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Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel
- pixelesque 3y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39042626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39042626
- mike_d 3y agoThe post if you want to read it directly: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/b98b29cf-27d9-49e0-b10b-1848399badfd@kittens.ph/T/#u https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/b98b29cf-27d9-49e0-b10b-1848399...
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- dale_glass 3y agoThey sent that to a LKML and didn't get a single reply to it? Curious. I think maybe somebody should re-post the request to credit the 3 developers, because that is directly relevant to LKML and may have gotten lost in the middle of all the text.
- Macha 3y agoSome may have been involved in Linux at the time and this raises unhappy memories. Some may consider his action unforgiveable. Some may have butted heads with Hans Reiser in the past and be uninterested in his words because of their personal opinion. Some may be uninterested in the poster (the 8chan founder, not a regular Linux contributor). Some may see themselves as representatives of their employer and worry any response could be a PR risk if it gets interpreted as sympathizing with a murderer, or alternatively kicking a man while he's down.
- daniel_reetz 3y agoAlso, people may simply not remember him. We are all the center of our own worlds.
- lazide 3y agoWould you respond to the unabombers manifesto if he posted it on HN?
- dale_glass 3y agoI'm not saying you have to like the guy (I don't), but the request for credit was reasonable, and if they did work then they deserve to be credited, even if a horrible person is the one pointing it out.
- lazide 3y agoThe unabomber also had a point about modern society, even if his proposed course of action to address them was counter productive and insane. No one sane I can think of is going to reference the unabomber manifesto in their public policy document proposing fixing any of those problems in an actually sane way, because most folks who would read that are going to automatically assume the person shares values or sympathies with the Unabomber. And the Unabomber was a literal terrorist nut job, even if he was brilliant in some other areas. Which is bad for the writer. So I’m sure those folks will get some credit, just not in a way that will reference that email and hence draw an association with a convicted murderer who was also a major asshole to most of his co-contributors. Guilt by association exists, even if irrational and it causes shitty outcomes sometines. If someone has something to lose with their public persona, it’s a good idea to not associate with problematic people because of it.
- anilakar 3y ago[flagged]
- mgdlbp 3y ago(re: dead comment 39066268) I'm now very interested in what Reiser would think of the present state of the (semantic) web. (edit: i.e, the thought experiment, realized: transplant someone just a few years in time --- what gradual changes would they uniquely observe?)
- b33j0r 3y agoI was a bit bemused the other day when I saw a reiserfs update on arch. Kinda funny, if Mussolini had invented sliced bread, would sandwiches have been a bad idea for decades too?
- deafpolygon 3y agoNo one seems to have a problem with Volkswagon.
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- boudin 3y agoOr rockets, which is mostly the work of the brain behind V2 missiles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
- haunter 3y agoOr pretty much most big german industrial companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
- lazide 3y agoThey would if it was called a Hitlerwagon
- XorNot 3y agoWe probably wouldn't have kept calling it "Mussolini Bread".
- meepmorp 3y agoReiserfs has been essentially unmaintained for nearly 20 years because the guy who was the driving force behind the project was too busy first hiding his dead wife's body then serving prison time. It wasn't the association with him that killed it, it was his disappearance from everything.
- konschubert 3y agoWhy is everybody so fascinated by this? You can be both smart, weird and a sociopath.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoI think because in a way, we are all weird more or less due to the incredibly strange society we live in, and Reiser was one of the few that blew up. So there are two levels of fascination: on one level, we are looking for insights about ourselves in his breakdown, and we also hope that we are different than him, which gives us hope that we can live through this society and not fall apart like he did.
- konschubert 3y agoHe lied to their kids and told them that their mother had abandoned them.
- lelanthran 3y ago> He lied to their kids and told them that their mother had abandoned them. You think that's the most notable thing out of all the other things he did? Parents do that all the time to their kids after divorce, there's probably even a Wikipedia page about parental alienation
- Snow_Falls 3y agoThat he did it after murdering the mother is what makes it particularly galling.
- lazide 3y ago[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_alienation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_alienation]
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- Sakos 3y ago> It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison That last part immediately jumped out to me and made me a bit sad. We have adults walking around with the emotional intelligence of toddlers, because nobody ever thought it might be important to impart that in a systematic way. Did we used to when society worked differently? Maybe, maybe not? I don't know and I'm certainly not one to argue that things used to be better in the old days. But I feel like we're failing our children by not emphasizing emotional intelligence more in schools. We've learned so much in recent decades about how to regulate emotion, how to handle emotional crises, suffering and pain. Schema therapy, DBT and ACT have only really become a widespread thing in the past 2 decades. Did any of us know about cognitive behavioral therapy a decade ago? There is so much we could be doing as a society to improve the mental health of so many people, but we just ... don't.
- lelanthran 3y agoI feel you are inaccurate, in that schools all focus more on emotional intelligence over any single academic subject matter. Add up all the required group projects, team stuff, etc and there you have it.
- pgeorgi 3y agoThey focus more on it, but in a lord-of-the-flies kind of way. You either get the cues, or you don't in which case, tough luck. It's the same in other fields, e.g. sports/physical ed often works that way, language and maths as well depending on the teacher. But with none of them, the failure to impart that knowledge increases the risk of murder (as seen here, even though that's an extreme case.) Edit to add: and in cases like Hans Reiser it's doubly sad because he surely was a smart kid. Sending him off into special "emotional intelligence classes" probably wouldn't have affected his intellectual skills in the slightest (or maybe even in a positive way). But while it's an aspect that most schools try to impart through osmosis, they don't detect when they fail, or even when they notice, there's little they can do about it.
- jonathanlydall 3y agoI only managed to read this in full a bit after the other thread was posted. Lots of interesting aspects to it, but one that stands out to me is how he is an example of an engineer who didn’t realise the importance of people skills. I quite often see software developers who have an almost antagonistic attitude towards business, users and sometimes colleagues because they feel that their project failing to succeed is other people’s fault: “business didn’t give me the right requirements”, “users didn’t use the software in the correct way”, “all the other software developers are useless”. This attitude may not get in the way of small scale solo projects, but for any non trivial sized project, it’s going to work very badly. Significant sized projects require collaboration, you need to work well with others which may require compromise. Assuming that your organisation is not dysfunctional, it’s not unusual that requirements aren’t initially 100% clear, this is why software development is often an iterative process. The most valuable software developers know how to work with others towards the common goal of making excellent software and the process can sometimes seem messy due having to work with many different kinds of people, but that’s the skill you need to rise above being a merely great coder, but one who can’t really work with a team.
- robviren 3y agoI've seen similar sentiment as well. It's difficult to blame people as I am certain individual experiences dictate how they feel about business. Software engineering in particular feels like something that is just fundamentally misunderstood by most people. If I looked out and saw a half constructed building I would not tell customers that it is almost done. Most people can grasp that a building needs materials sourced from many vendors, some people working on certain aspects (plumber, carpenter, framer, etc), but for some reason they just look at software and are convinced it is a lack of resolve or dedication or something. I blame the popular notion of hacking together Facebook over a long weekend or similar. There is usually a lack of respect and clear communication at the heart of negative feelings. I attempt to properly level set expectations so there is even room for the soft skills you identified. It's hard to deploy them when the business has a fundamental misunderstanding and antagonism towards development.
- gigatexal 3y agoI've done a bit of thinking about Mr. Reiser and after reading the message to the mailing list and the like I'm thinking he sounds remorseful but also even if he wasn't the debt he owes society is being paid by his incarceration and I do nothing worthwile to pile on and re-punish him for his crimes. The same goes for my comments about Stallman; I don't care for the man and probably wouldn't hang out with him or entertain his ideas but there's no denying his contributions to open source and the gnu set of things. His relevance now is basically zero and so is Hans's but I don't need to flog either of them anytime their names come up. So my previous comments I apologize for (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39042626&p=2#39045093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39042626&p=2#39045093). I don't know enough about filesystems or what was maybe planned for v4 v5 and beyond for reiserfs but I am glad we have some really nice filesystems in Linux. I'm stoked to see what I can do with bcachefs and am quite happy with xfs and zfs on my systems.
- concordDance 3y ago> entertain his ideas Any of them or just a specific small subset?
- gigatexal 3y agoI think he’s a bit extreme about proprietary software.
- codeflo 3y agoI don’t think Stallman is irrelevant. He’s still in charge of the GNU stuff, he still blocks progress on GCC, he still has donors and an audience, he’s still a pedophilia apologist. Edit: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient... https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794 https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...
- gigatexal 3y agoMaybe if he became irrelevant and we moved on we could find someone that could champion all the benefits of GNU without the Stallman baggage.
- nurettin 3y agoRight after Reiser got convicted, ext4 came out and replaced reiserfs in the recommendation list. I always thought that this was a strange coincidence.
- popohauer 3y agoThis is why I always say the best software developers are the ones who work well with others and have a low KDR IRL.
- INTPenis 3y agoI didn't even read it. Remember that this man strangled a woman to death, the mother of his children. Many of us suffer with social skills but we don't murder people for it.
- Qwertious 3y ago>Many of us suffer with social skills but we don't murder people for it. And what should he do? Just go die? He apologized, he went to jail and is serving out his sentence, he worked on becoming a better person, what are you expecting him to do after the event?
- INTPenis 3y agoI don't expect anything from him. I just think it's funny how society boycotted certain MIT people for hanging around Epstein but a murderer gets top billing on HN.
- rozab 3y agoVery strange to see Brennan (hotwheels) come up in this context. He always struck me as a tragic figure.
- moritzwarhier 3y agoWow, I didn't notice this when I read the beginning of Reisers letter in the previous submission.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoHer name was Nina Sharanova
- curiousgal 3y agoI read the Wikipedia article about the crime and I found it surprising he got convicted as it seemed like they didn't have any actual evidence against him. Could anyone who's familiar with the case shed some light as to why the jury found him guilty? We do know that he did do it, I am just curious as to how it was proven.
- noslenwerdna 3y agoHe admitted to it and showed the police where he hid the body as part of a plea bargain.