53 ms·

Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

417 points by wut42 3y ago

mariusor 3y ago
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.
- iaw 3y ago
  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.
  - JadeNB 3y ago
    > 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.
    - iaw 3y ago
      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.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        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.
        okwhateverdude 3y ago
        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?")
        fl7305 3y ago
        > 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?
        bombcar 3y ago
        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.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    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.
    - starkparker 3y ago
      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.com:80/cgi-bin/blogs/localnews/category?blogid=37&cat=1428 https://web.archive.org/web/20080501184401/http://www.sfgate...
      - RajT88 3y ago
        I go back periodically and read the Wired article about it. It is totally bananas: https://archive.is/BcMRF 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!
        jacquesm 3y ago
        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.
        RajT88 3y ago
        Yeah, some follow-up reporting found that the guy was lying for some weird reason. He said as much. I forget the reason.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    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.
  - Arch-TK 3y ago
    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.)
    - bena 3y ago
      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.
      - EasyMark 3y ago
        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.
        bena 3y ago
        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.
      - pcthrowaway 3y ago
        Elsewhere in this thread (or maybe it was another thread I followed on it), didn't someone mention he suspiciously left his phone at home the day he committed the murder, whereas he would normally have the phone with him? Seems like it was probably premeditated to me if so
- Aloha 3y ago
  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.
  - themerone 3y ago
    Drunk driving is a stupid thing people do. Murder is an act of evil.
    - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
      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.
      - themerone 3y ago
        Evil is not a religious concept.
        shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
        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.
        lupusreal 3y ago
        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.
        skissane 3y ago
        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.
- throwaway365980 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gertop 3y ago
    Why do you think that her being a mail order bride makes it less bad? If anything it just shows that he wanted to buy another human that he could control and, when it turned out not to be the case, he decided to kill her.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - deleted 3y ago
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  - iaw 3y ago
    I am not going to touch on your other points as you clearly have decided your mind. > why a mistake he committed in personal life would make his file system a taboo to touch. He is no longer here to fix bugs or improve the file system, it is not that it's Taboo to touch per se. The benefits of ReiserFS are no longer clear compared to alternatives, there's a cost to including ReiserFS (which Reiser acknowledges), no other FS is associated with the name of a premeditated murderer.
    - account42 3y ago
      > premeditated murderer This is an opinion and not something backed by any known facts.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        Before entering a post-verdict deal for a reduced charge to give up the location of his victim’s body, Reiser was convicted by the jury of first-degree (specifically premeditated, even though there alternative ways to get that charge in California) murder, meaning that the trial jury found that the evidence presented at trial eatablished that beyond a reasonable doubt. The facts supporting that conclusion are public. It may be possible to reasonably disagree with the jury’s conclusion, but it is beyond silly to describe it as opinion supported by no known facts.
- deleted 3y ago
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- bachmeier 3y ago
  "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.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > 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.
    - ryandvm 3y ago
      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.
      - ako 3y ago
        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.
        timschmidt 3y ago
        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.
- silisili 3y ago
  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.
  - riversflow 3y ago
    > 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.
- eatbitseveryday 3y ago
  > 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.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Context matters
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    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.
    - account42 3y ago
      > 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.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    > 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.
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  Good thing the lizards who pass the US throne back and forth don't have souls that need redemption!
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I spent 10 years in jail. For a large part of that I socialized mainly with those who had committed murder. Some had committed more than one. Most of the murderers I met are some of the nicest people I ever met (if you can temporarily disregard their crime). People are not defined by their worst mistake. I am in very regular contact with many of them as they work their way through the system. Some of them have life sentences without parole, which is a hard pill to swallow. I think my autobiography will be titled "All my friends are murderers."
  - etc-hosts 3y ago
    I hope you make friends with a non murderer one day.
hinkley 3y ago
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.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  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.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > 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.
belltaco 3y ago
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?
- lxe 3y ago
  > I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006. From the letter dated November 2023
- TomK32 3y ago
  He was found guilty by the jury in April 2008 and led police to her body in July.
- semi-extrinsic 3y ago
  The letter in this link is dated 26 November 2023 and in the opening he writes he is still in prison.
- iaw 3y ago
  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.
  - iknowstuff 3y ago
    How does he end up imprisoned 4 years longer than his sentencing indicated?
    - gavinhoward 3y ago
      His sentence, according to above, is 15 years to life, so his sentence could end up being a life sentence.
    - dtauzell 3y ago
glonq 3y ago
[flagged]
- lxe 3y ago
  Apparently he's been in prison for murdering his wife since 2008
  - glonq 3y ago
    Oh I remember when that whole thing went down. It caused quite the buzz on Slashdot. ...but now I'm struggling to remember how many times I've logged into Slashdot in the past 10 years...
    - TomK32 3y ago
      about as often has Reiser has...
    - ahazred8ta 3y ago
      The webcomic "Everybody Loves Eric Raymond" got a bit of mileage out of it. https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/hans-reiser https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/hans-reiser
emayljames 3y ago
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hans-Reiser-2024 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hans-Reiser-2024
- fouc 3y ago
  Upvoted because this links to the actual pictures of the letters.
sph 3y ago
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.org/ 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.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Isn't that a restating of Metcalfe's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locally_linear_graph
  - sph 3y ago
    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.
TomK32 3y ago
[flagged]
ahoka 3y ago
Why can’t people in US prisons access the internet?
- fouc 3y ago
  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.
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  Because not being able to freely communicate with the larger society is part of the punishment? I dunno, always seemed like an obvious thing.
  - vimax 3y ago
    Why should prisons be about punishment rather than rehabilitation?
    - atemerev 3y ago
      “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.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        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.
morelisp 3y ago
Why was (8chan founder) Fredrick Brennan corresponding with Hans Reiser? Anyone have the background for that?
- wut42 3y ago
  If I remember correctly, he sent him a letter about ReiserFS removal from the kernel out of curiosity.
- dblitt 3y ago
  His original letter to Hans is published here: https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%961%20Fred%E2%86%92Hans/reiser.pdf https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%961%20Fred%E2%86%...
- evan_ 3y ago
  he's kind of reinvented himself as a journalist/blogger type
kstrauser 3y ago
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.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  I don't believe he did. He's just angling for his next parole date as he got denied this year.
  - ddtaylor 3y ago
    He was denied two years ago.
    - jacquesm 3y 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.
      - stickfigure 3y ago
        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.
        mardifoufs 3y ago
mpol 3y ago
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.
- the_af 3y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    https://www.phoronix.com/news/Reiser5-Development 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.
- ajb 3y ago
  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)
  - sakjur 3y ago
    Yes, he went to prison around the time when I started using Linux and when HDDs were very much still the default choice. SSDs often held 64 or 128 GB for a high cost and with questionable lifespans.
not2b 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffrallen 3y ago
  I met him at the same place at the same time and had the same reaction to him. Are you me?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    If it makes you both feel better, I had a similar reaction completely removed except as a user of RieserFS.
  - not2b 3y ago
    I don't think I'm you. :-)
    - horsh1 3y ago
      ... yet.
      - lilbaby 3y ago
        non-duality on HN. well I never
    - ncr100 3y ago
      Replication error detected!
vvillena 3y ago
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.
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  yea im thankful he shared all the failures and redesigns etc
revel 3y ago
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.
- Athas 3y ago
  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.
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    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
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > 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.
- rekado 3y ago
  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.
bjourne 3y ago
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.
- ghaff 3y ago
  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.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    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.
    - jbverschoor 3y ago
      Only 5-10 years after BeFS.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Can you explain what that means? What are 'traditional filesystem semantics' and how would it be useful through 'some other kind of API'?
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        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.
toxypol 3y ago
Being a computer scientist in prison until death must suck so hard. Jesus Christ.
- fred_is_fred 3y ago
  Agreed but he's parole eligible in 2027 according to wikipedia. So it may not be life.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  Why's it any worse than being any other kind of person in prison?
  - fl7305 3y ago
    It'd suck a lot less if your main hobby was playing poker with roughnecks.
    - saalweachter 3y ago
      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
deleted 3y ago
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jpablo 3y ago
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
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mvanveen 3y ago
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.
gigatexal 3y ago
[flagged]
bostonsre 3y ago
Were there technical reasons for the deprecation or was it more of a cancelled type thing?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- arp242 3y ago
  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.)
coldtea 3y ago
[flagged]
CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
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.
- bombcar 3y ago
  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.
_chu1 3y ago
For context, I was born the year this guy went to prison. I'm almost 16.
resters 3y ago
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
- bombcar 3y ago
  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.
  - gregw2 3y ago
    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 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.
knorker 3y ago
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.
jbverschoor 3y ago
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.
keeganpoppen 3y ago
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.
- ajb 3y ago
  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.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Did you believe Red at his parole hearings in The Shawshank Redemption?
    - ajb 3y ago
      Haven't seen it
cvalka 3y ago
[flagged]
lilbaby 3y ago
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??
- xtracto 3y ago
  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.
deleted 3y ago
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laliluleloo 3y ago
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.
pfisherman 3y ago
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.
- beaeglebeached 3y ago
  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.
  - bazoom42 3y ago
    probably the wrong way? Some of these comment are sickening.
    - beaeglebeached 3y ago
      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. I'd feel much safer with him on the street than his psychopathic family court judge.
etc-hosts 3y ago
https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/wp-content/images/ep057.jpg https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/wp-content/images/ep057.jpg

417 points by wut42 3y ago

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.

iaw 3y ago
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.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  > 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.
  - iaw 3y ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      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.
      - okwhateverdude 3y ago
        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?")
      - fl7305 3y ago
        > 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?
        bombcar 3y ago
        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.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  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.
  - starkparker 3y ago
    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.com:80/cgi-bin/blogs/localnews/category?blogid=37&cat=1428 https://web.archive.org/web/20080501184401/http://www.sfgate...
    - RajT88 3y ago
      I go back periodically and read the Wired article about it. It is totally bananas: https://archive.is/BcMRF 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!
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        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.
        RajT88 3y ago
        Yeah, some follow-up reporting found that the guy was lying for some weird reason. He said as much. I forget the reason.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  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.
- Arch-TK 3y ago
  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.)
  - bena 3y ago
    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.
    - EasyMark 3y ago
      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.
      - bena 3y ago
        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.
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      Elsewhere in this thread (or maybe it was another thread I followed on it), didn't someone mention he suspiciously left his phone at home the day he committed the murder, whereas he would normally have the phone with him? Seems like it was probably premeditated to me if so
Aloha 3y ago
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.
- themerone 3y ago
  Drunk driving is a stupid thing people do. Murder is an act of evil.
  - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
    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.
    - themerone 3y ago
      Evil is not a religious concept.
      - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
        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.
        lupusreal 3y ago
        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.
        skissane 3y ago
        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.
throwaway365980 3y ago
[flagged]
- gertop 3y ago
  Why do you think that her being a mail order bride makes it less bad? If anything it just shows that he wanted to buy another human that he could control and, when it turned out not to be the case, he decided to kill her.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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- iaw 3y ago
  I am not going to touch on your other points as you clearly have decided your mind. > why a mistake he committed in personal life would make his file system a taboo to touch. He is no longer here to fix bugs or improve the file system, it is not that it's Taboo to touch per se. The benefits of ReiserFS are no longer clear compared to alternatives, there's a cost to including ReiserFS (which Reiser acknowledges), no other FS is associated with the name of a premeditated murderer.
  - account42 3y ago
    > premeditated murderer This is an opinion and not something backed by any known facts.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Before entering a post-verdict deal for a reduced charge to give up the location of his victim’s body, Reiser was convicted by the jury of first-degree (specifically premeditated, even though there alternative ways to get that charge in California) murder, meaning that the trial jury found that the evidence presented at trial eatablished that beyond a reasonable doubt. The facts supporting that conclusion are public. It may be possible to reasonably disagree with the jury’s conclusion, but it is beyond silly to describe it as opinion supported by no known facts.
deleted 3y ago
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bachmeier 3y ago
"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.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > 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.
  - ryandvm 3y ago
    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.
    - ako 3y ago
      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.
      - timschmidt 3y ago
        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.
silisili 3y ago
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.
- riversflow 3y ago
  > 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.
eatbitseveryday 3y ago
> 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.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Context matters
- jacquesm 3y ago
  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.
  - account42 3y ago
    > 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.
- scotty79 3y ago
  > 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.
rokkitmensch 3y ago
Good thing the lizards who pass the US throne back and forth don't have souls that need redemption!
qingcharles 3y ago
I spent 10 years in jail. For a large part of that I socialized mainly with those who had committed murder. Some had committed more than one. Most of the murderers I met are some of the nicest people I ever met (if you can temporarily disregard their crime). People are not defined by their worst mistake. I am in very regular contact with many of them as they work their way through the system. Some of them have life sentences without parole, which is a hard pill to swallow. I think my autobiography will be titled "All my friends are murderers."
- etc-hosts 3y ago
  I hope you make friends with a non murderer one day.

hinkley 3y ago

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.

dale_glass 3y ago
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.
dspillett 3y ago
> 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.

belltaco 3y ago

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?

lxe 3y ago
> I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006. From the letter dated November 2023
TomK32 3y ago
He was found guilty by the jury in April 2008 and led police to her body in July.
semi-extrinsic 3y ago
The letter in this link is dated 26 November 2023 and in the opening he writes he is still in prison.
iaw 3y ago
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.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  How does he end up imprisoned 4 years longer than his sentencing indicated?
  - gavinhoward 3y ago
    His sentence, according to above, is 15 years to life, so his sentence could end up being a life sentence.
  - dtauzell 3y ago

glonq 3y ago

[flagged]

lxe 3y ago
Apparently he's been in prison for murdering his wife since 2008
- glonq 3y ago
  Oh I remember when that whole thing went down. It caused quite the buzz on Slashdot. ...but now I'm struggling to remember how many times I've logged into Slashdot in the past 10 years...
  - TomK32 3y ago
    about as often has Reiser has...
  - ahazred8ta 3y ago
    The webcomic "Everybody Loves Eric Raymond" got a bit of mileage out of it. https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/hans-reiser https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/hans-reiser

emayljames 3y ago

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

fouc 3y ago
Upvoted because this links to the actual pictures of the letters.

sph 3y ago

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.org/ 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.

dekhn 3y ago
Isn't that a restating of Metcalfe's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locally_linear_graph
- sph 3y ago
  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.

TomK32 3y ago

[flagged]

ahoka 3y ago

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

fouc 3y ago
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.
Joker_vD 3y ago
Because not being able to freely communicate with the larger society is part of the punishment? I dunno, always seemed like an obvious thing.
- vimax 3y ago
  Why should prisons be about punishment rather than rehabilitation?
  - atemerev 3y ago
    “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.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      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.

morelisp 3y ago

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

wut42 3y ago
If I remember correctly, he sent him a letter about ReiserFS removal from the kernel out of curiosity.
dblitt 3y ago
His original letter to Hans is published here: https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%961%20Fred%E2%86%92Hans/reiser.pdf https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%961%20Fred%E2%86%...
evan_ 3y ago
he's kind of reinvented himself as a journalist/blogger type

kstrauser 3y ago

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.

mardifoufs 3y ago
I don't believe he did. He's just angling for his next parole date as he got denied this year.
- ddtaylor 3y ago
  He was denied two years ago.
  - jacquesm 3y 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.
    - stickfigure 3y ago
      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.
      - mardifoufs 3y ago

mpol 3y ago

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.

the_af 3y ago
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.
- bombcar 3y ago
  https://www.phoronix.com/news/Reiser5-Development 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.
ajb 3y ago
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)
- sakjur 3y ago
  Yes, he went to prison around the time when I started using Linux and when HDDs were very much still the default choice. SSDs often held 64 or 128 GB for a high cost and with questionable lifespans.

not2b 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jeffrallen 3y ago
I met him at the same place at the same time and had the same reaction to him. Are you me?
- bombcar 3y ago
  If it makes you both feel better, I had a similar reaction completely removed except as a user of RieserFS.
- not2b 3y ago
  I don't think I'm you. :-)
  - horsh1 3y ago
    ... yet.
    - lilbaby 3y ago
      non-duality on HN. well I never
  - ncr100 3y ago
    Replication error detected!

vvillena 3y ago

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.

sitzkrieg 3y ago
yea im thankful he shared all the failures and redesigns etc

revel 3y ago

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.

Athas 3y ago
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.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  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
Eisenstein 3y ago
> 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.
rekado 3y ago
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.

bjourne 3y ago

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.

ghaff 3y ago
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.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  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.
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    Only 5-10 years after BeFS.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Can you explain what that means? What are 'traditional filesystem semantics' and how would it be useful through 'some other kind of API'?
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      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.

toxypol 3y ago

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

fred_is_fred 3y ago
Agreed but he's parole eligible in 2027 according to wikipedia. So it may not be life.
bigbillheck 3y ago
Why's it any worse than being any other kind of person in prison?
- fl7305 3y ago
  It'd suck a lot less if your main hobby was playing poker with roughnecks.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    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

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jpablo 3y ago

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

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mvanveen 3y ago

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.

gigatexal 3y ago

[flagged]

bostonsre 3y ago

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

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
arp242 3y ago
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.)

coldtea 3y ago

[flagged]

CaliforniaKarl 3y ago

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.

bombcar 3y ago
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.

_chu1 3y ago

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

resters 3y ago

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

bombcar 3y ago
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.
- gregw2 3y ago
  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 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.

knorker 3y ago

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.

jbverschoor 3y ago

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.

keeganpoppen 3y ago

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.

ajb 3y ago
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.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Did you believe Red at his parole hearings in The Shawshank Redemption?
  - ajb 3y ago
    Haven't seen it

cvalka 3y ago

[flagged]

lilbaby 3y ago

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??

xtracto 3y ago
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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

laliluleloo 3y ago

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.

pfisherman 3y ago

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.

beaeglebeached 3y ago
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.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  probably the wrong way? Some of these comment are sickening.
  - beaeglebeached 3y ago
    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. I'd feel much safer with him on the street than his psychopathic family court judge.

etc-hosts 3y ago

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/wp-content/images/ep057.jpg https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/wp-content/images/ep057.jpg