path_root = '/usr' and owner_uid = 0 and world_readable = true" that allowed you to query files, or maybe kernel calls that looked a lot like the Amazon S3 API (PutObject, ListObjects, ListBuckets, etc.) if that turns out to be more efficient for certain usecases.

The normal POSIX filesystem calls are obviously enormously useful. I mean, they've been used to implement SQLite and PostgreSQL, so you can* implement those other kinds of APIs on top of it. I can also imagine it being the case where there might be a much more efficient way to implement specific workflows if you didn't care about all the conventions that POSIX brings along.

Only 5-10 years after BeFS.

I beg to differ. In 2024 we know that COW is bad regardless of whether we're talking about disk or memory.

I grew up down the street from Hans. I did not know him well, as he was the age of my older brother. I remember they worked on a couple of teenage electrical engineering projects together. Some of the filtered down to me. Hans was autistic and had the mind blindness thing going on, which sometimes made social interaction difficult for him. I think that most of my family did not want to believe that he killed his wife; and that some of his bizarre behavior could be explained by just not having that instinct that drives people to conform to social norms. But once he led police to the body the realization set in for us. Maybe we were the last know.

Our understanding was that it was a crime of passion - a heated argument over custody of children. He was not mean, evil, or a bully or anything - growing up in Oakland I have met a few of those. He is someone who lost it and made a really bad decision that ended a life and destroyed his family. I wonder if things might have turned out differently for him if he had been born 20 years later when there was more awareness and resources for neurodivergent people.

I struggle to think what should be done when someone is dragging your children away to Russia faster than the courts can stop.

Obviously not murder, but the desperation must have been a pit of despair. The children are about 20 now (draft age) and were in Russia shortly after the case. They may very well have ended up as trench soup in Donetsk or something by now thanks to the wife's psychopathic branch of the family.

Reiser tried, albeit in probably the wrong way.

probably the wrong way?

Some of these comment are sickening.

I say probably because I'm not familiar enough with certainty of the situation to know if this was the only real opportunity Hans had to try to stop the children being taken to be sacrificed to the dice of the Russian legal system and ultimately to be exposed to the child harvesting cannon fodder regime of Putin.

He probably had other options to try, but I'm not sure what they were.

Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder. It was premeditated, not a crime of passion. He ruthlessly planned it and executed the murder of his wife. Only because of a plea deal was he sentenced to a second degree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_United_States_law#De...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

The article also says that he wasn't diagnosed as autistic. It's interesting seeing how eager folks are to share their excuses and lies. Some don't want to see evil or fear it. A few appear to identify with this murderer.

He was not mean, evil, or a bully or anything

He killed his childrens mother. If those words have any meaning it was mean and evil.

I worked with Hans Reiser in the late 90s. He was a contractor with the company that I was working for, and he was doing that (working on logic synthesis for FPGAs) by day and trying to start his company at night. He was very passionate about his technical ideas, though in those days he had difficulty explaining them, so I went back and forth about whether he was a genius or a crank (I decided that he was some combination of the two). I have a music CD somewhere around that he gave me, new age-y music his mother composed (not sure whether I still have it or not). I didn't want to believe that he was a murderer, but it soon became clear that he was lying.

I met him at the same place at the same time and had the same reaction to him. Are you me?

I don't think I'm you. :-)

... yet.

non-duality on HN. well I never

If it makes you both feel better, I had a similar reaction completely removed except as a user of RieserFS.

Being a computer scientist in prison until death must suck so hard. Jesus Christ.

Why's it any worse than being any other kind of person in prison?

It'd suck a lot less if your main hobby was playing poker with roughnecks.

Bad hobbies to have in prison:

  * computers
  * wood working
  * lock-picking

Good hobbies to have in prison:

  * re-inventing mathematics from scratch
  * writing poetry
  * working low-skill jobs without meaningful compensation

Agreed but he's parole eligible in 2027 according to wikipedia. So it may not be life.

A few things that stuck out to me.

SuSE supposedly failed. I don't know who told him that. He might have expected it to be a RedHat or Ubuntu by now, which it isn't. But failed is very black and white. I would argue, if they still exist as they do now, they are quite successful.

He talks about Reiser V4. I think there is a Reiser V5 now? Or am I wrong? I cannot find that on Wikipedia. Anyway, the chances of it ending up in the Linux kernel seem close to zero.

He sounds very humble. Also he talks about being more social and having got education and therapy in prison. Still it reads as if they are all working together in prison, in certain ways. The world out there might be more complex. I don't know if he is being naive in this regard.

He does mention Reiser5 in his letter:

I don’t know what is in Reiser 5—I haven’t been told, and I cannot go on the Internet. Edward Shishkin is a very bright man though, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t spend more time with him, I am confident he has done some thing nice in Reiser 5.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Reiser5-Development is the last reference I find to Rieser5, but the link in it goes to what appears to just be Reiser4 maintained against moderately recent kernels.

He is also still talking about spinning rust (rotational delay). I forget the timeline, but maybe he went into prison before SSDs became ubiquitous? (I know they are still in servers)

Why was (8chan founder) Fredrick Brennan corresponding with Hans Reiser? Anyone have the background for that?

If I remember correctly, he sent him a letter about ReiserFS removal from the kernel out of curiosity.

he's kind of reinvented himself as a journalist/blogger type

His original letter to Hans is published here: https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%961%20Fred%E2%86%...

There used to be a lot of content about Hans Reiser on Slashdot back in the days before HN.

His statements, code and conduct were controversial long before the murder.

I'm curious if anyone has insight into his technical contributions. Were they:

- ahead of their time but now superseded by other filesystems

- visionary but not fully realized/implemented

- other

It's kind of a combination of all three.

He was "right place/right time" with a working journalling filesystem for a rapidly expanding Linux world that needed one, desperately. Drive sizes were climbing incredibly fast, and FSCK times were out of control (back then, almost all distros wouldn't mount "dirty" ext2 partitions without a full FSCK, which could take ages on a 100 GB drive.

Some of the concepts of (as he says in the letter, read it) about namespaces were quite up and coming (WinFS had similar concepts, mind you). Other aspects about journaling were also "ahead of the time" but part of the reason he got their first was not making data integrity the number 1 feature (which you can still do with modern filesystems, but Reiser3 pioneered the "journal metadata only" which makes FSCK fast, and access fast, but can result in corrupt data. Most other filesystems default to slow and correct, with an option to go fast if you want.

XFS was similar, but things like ZFS are more powerful in almost orthogonal ways.

His "dream" of the one true storage that melds RAM, ROM, disk, cache, etc has yet to come to be, though you could argue that some of the S3 style interfaces are closer.

Re: “Reiser3 pioneered journal metadata only”, a metadata-only approach to journaling actually was not uncommon (although for Linux, journaling at all for a time was not available).

This first journalled Unix file system in AIX in the early 90s was metadata only, and faster fsck made it an appealing feature copied by all other commercial Unixes by the late 90s. In the latter 90s, DigitalUnix was the first Unix vendor to provide journaling data, not just metadata. Even SGI’s XFS which had a number of cool and unique features around extent structures optimized for serving video stream large file did not have journaled data.

Most people in Unix then (and now) are unaware of “uncool” operating systems like OS/400 (now iSeries) which arguably delivered on that dream of a melding RAM, ROM, disk, cache. It wasn’t POSIX/Unix/hacker-friendly/cheap but it was and I think still is a billion dollar minicomputer business for IBM. I believe they called it “Single-Level Store Architecture”.

Wikipedia for this for the interested (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i ): “Instead of operating on memory addresses, TIMI instructions operate on objects. All data in IBM i, such as data files, source code, programs and regions of allocated memory, are encapsulated inside objects managed by the operating system (c.f. the "Everything is a file" model in Unix). …The object model hides whether data is stored in primary, or secondary storage. Instead, the operating system automatically handles the process of retrieving and then storing the changes to permanent storage.”

I believe lisp machines back in the day had something grossly similar.

The difficulty (impossibility?) of implementing this sort of file system in the confines of POSIX (with extensions even?) is probably why this never happened in Unix.

As Reiner’s 2023 letter we are discussing notes, this required new information/hints flowing up and down the layers of the stack. It’d require implementing a new userspace+kernel paradigm of application development alongside the current one.

Accomplishing that sort of transformation in an ecosystem takes a very unique blend of skills and knowledge, and it’s additionally not clear how much economic benefit accrues to anyone for making this shift which is an inhibitor to realization, in Unix, of “the dream”.

But it was done outside of Unix and it quietly is running Fortune 100 workloads today … although many of them are implementing the “strangler pattern” to get those workloads moved to more conventional “modern” systems.

Reading this I think it is interesting to compare and contrast this write up with the evangelism of Richard Hipp and his success with SQLite.

It seems to me that Hans Reiser's write up still has a lot of leaps and lurches, both emotionally and in terms of reasoning. I felt there was a lot of instances where he expresses remorse for key hiring decisions or meetings between stakeholders in the open source world, but with tinges of belief that had he done things differently then that would've made the difference in a successful outcome.

In a lot of ways it seems like Hans Reiser had a pretty grandiose vision to rearchitect filesystems to become more like databases- which then demanded huge changes both in terms of the physical layout of data stored on disk as well as the implications around how operating systems would leverage and use such a technology capability. He sees himself in a lineage with the plan9 folks... and also sort of implies that this was an idea ahead of its time and somewhat downplaying what a large amount of change would be required (sort of reminiscent to me of the criticisms ppl wage against systemd).

He's now in jail for murdering his wife.

Richard Hipp, on the other hand, literally has a values page on his website. His software is in the public domain. He and his team have been steadily and methodically building what is now the most widely deployed database of all time and it powers a wide range of critical applications and has been approved for FAA use cases, used in missile targeting and powers literally all of the apps on our phones.

He's a deeply Christian human (and I say this as a lifelong atheist who wasn't raised on these values) and has approached evangalism of his technology with heaping amounts of humility and hardcore praxis (SQLite is arguably one of the more comprehensively tested libraries out there). Hipp also is rather opinionated as a technologist- he wrote his own SCM on top of SQLite! But he doesn't come across as a zealot whatsoever but rather a seasoned and mature technologist who is methodically executing on a radical vision to the benefit of all.

In the process I feel that in a lot of ways his accomplishments have achieved the vision that Hans Reiser wanted around advancing new ideas in databases and filesystems. However, instead of doing it at the filesystem layer Hipp instead achieved this vision in process with a library that is extremely easy to include in a huge variety of projects within userspace. In the process the revolution that Reiser wanted was achieved in many ways and with a lot less churn and violence in the process (figuratively and sadly literally).

I could not think of a more opposite and extreme contrasting examples of technologists and approaches, and for me it teaches a lot about how to approach socio-technological endeavors successfully as well as providing a good illustration of the way in which ethics and morals play into said endeavors.

Well, was only 5-10 years late for a database-like file system..

Very interesting observations, thank you.

wow, he is an amazingly compelling and articulate writer. definitely gives me a bit of an eerie feeling, of course, because he seems like a very meticulous person and perpetrated a heinous crime in a most meticulous fashion... but... it is very hard to completely discount the idea that he has learned something from prison in a way that makes him redeemable, though i'm a bit of a softie-- him bending over backward to commend people on their work in a way he clearly didn't do at the time... that is very hard for a prideful person to do without at least some little bit of subtext... and i just didn't pick up on anything like that. the only subtext would essentially be that he is so clever that he knows the only way for him to get his roses is to genuflect. so i guess this whole thing is kind of a litmus test on how you view human nature... but it was an incredible read, at the very least.

He's serving 15 years to life, and has already served 15 years (next chance of parole in 2027). So he's at the point where its very important for him to look like he's a reformed character. That makes it particularly hard for us to judge, at this distance. If he'd remained cold and calculating, this is still exactly what we'd expect him to write.

Did you believe Red at his parole hearings in The Shawshank Redemption?

I found this to be a great story about mismanagement. It appears Hans made a multitude of small mistakes that ended up crippling his filesystem project. It's extremely interesting to see such a thorough reflection on all the things that went wrong.

yea im thankful he shared all the failures and redesigns etc

This letter is too fucking heavy. I couldn't read it for long. Emotions overcame me. He's having a terrible time in prison. I feel sorry for him and angry at him at the same time, for the insane fucking stupid thing he did.

I followed the trial coverage at the time, on Wired. It was a fucking nail biter and by the end it was clear he'd done it and I was just like, fuck, Hans, why did you do it??

I followed it too. It's a crazy feeling: one of my favorite teachers from University (A PhD in AI at the time backbin 2001) is nowadays in prison for murder .

Apparently he is gay and slept with a student, got drunk and passion got the worst of him. This happened years after I have finished school, but finding about it was shocking.

It shows that invariably everyone has a human side that may make us do stupid things out of passion.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hans-Reiser-2024

Upvoted because this links to the actual pictures of the letters.

Were there technical reasons for the deprecation or was it more of a cancelled type thing?

Aside from general maintenance burden, it's not year-2038 proof. I believe that's the main reason for removing it now, so people don't run in to this in 2038 (some kernels have very long support cycles, are used in embedded devices, etc.)

When I was young, and I was first experimenting with Linux, I was kindof confused at being asked to choose a filesystem type.

I wasn't completely confused: I was a Mac OS user, and I had been around when the HFS+ filesystem was introduced to replace HFS. So I read through the documentation I could get, I learned how ReiserFS was a journaling filesystem, and decided to use it.

I kept on using ReiserFS as my preferred filesystem, any time there wasn't a need to use a different filesystem (for example, I continued using ext2 for /boot). I don't remember ever having an issue with it.

Then I started dealing with larger filesystems, and XFS was available, and I understood that XFS worked better on large storage. Around the same time, I learned of Hans Reiser being charged with killing his wife. I was confused and sad, but moved on.

I hope for all the best for Hans Reiser's children.

My journey was similar, but I started with plain EXT2 and eventually investigated (and then moved) to ReiserFS because it came back from unexpected shutdown so quickly. Knowing what I know now about filesystems, I probably could have solved my problem by mounting /mp3s read-only on ext2, but that was then.

I eventually moved on to XFS when it came into the kernel because I got tired of finding tail-packed parts of /etc/password in other important files, preventing boot.

My favorite novel feature of ReiserFS was how it would take inodes you wanted to delete, cut them up, and scatter them across the hard drive with a plaintext inode suicide note.

He was sentenced to 15 years to life, 16 years ago. I'm not sure this letter is for us, or for the parole board. Maybe I'm being cynical.

That's not to say I didn't find the technical parts interesting.

Others have commented on other parts of the letter but I find it very amusing he is basically stuck in a 2006 view of the tech world. Slashdot and HDD seek times immediately jumped out as things are as dead as they can be.

I wonder if he even knows about smartphones.

Update: As of right now Slashdot.Org hasn't posted this

He doesn’t discuss the deprecation at all. Instead he paints a picture with technical discussions of the past, and still sees himself as some great inventor and the cause of many things. Dreams of others etc. Puke

He has god complex, but now also has some verbal tricks up his sleeve. The whole thing felt disingenuous.

What was the point of keeping him in jail? He only had one wife so hopefully no more murders.

Too bad ReiserFS fell out of favor. It was killer.

For context, I was born the year this guy went to prison. I'm almost 16.