I worked with Hans Reiser in the late 90s. He was a contractor with the company that I was working for, and he was doing that (working on logic synthesis for FPGAs) by day and trying to start his company at night. He was very passionate about his technical ideas, though in those days he had difficulty explaining them, so I went back and forth about whether he was a genius or a crank (I decided that he was some combination of the two). I have a music CD somewhere around that he gave me, new age-y music his mother composed (not sure whether I still have it or not). I didn't want to believe that he was a murderer, but it soon became clear that he was lying.
I 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.
I suspect many are aware of this but for those uninformed:
Reiser committed premeditated murder of his (ex?)wife Nina around 2006 and hid her body so well they could not find her. He made his children think either that their mother abandoned them. He had thought without a body he could not be charged and convicted.
I believe he waited until it was apparent he would lose the trial and then plead down so that they could recover her body.
I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
He was far less of a mastermind than he fancied himself at the time.
If I recall, he bought a book on murder investigations and a socket set after his wife's disappearance (which was easily tracked back to him), removed car seats (blood) from his car, and willingly testified in court that it was his manly dream to sleep in the car, or something along these lines.
He could have likely gotten away with it if he kept his mouth shut. Luckily he had the arrogance of believing he had actually come up with a convincing story.
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.
> I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
I think it would be ridiculous for me to presume that I can possibly have any view into whether or not someone has sincerely changed, but why should the fact that someone was calculating once affect whether they have changed? I could see doubting the apparent demonstration of change, because they might have calculated the appropriate words to say, but I don't see any reason that a calculating person is less able sincerely to change than any other.
I 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."
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.
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.
"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.
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.
To be quite frank, redemption isn't really for us to decide. His family, her family, they have a say in it.
We only have a say insofar as we're part of the society that determines the laws that form the judges who will decide when it's appropriate to let him back into society.
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.
And then there’s murdering your ex, hiding her body over two days, lying to your children that she’d left for russia and they’d been abandoned, and only revealing the location of the body so you could plea down to second degree murder (a good 18 months later mind, we’re not talking quick change of heart).
Oh and then filing a civil suit against pretty much the entire legal system, including the trial judges and your attorney.
And when sued for damage by your children’s grandmother (on their behalf) assert that you killed your ex to protect your kids (which you had basically never been there for, which was the entire reason your wife left you).
I’m not saying redemption is not possible, but I’d think some reflection and atonement would be the baseline, and I’m not aware of Hans Reiser having done any such work.
Redemption requires that a person change and provide restitution. What Reiser did wasn't a stupid mistake, it was a calculated action that he took. His only mistake was getting caught. He didn't accidentally kill someone, or do so in the heat of a unique moment in his life. He decided that he could make his life easier by killing someone else and did so with no intention of facing the consequences of his actions.
While I won't say redemption is impossible. He is going to have to serve his time and dedicate the rest of his life to helping others to even come close.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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."
It's hard to reconcile good things a person might have said and done, with the bad. That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote, without entering into a huge discussion on the pain Reiser has caused. This is the only time I feel I am able to share that quote, on a thread that hopefully tries to look past the right and wrong of his actions.
Just as no one is truly good, no one is truly evil either. It is good for one's soul and humanity to acknowledge that a bad person might have done something good in their life.
ReiserFS was pretty cool as well, sad to see it go, but no one uses it anymore. I hope they'll find redemption and peace.
> That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote, without entering into a huge discussion on the pain Reiser has caused
That's a shame. He did something awful, but that's nothing at all to do with the idea in the quotation. Ideas shouldn't be cursed because the wrong person said them; they should stand or fall on their own merits.
Certainly, I have an issue with this idea that everything a person does gets cancelled because the person gets cancelled. Particularly in this era of intense political polarization.... It is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The world is full of examples of art and science from troubled individuals; much of our foundational understanding of certain areas of science is derived from the learned experiences of inhumane research conducted by nazis or WW2 japan. Yet one guy murders his wife and suddenly we are all rejecting a perfectly cromulent filesystem.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.
(What's interesting to me is that it's often black and white; dead people become either perfectly good or perfectly evil, depending on where you fall - only if they're "not important" are they allowed to be human and gray.)
Certainly, I don't have a problem with the quote. I just don't want to face the inevitable "Hans Reiser? Isn't that the one that..." quagmire that pretty much everybody is going to step into.
[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"
> Generally speaking, "the value of a graph is proportional to the square of the number of edges"
No, what Metcalfe's law assumes is that the value of the graph is proportional to the number of edges (not their square). And from that assumption and the fact that the graph is fully connected follows that it's proportional to the square of the number of nodes. (Because you can have (n-1)*n/2 edges with n nodes in a fully connected graph.
And hence, the Reiser quote above is similar but it emphasizes something else: it states what Metcalfe's law (I think) uses as a premise (or implicit claim) that the value is in the connections. Because it's not necessarily a fully connected graph.
Edit: originally I've given (n-1)*2/2 as the number of edges instead of (n-1)*n/2.
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.
We also have to remember that a lot of the historical figures we glorify through their great achievements were terrible people in many respects. And that often goes undiscussed.
> We also have to remember that a lot of the historical figures we glorify through their great achievements were terrible people in many respects. And that often goes undiscussed.
...or we focus on how terrible a person was, and insist on completely disregarding their great achievements.
You accidentally omitted a word, that should read:
> The utility of an operating system is more proportional to the number of connections possible between its components than it is to the number of those components.
>This is the only time I feel I am able to share that quote, on a thread that hopefully tries to look past the right and wrong of his actions.
Well, people would still use the theory of relativity if Einstein was proven to be a serial killer, so intelligent people who don't play it "hollier than thou" should be able to separate between some person's acts and their unrelated achievements or expressions.
Scientists would, while Twitter and average Joes will be discussing ad nauseam whether to rename the theory and delete the name Einstein from history books.
Wasn't there a similar discussion about renaming the James Webb Space Telescope? He was not even a murderer.
Another example is in ecology. Resilient ecology has many possible interactions among members of the ecology (including humans). An "invasive species" isn't necessarily one that is not native to the ecology, but one that is able to exploit a resource while having a minimum interaction with the rest of the ecology.
Dr. John Todd's ecovats are essentially self-contained ecologies that self-organized around a pollutant. They are created by taking samples from a number of ecological systems and putting them together into vats, and then running contaminated water through there. It's because the possible interactions are so high, that somewhere in there, was a path to breaking down the contaminant. In such a way, Dr. Todd was able to break DDT down in a matter of days through a system like that, and has worked on cleaning up superfund sites with this method.
To go one step further than number of interactions, Christopher Alexander's ideas on pattern languages was more than just about interaction of components, but actually about the _grammar_ of design patterns. Such a grammar can be constructed in a way that all possible combination coming out of the grammar results in a cohesive design. This allows inhabitants of an architecture or an end-user to reconfigure anything (as long as it follows that grammar) to suit their current needs, and it would still come off as a cohesive design.
To circle back to addressing the idea of evil and people who do bad things. I think you can find truth anywhere, and Han Reiser certainly touched on an insight (though it was not exclusive to him). I would further suggest this though: wouldn't this also mean that there is value in _relationships_ among people? In, not just the exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but the exchange of shared experience and feeling?
I don't know what went through Reiser's head when he killed his wife, and I can believe that there are a kind of madness that can consume someone. I think perhaps, Reiser saw an insight in systems engineering ... but did not see how that same principle was also present in the day to day life as well. (Or maybe he did see it, and was consumed by a madness anyways)
Your observations are right but your conclusions are shoddy . We can and should separate ideas from the person . There are plenty of truly evil people though . No indictment of Hans I don’t know his case . But of truly evil people there are countless numbers
I disagree, but this is personal philosophy I do not feel comfortable going too deep with on an Internet forum.
From my point of view, people that are born with evil streak are vanishingly rare, as much as being born with two heads. What happens later is simply a product of nurture, upbringing, context, and chemical imbalances. Pure black and pure white do not exist in nature.
Lots of people who do good work have done awful things.
I love Oscar Wilde's plays, but he was a paedophile sex tourist. Eric Gill created beautiful stuff, including typefaces most of us probably use or read fairly often, and he sexual abused his children and his dog.
"Pedophile" back then often just meant "gay". In French pedé (pedophile) was the regular way to say "homosexual".
Also the age of consent was lower back then, and untold numbers of "normal respectable ethical people" who back then would otherwise condemn Wilde as "pedophile" did marry girls at 14 or so. Before the 20th century basically after 13-14 kids were considered more like short adults than as a special category of teens. Wilde surely wasn't any kind of pervert going with prepubescent kids or anything like that. In fact, the guy he went to prison for being a lover to was 21.
As for his "sex tourism", it was basically travelling in countries you could have gay sex with locals and the local authorities would turn a blind eye.
I also remember him saying, (paraphrasing here) “I’m not particularly smart, there are people out there that are much smarter than me. What I am really good at is poking around in the dark with a stick and seeing what happens”
The Internet has huge utility because TCP/IP is a narrow waist. It has architectural connections to Ethernet/wireless/... on one end, and HTTP/BitTorrent/... on the other.
For the most functionality, you want fewer code components, and more interoperability. You want O(M + N) pieces of code to give O(M * N) functionality.
The narrow waist architecture does that -- it gives O(M * N) connections to O(M + N) amounts of code.
You don't want to write O(M * N) code, though many people and systems are stuck there!
This generally works the best when the connections are data-oriented and protocol-oriented, not oriented around source code.
I mention Metcalfe's law, which is related but distinct. Metcalfe's law is about O(N^2) network node connections ("dynamically"), while the (usually) O(M * N) narrow waist is about system architecture ("statically").
They both produce network effects! If the Internet already exists, then the easiest design to implement is to attach your new network to it (e.g. a network in space), not create a new, incompatible network.
---
Incidentally, this seems like what's wrong with the Kubernetes ecosystem -- it has an combinatorial explosion of code due to lack of protocols and interoperability.
It's not data-oriented, like Unix is.
(An important point is that lots of people complain about Unix-style unstructured byte streams because it's suboptimal LOCALLY, while missing the global interoperability / scale / system economy issues -- they get stuck writing O(M * N) code to avoid parsing and serializing )
Software modularity within a process is much different than modularity between processes -- it's a bit more like networking.
You need an exterior narrow waist. To pick an example, a consequence of that is that encodings like UTF-16 don't make sense in any channels where you don't have metadata, and there are a lot of those
e.g. the URL comes BEFORE the Content-Type header in HTTP!
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.
Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder. It was premeditated, not a crime of passion. He ruthlessly planned it and executed the murder of his wife. Only because of a plea deal was he sentenced to a second degree.
The article also says that he wasn't diagnosed as autistic. It's interesting seeing how eager folks are to share their excuses and lies. Some don't want to see evil or fear it. A few appear to identify with this murderer.
Did they diagnose people with high functioning autism back in the 60s and 70s? Was Asperger’s even refinished as a thing back then? I don’t know for sure that he got a diagnosis. But was pretty obvious to all in the neighborhood in retrospect.
Anyway, I shared my perspective as someone who was a little closer to the whole episode than most. Perhaps there are some details in there that did not make the Wikipedia page. You are free to discount it or not. Ain’t a thang to me.
He freaked out in the midst of an acrimonious custody battle. I don’t know if you know or have been close to anyone who has gotten divorced; but people can stop thinking straight when their kids are involved.
This guy is what a mean bully looks like.[1] Crossed paths with him when we were kids and I am not at all surprised he ended up where he did.
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.
ReiserFS is the only Linux file system that has lost me data. Back in the day it had performance advantages when dealing with small files. But now I'd be very surprised if ext4 isn't superior to it in every conceivable way.
There's an argument for copy-on-write filesystem options but it's pretty hard to argue there needs to be more than 2 or 3 "traditional" journaling filesystems like maybe ext4 and XFS.
His letter contends that ReiserFS was intended to be more than just a filesystem, and that jibes with what he was saying about it at the time. I think that it was meant to be a queryable database that happened to be good at implementing traditional filesystem semantics, but also optimally useful through some other kind of API.
I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename? I always thought it a bit weird that we were naming parts of Linux after people. We already did that once and that kinda uses up your freebie.
Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.
I 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.
> I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename?
Yes. But that requires someone, or a group, to take responsibility for that and support the fork. Maintaining a filesystem can be a complex undertaking.
> Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.
I think it was more like he was the core of the project with others contributing. Once he was out of the picture no one else had sufficient passion and/or time for it to take on the mantle of project lead sufficiently (to push Reiser4 onward and eventually getting it merged into the mainline Kernel and maintaining Reiser3 in the meantime & further forward).
While Reiser4 is still maintained, it has never been merged into the mainline kernel limiting its support in common Linux distributions. I don't know if that is because the current maintainers have tried to have it merged and failed for some reason, or if they have not pushed of its inclusion at all.
What is deprecated and due to be removed is Reiser3, which is not actively maintained. There are some technical issues that would need addressing soon if it were to remain, and in any case an unmaintained filesystem is a dangerous thing to rely upon if you can avoid doing so. It isn't being removed because of who started it, it is being removed because it is not well enough supported for mainstream safety.
Reiser3 won't be removed until some time in 2025, and unless you need the latest latest kernel at all times an active setup will keep working for a while after that (until the older kernel it uses falls into EOL), so you have plenty of time to migrate if you need to.
If a lot of people were relying on Reiser3 there would be a lot more noise about this. People using Reiser4 are building their own modules (or patching a kernel tree and building it in) already and this will not affect them.
If I remember correctly (and I followed the discussions on LKML at the time, but it was a long time ago), Reiser4 was not merged because it had some "cool" features that could cause problems.
For example (again, IIRC), it allowed directories to have hard links. Al Viro was adamantly against it, showing that this potentially creates some very serious problems. In particular, it allows for cycles in the directory graph (it's no more a tree), and Viro has shown that detecting or preventing such cycles may by prohibitively expensive, and undetected they would cause any program that does directory walking (like search) to loop infinitely.
This was not the only problematic feature, just the one I remember more vividly (in part, because of Al Viro's caustic argument style :-) ).
Remember that XFS was added to the kernel in 2001, and was already well-supported by most (all?) distros by the time the Reiser3/4 issue was beginning.
People who encountered issues with Reiser3 usually migrated away, and never looked back, Reiser4 was already DOA imo before all the other stuff happened.
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.
This letter is too fucking heavy. I couldn't read it for long. Emotions overcame me. He's having a terrible time in prison. I feel sorry for him and angry at him at the same time, for the insane fucking stupid thing he did.
I followed the trial coverage at the time, on Wired. It was a fucking nail biter and by the end it was clear he'd done it and I was just like, fuck, Hans, why did you do it??
I followed it too. It's a crazy feeling: one of my favorite teachers from University (A PhD in AI at the time backbin 2001) is nowadays in prison for murder .
Apparently he is gay and slept with a student, got drunk and passion got the worst of him. This happened years after I have finished school, but finding about it was shocking.
It shows that invariably everyone has a human side that may make us do stupid things out of passion.
He was "right place/right time" with a working journalling filesystem for a rapidly expanding Linux world that needed one, desperately. Drive sizes were climbing incredibly fast, and FSCK times were out of control (back then, almost all distros wouldn't mount "dirty" ext2 partitions without a full FSCK, which could take ages on a 100 GB drive.
Some of the concepts of (as he says in the letter, read it) about namespaces were quite up and coming (WinFS had similar concepts, mind you). Other aspects about journaling were also "ahead of the time" but part of the reason he got their first was not making data integrity the number 1 feature (which you can still do with modern filesystems, but Reiser3 pioneered the "journal metadata only" which makes FSCK fast, and access fast, but can result in corrupt data. Most other filesystems default to slow and correct, with an option to go fast if you want.
XFS was similar, but things like ZFS are more powerful in almost orthogonal ways.
His "dream" of the one true storage that melds RAM, ROM, disk, cache, etc has yet to come to be, though you could argue that some of the S3 style interfaces are closer.
Re: “Reiser3 pioneered journal metadata only”, a metadata-only approach to journaling actually was not uncommon (although for Linux, journaling at all for a time was not available).
This first journalled Unix file system in AIX in the early 90s was metadata only, and faster fsck made it an appealing feature copied by all other commercial Unixes by the late 90s. In the latter 90s, DigitalUnix was the first Unix vendor to provide journaling data, not just metadata. Even SGI’s XFS which had a number of cool and unique features around extent structures optimized for serving video stream large file did not have journaled data.
Most people in Unix then (and now) are unaware of “uncool” operating systems like OS/400 (now iSeries) which arguably delivered on that dream of a melding RAM, ROM, disk, cache. It wasn’t POSIX/Unix/hacker-friendly/cheap but it was and I think still is a billion dollar minicomputer business for IBM. I believe they called it “Single-Level Store Architecture”.
Wikipedia for this for the interested (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i ): “Instead of operating on memory addresses, TIMI instructions operate on objects. All data in IBM i, such as data files, source code, programs and regions of allocated memory, are encapsulated inside objects managed by the operating system (c.f. the "Everything is a file" model in Unix). …The object model hides whether data is stored in primary, or secondary storage. Instead, the operating system automatically handles the process of retrieving and then storing the changes to permanent storage.”
I believe lisp machines back in the day had something grossly similar.
The difficulty (impossibility?) of implementing this sort of file system in the confines of POSIX (with extensions even?) is probably why this never happened in Unix.
As Reiner’s 2023 letter we are discussing notes, this required new information/hints flowing up and down the layers of the stack. It’d require implementing a new userspace+kernel paradigm of application development alongside the current one.
Accomplishing that sort of transformation in an ecosystem takes a very unique blend of skills and knowledge, and it’s additionally not clear how much economic benefit accrues to anyone for making this shift which is an inhibitor to realization, in Unix, of “the dream”.
But it was done outside of Unix and it quietly is running Fortune 100 workloads today … although many of them are implementing the “strangler pattern” to get those workloads moved to more conventional “modern” systems.
wow, he is an amazingly compelling and articulate writer. definitely gives me a bit of an eerie feeling, of course, because he seems like a very meticulous person and perpetrated a heinous crime in a most meticulous fashion... but... it is very hard to completely discount the idea that he has learned something from prison in a way that makes him redeemable, though i'm a bit of a softie-- him bending over backward to commend people on their work in a way he clearly didn't do at the time... that is very hard for a prideful person to do without at least some little bit of subtext... and i just didn't pick up on anything like that. the only subtext would essentially be that he is so clever that he knows the only way for him to get his roses is to genuflect. so i guess this whole thing is kind of a litmus test on how you view human nature... but it was an incredible read, at the very least.
He's serving 15 years to life, and has already served 15 years (next chance of parole in 2027). So he's at the point where its very important for him to look like he's a reformed character. That makes it particularly hard for us to judge, at this distance. If he'd remained cold and calculating, this is still exactly what we'd expect him to write.
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.
That's very possible. Some of his phrasing sounded like he hoped the parole board would be reading it: I accept responsibility for my crime, I'm using the skills I'm learning in prison, etc. etc.
Still, if you asked me about my own sins, I might say similar things: I accept responsibility for acting like a jackass, I'm using the skills I've learned from mentors and through meditation and mindfulness, etc. etc. I'd be completely earnest about all that. I've behaved poorly in the past, decided I wanted to be a better person, and genuinely try to do that. If I want people to take me at my word and believe that I'm trying to be better, I have to take him at his word until proven wrong.
(One of my sins was unnecessary cynicism. I have the luxury of it not mattering to me whether he's sincere or not, and I think it's a healthier mindset for me to accept stories like his at face value than to default to mistrusting everyone. I'm not naive, though. The people in his life need to weigh that a lot more carefully than I need to.)
Maybe he wants to learn, or maybe he's a psychopath trying to upgrade his human emulation software so he can get out sooner. Even experts find it hard to tell.
Philosophical question: if "fake it 'til you make it" allowed someone to emulate a human (I like your phrasing here) well enough that they, indeed, act like a human... isn't that good enough?
The biblical advice to "judge not, that ye be not judged" seems relevant here. It's pretty obvious to me that it refers to a person's heart, that is, their internal desires and motivations that no one but them can truly know. If that motivation leads to a person acting the way I'd like them to, and they claim it's for reasons I agree with, and I'm not on the parole board or one of their family members where I have a need to look deeper, then fine.
Psychopaths are still people even if their brains are broken. It is indeed hard to integrate them into society, especially if their family did a bad job of it in their childhood.
I mean nothing personal by it but all I see when I see posts like yours (and many others in this thread), is that the average person understands nothing about psychopathy.
What he did was premeditated. His brain is wired in such a way that killing his wife was always an option. No amount of neuroplasticity will override this baked-in reality of who this man is. Teaching psychopaths social skills will not provide them with the idealized "personal growth" you imagine.
I highly recommend, "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson (of "The Mean That Stare at Goats" fame) as an amusing but on-point introduction.
When I was young, and I was first experimenting with Linux, I was kindof confused at being asked to choose a filesystem type.
I wasn't completely confused: I was a Mac OS user, and I had been around when the HFS+ filesystem was introduced to replace HFS. So I read through the documentation I could get, I learned how ReiserFS was a journaling filesystem, and decided to use it.
I kept on using ReiserFS as my preferred filesystem, any time there wasn't a need to use a different filesystem (for example, I continued using ext2 for /boot). I don't remember ever having an issue with it.
Then I started dealing with larger filesystems, and XFS was available, and I understood that XFS worked better on large storage. Around the same time, I learned of Hans Reiser being charged with killing his wife. I was confused and sad, but moved on.
I hope for all the best for Hans Reiser's children.
My journey was similar, but I started with plain EXT2 and eventually investigated (and then moved) to ReiserFS because it came back from unexpected shutdown so quickly. Knowing what I know now about filesystems, I probably could have solved my problem by mounting /mp3s read-only on ext2, but that was then.
I eventually moved on to XFS when it came into the kernel because I got tired of finding tail-packed parts of /etc/password in other important files, preventing boot.
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
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.
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.)
Even in supposedly soft prison systems like Norway's prisoners are denied access to the Internet because it is believed that they would use it to further their criminal or terrorist activities.
"Bruk av internett i fengsel
Innsatte i fengsler med høyt og lavere sikkerhetsnivå har i utgangspunktet ikke tilgang til internett.
Unntaket er innsatte som tar utdanning under soning. De kan få begrenset og kontrollert tilgang til internett i undervisningsøyemed."
Translated by Google because I'm too lazy to type it all:
"Use of the Internet in Prison
Inmates in prisons with a high and lower security level do not initially have access to the internet.
The exception is inmates who take education during their sentence. They can have limited and controlled access to the internet for educational purposes."
When I was much younger, I actually wanted to end up in a Norwegian prison for the free food and so that I did not have to risk unemployment/starvation after hearing about how great it was.
But no internet? Definitely motivation for me to work hard in life and not end up imprisoned.
I think there are two issues here: why aren't they allowed and why shouldn't they be allowed.
Some prisoners certainly shouldn't be allowed to access the internet. If you're in organized crime, being able to access the internet would give you an effective way of continuing your control from behind prison walls. Many prisoners might use the internet to continue attacks on people, albeit virtual. Does this apply to all prisoners? No. Should it apply to Hans Reiser? Maybe, I don't know enough to comment on that, his relationship with his kids, etc.
The US prison system is also often punitive beyond necessary which answers why they aren't allowed internet access in most circumstances. I think if you ask most Americans about prison, they'll say that people are raped and beaten in prison. Many Americans even seem to think those are appropriate accessory punishments to imprisonment. The news reported that Reiser was beaten in prison: https://web.archive.org/web/20090609172728/http://www.kcbs.c....
Should some prisoners be allowed more internet access? I'll leave that for others as my lunch is over.
Googling for a bit it seems like it depends on the state [1] and not the federal level. But, email can be sent or received using CORRLINKS but you have to pay a fee for sending and receiving. [2]
Probably because you can use the reason of a gang leader orchestrating things from the inside to justify staffing to screen every email and then you charge inflated rates for that staffing.
Despite what everyone says, few things are ideological in the USA. Most things are a savvy entrepreneur locking in income from an unconventional method to draw from taxpayer money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He regrets “killing” other’s dreams about working on his file system.
He’s a psychopath. The whole write up does not discuss anything that was asked and he just wants recognition and fame for inventing something (queryable file system) that was already released long before that, namely BeFS, by the real file system god, Dominic Giampaolo who also wrote APFS
He does mention her by name once, but only in passing:
> I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.
> I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.
I have never heard of, seen or even got wind of a "QAnon" member, group, theory, website or whatever they say it is outside of mainstream news. According to them it's some huge group of evil people but I can't tell myself that they're a real thing. If anyone has any real world, personal experience I would love to hear it.
If you have a subscription, the HBO documentary I mentioned, Q: Into the Storm is excellent. I think that the struggle mainstream news orgs have in talking about QAnon is that it's very difficult to encapsulate all the interlocking conspiracies and figures. There's also a wide degree of variance for what various bits and pieces mean, but there are a few central tenets. The main one is that there's a mysterious high ranking figure in the government, Q (who gets his name due to the Q-level security clearance he or she has). Q makes very abstract posts on 4chan -- and then other sites -- that seem to suggest that there's a massive pedophile ring inside the government and that Donald Trump is working to expose it from within. Many figures are implicated and, by strange coincidence, they happen to be figures that the far right detests. The Clintons and Bill Gates take starring roles but honestly it's impossible to keep track of it all.
Into the Storm is centrally focused on the identity of Q, but in the process of pursuing the answer the creator of the documentary, Cullen Hoback, ends up going on an absolutely wild hunt. I find documentaries of this sort to be a bit hit-or-miss, but this is one of the best of its subgenre. The subculture and background surrounding QAnon is interesting in its own right but, of course, the real highlight is the characters. Fredrick Brenan, Jim & Ron Watkins, and Hoback himself are fascinating individuals.
QAnon (often shortened to Q) is the name given to the persona that has been adopted by a few different individuals and is almost certainly currently controlled by Ron (principally) and Jim (secondarily) Watkins. Calling the posts "Q intel drops" is coded language the tells me you are intimately aware of the QAnon conspiracy group. Let me be clear: Q is some random dudes larping on the internet to give their own pathetic lives some level of importance they do not deserve. Q is a fictionalized persona.
I don't mean this as an insult, but after looking through your post history, you should consider psychological counseling. I recognize the coded language you are using. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you are in a cult. These people are taking advantage of you.
> 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?
> 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.
I worked with Hans Reiser in the late 90s. He was a contractor with the company that I was working for, and he was doing that (working on logic synthesis for FPGAs) by day and trying to start his company at night. He was very passionate about his technical ideas, though in those days he had difficulty explaining them, so I went back and forth about whether he was a genius or a crank (I decided that he was some combination of the two). I have a music CD somewhere around that he gave me, new age-y music his mother composed (not sure whether I still have it or not). I didn't want to believe that he was a murderer, but it soon became clear that he was lying.
I met him at the same place at the same time and had the same reaction to him. Are you me?
If it makes you both feel better, I had a similar reaction completely removed except as a user of RieserFS.
I don't think I'm you. :-)
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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.
I suspect many are aware of this but for those uninformed:
Reiser committed premeditated murder of his (ex?)wife Nina around 2006 and hid her body so well they could not find her. He made his children think either that their mother abandoned them. He had thought without a body he could not be charged and convicted.
I believe he waited until it was apparent he would lose the trial and then plead down so that they could recover her body.
I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
He was far less of a mastermind than he fancied himself at the time.
If I recall, he bought a book on murder investigations and a socket set after his wife's disappearance (which was easily tracked back to him), removed car seats (blood) from his car, and willingly testified in court that it was his manly dream to sleep in the car, or something along these lines.
He could have likely gotten away with it if he kept his mouth shut. Luckily he had the arrogance of believing he had actually come up with a convincing story.
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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.
> 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.
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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.)
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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."
I hope you make friends with a non murderer one day.
I'm always wary of how manipulating some people can be. To be clear, I'm not declaring this letter or Reiser is that way necessarily, just how people have that capability.
That said, to me, some of the specific phrases used felt that they were for a parole board rather than the broader audience, or charitably, both. But perhaps I've become too jaded.
> too jaded
I don’t think you are. The number of times the person inferring I’m jaded is later found out to be a manipulator is very high. Calling people who are perceptive of lies, “jaded”, “negative”, “pessimistic”, etc is seemingly a common tactic employed by sociopaths to socially empower themselves while simultaneously weakening those that might call them out.
"Ending another human's life" covers a wide range of cases. My recollection of this event, which is now long in the past, is that he was cold, calculating, did not value human life, and was quite comfortable with his kids moving on without their mother. He didn't just do something to her. He permanently damaged his kids, her family, and all of her friends. He made his decision knowing all of this.
Redemption? Possible I suppose, but don't make the mistake of looking at this from your perspective, because he's not like the rest of us.
> because he's not like the rest of us.
He's human and killing other humans is something a humans can do, given the right circumstances.
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> 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.
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To be quite frank, redemption isn't really for us to decide. His family, her family, they have a say in it.
We only have a say insofar as we're part of the society that determines the laws that form the judges who will decide when it's appropriate to let him back into society.
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.
There’s “Stupid thing”.
And then there’s murdering your ex, hiding her body over two days, lying to your children that she’d left for russia and they’d been abandoned, and only revealing the location of the body so you could plea down to second degree murder (a good 18 months later mind, we’re not talking quick change of heart).
Oh and then filing a civil suit against pretty much the entire legal system, including the trial judges and your attorney.
And when sued for damage by your children’s grandmother (on their behalf) assert that you killed your ex to protect your kids (which you had basically never been there for, which was the entire reason your wife left you).
I’m not saying redemption is not possible, but I’d think some reflection and atonement would be the baseline, and I’m not aware of Hans Reiser having done any such work.
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Redemption requires that a person change and provide restitution. What Reiser did wasn't a stupid mistake, it was a calculated action that he took. His only mistake was getting caught. He didn't accidentally kill someone, or do so in the heat of a unique moment in his life. He decided that he could make his life easier by killing someone else and did so with no intention of facing the consequences of his actions.
While I won't say redemption is impossible. He is going to have to serve his time and dedicate the rest of his life to helping others to even come close.
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Drunk driving is a stupid thing people do. Murder is an act of evil.
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> do stupid things
Yes, we've all done stupid things we regret. But this is not it. This is way to bad to fit in the "stupid things" category.
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> 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.
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.
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Context matters
> 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.
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Good thing the lizards who pass the US throne back and forth don't have souls that need redemption!
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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.
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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.
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A few things that stuck out to me.
SuSE supposedly failed. I don't know who told him that. He might have expected it to be a RedHat or Ubuntu by now, which it isn't. But failed is very black and white. I would argue, if they still exist as they do now, they are quite successful.
He talks about Reiser V4. I think there is a Reiser V5 now? Or am I wrong? I cannot find that on Wikipedia. Anyway, the chances of it ending up in the Linux kernel seem close to zero.
He sounds very humble. Also he talks about being more social and having got education and therapy in prison. Still it reads as if they are all working together in prison, in certain ways. The world out there might be more complex. I don't know if he is being naive in this regard.
He does mention Reiser5 in his letter:
> I don’t know what is in Reiser 5—I haven’t been told, and I cannot go on the Internet. Edward Shishkin is a very bright man though, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t spend more time with him, I am confident he has done some thing nice in Reiser 5.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Reiser5-Development is the last reference I find to Rieser5, but the link in it goes to what appears to just be Reiser4 maintained against moderately recent kernels.
He is also still talking about spinning rust (rotational delay). I forget the timeline, but maybe he went into prison before SSDs became ubiquitous? (I know they are still in servers)
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.
> He sounds very humble.
psychopaths work very hard at this.
I think about Hans Reiser pretty often, incidentally, because there is a quote from him I read as a teenager that stuck with me.
"The utility of an operating system is proportional to the number of connections possible between its components, than it is to the number of those components."
— Hans Reiser (from http://web.archive.org/web/20040126210110/http://unununium.o...)
It's hard to reconcile good things a person might have said and done, with the bad. That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote, without entering into a huge discussion on the pain Reiser has caused. This is the only time I feel I am able to share that quote, on a thread that hopefully tries to look past the right and wrong of his actions.
Just as no one is truly good, no one is truly evil either. It is good for one's soul and humanity to acknowledge that a bad person might have done something good in their life.
ReiserFS was pretty cool as well, sad to see it go, but no one uses it anymore. I hope they'll find redemption and peace.
> That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote, without entering into a huge discussion on the pain Reiser has caused
That's a shame. He did something awful, but that's nothing at all to do with the idea in the quotation. Ideas shouldn't be cursed because the wrong person said them; they should stand or fall on their own merits.
Certainly, I have an issue with this idea that everything a person does gets cancelled because the person gets cancelled. Particularly in this era of intense political polarization.... It is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The world is full of examples of art and science from troubled individuals; much of our foundational understanding of certain areas of science is derived from the learned experiences of inhumane research conducted by nazis or WW2 japan. Yet one guy murders his wife and suddenly we are all rejecting a perfectly cromulent filesystem.
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(What's interesting to me is that it's often black and white; dead people become either perfectly good or perfectly evil, depending on where you fall - only if they're "not important" are they allowed to be human and gray.)
Certainly, I don't have a problem with the quote. I just don't want to face the inevitable "Hans Reiser? Isn't that the one that..." quagmire that pretty much everybody is going to step into.
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Isn't that a restating of Metcalfe's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
[EDIT: I have misunderstood Metcalfe's Law for over 20 years, assuming that "connections" meant edges in the following quote. Metcalfe intended to mean that the value of the network grows as the square of the number of nodes because "connections" here aren't edges, they're fully reachable pairs of nodes. Thanks, again, HN, for helping me through that]
> The financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2).
Generally speaking, "the value of a graph is proportional to the square of the number of edges"
rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locally_linear_graph
> Generally speaking, "the value of a graph is proportional to the square of the number of edges"
No, what Metcalfe's law assumes is that the value of the graph is proportional to the number of edges (not their square). And from that assumption and the fact that the graph is fully connected follows that it's proportional to the square of the number of nodes. (Because you can have (n-1)*n/2 edges with n nodes in a fully connected graph.
And hence, the Reiser quote above is similar but it emphasizes something else: it states what Metcalfe's law (I think) uses as a premise (or implicit claim) that the value is in the connections. Because it's not necessarily a fully connected graph.
Edit: originally I've given (n-1)*2/2 as the number of edges instead of (n-1)*n/2.
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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.
> That sentence is a guiding principle of software design that I cannot often quote
Just rephrase it. It is not like you need to bring him up to discuss the idea, or as if this is the only form the idea can be expressed.
In fact I would say the quote as it is is confusingly written.
Fully agreed.
We also have to remember that a lot of the historical figures we glorify through their great achievements were terrible people in many respects. And that often goes undiscussed.
> We also have to remember that a lot of the historical figures we glorify through their great achievements were terrible people in many respects. And that often goes undiscussed.
...or we focus on how terrible a person was, and insist on completely disregarding their great achievements.
You accidentally omitted a word, that should read:
> The utility of an operating system is more proportional to the number of connections possible between its components than it is to the number of those components.
The word "more" is missing from the first half of the sentence: "more proportional".
>This is the only time I feel I am able to share that quote, on a thread that hopefully tries to look past the right and wrong of his actions.
Well, people would still use the theory of relativity if Einstein was proven to be a serial killer, so intelligent people who don't play it "hollier than thou" should be able to separate between some person's acts and their unrelated achievements or expressions.
Scientists would, while Twitter and average Joes will be discussing ad nauseam whether to rename the theory and delete the name Einstein from history books.
Wasn't there a similar discussion about renaming the James Webb Space Telescope? He was not even a murderer.
It's hard to reconcile good things a person might have said and done, with the bad.
It's very easy to reconcile that a person that has done very bad things can say insightful things or be competent.
Being bad doesn't mean being stupid.
That principle has been stated and developed in other context. For example, there was an earlier HN post about composition of features (https://lea.verou.me/blog/2023/eigensolutions/?latest)
Another example is in ecology. Resilient ecology has many possible interactions among members of the ecology (including humans). An "invasive species" isn't necessarily one that is not native to the ecology, but one that is able to exploit a resource while having a minimum interaction with the rest of the ecology.
Dr. John Todd's ecovats are essentially self-contained ecologies that self-organized around a pollutant. They are created by taking samples from a number of ecological systems and putting them together into vats, and then running contaminated water through there. It's because the possible interactions are so high, that somewhere in there, was a path to breaking down the contaminant. In such a way, Dr. Todd was able to break DDT down in a matter of days through a system like that, and has worked on cleaning up superfund sites with this method.
To go one step further than number of interactions, Christopher Alexander's ideas on pattern languages was more than just about interaction of components, but actually about the _grammar_ of design patterns. Such a grammar can be constructed in a way that all possible combination coming out of the grammar results in a cohesive design. This allows inhabitants of an architecture or an end-user to reconfigure anything (as long as it follows that grammar) to suit their current needs, and it would still come off as a cohesive design.
To circle back to addressing the idea of evil and people who do bad things. I think you can find truth anywhere, and Han Reiser certainly touched on an insight (though it was not exclusive to him). I would further suggest this though: wouldn't this also mean that there is value in _relationships_ among people? In, not just the exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but the exchange of shared experience and feeling?
I don't know what went through Reiser's head when he killed his wife, and I can believe that there are a kind of madness that can consume someone. I think perhaps, Reiser saw an insight in systems engineering ... but did not see how that same principle was also present in the day to day life as well. (Or maybe he did see it, and was consumed by a madness anyways)
Your observations are right but your conclusions are shoddy . We can and should separate ideas from the person . There are plenty of truly evil people though . No indictment of Hans I don’t know his case . But of truly evil people there are countless numbers
I disagree, but this is personal philosophy I do not feel comfortable going too deep with on an Internet forum.
From my point of view, people that are born with evil streak are vanishingly rare, as much as being born with two heads. What happens later is simply a product of nurture, upbringing, context, and chemical imbalances. Pure black and pure white do not exist in nature.
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Lots of people who do good work have done awful things.
I love Oscar Wilde's plays, but he was a paedophile sex tourist. Eric Gill created beautiful stuff, including typefaces most of us probably use or read fairly often, and he sexual abused his children and his dog.
"Pedophile" back then often just meant "gay". In French pedé (pedophile) was the regular way to say "homosexual".
Also the age of consent was lower back then, and untold numbers of "normal respectable ethical people" who back then would otherwise condemn Wilde as "pedophile" did marry girls at 14 or so. Before the 20th century basically after 13-14 kids were considered more like short adults than as a special category of teens. Wilde surely wasn't any kind of pervert going with prepubescent kids or anything like that. In fact, the guy he went to prison for being a lover to was 21.
As for his "sex tourism", it was basically travelling in countries you could have gay sex with locals and the local authorities would turn a blind eye.
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> paedophile sex tourist
Did you lift that quote from here? https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo99...
> Oscar Wilde was a paedophile and a sex tourist.
I Googled for: was Oscar Wilde a pedophile?
There is lots of debate. Not so straight forward.
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> Oscar Wilde's ... was a paedophile sex tourist
I've never heard of him being into children, have you a link for this, thanks (also, 'sex tourist'?)
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I also remember him saying, (paraphrasing here) “I’m not particularly smart, there are people out there that are much smarter than me. What I am really good at is poking around in the dark with a stick and seeing what happens”
I was impressed by this quote from TFA:
> Through force of will, and hard work, he made himself into a programmer of extraordinary skill ...
also slightly reminiscent of perlis https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6016271/why-is-it-better...
Great quote! Isn’t the number of connections instead of number of components related in some way to metcalfs law?
FWIW this is highly related to what I think of as the "narrow waist" architectural principle. You may like these articles I wrote:
The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html
The Internet has huge utility because TCP/IP is a narrow waist. It has architectural connections to Ethernet/wireless/... on one end, and HTTP/BitTorrent/... on the other.
For the most functionality, you want fewer code components, and more interoperability. You want O(M + N) pieces of code to give O(M * N) functionality.
The narrow waist architecture does that -- it gives O(M * N) connections to O(M + N) amounts of code.
You don't want to write O(M * N) code, though many people and systems are stuck there!
This generally works the best when the connections are data-oriented and protocol-oriented, not oriented around source code.
---
A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html
I mention Metcalfe's law, which is related but distinct. Metcalfe's law is about O(N^2) network node connections ("dynamically"), while the (usually) O(M * N) narrow waist is about system architecture ("statically").
They both produce network effects! If the Internet already exists, then the easiest design to implement is to attach your new network to it (e.g. a network in space), not create a new, incompatible network.
---
Incidentally, this seems like what's wrong with the Kubernetes ecosystem -- it has an combinatorial explosion of code due to lack of protocols and interoperability.
It's not data-oriented, like Unix is.
(An important point is that lots of people complain about Unix-style unstructured byte streams because it's suboptimal LOCALLY, while missing the global interoperability / scale / system economy issues -- they get stuck writing O(M * N) code to avoid parsing and serializing )
---
Newer article from last year - Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/ysh-design.html
Software modularity within a process is much different than modularity between processes -- it's a bit more like networking.
You need an exterior narrow waist. To pick an example, a consequence of that is that encodings like UTF-16 don't make sense in any channels where you don't have metadata, and there are a lot of those
e.g. the URL comes BEFORE the Content-Type header in HTTP!
Yeah, I can see the similarity. Thanks for the links.
Also, vaguely related, and a way to achieve this goal of making things composable, is the "everything is an X" pattern: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/everything-is-an-x-patter...
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Terry Davis was diagnosed with schizophrenia and never killed anybody.
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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.
Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder. It was premeditated, not a crime of passion. He ruthlessly planned it and executed the murder of his wife. Only because of a plea deal was he sentenced to a second degree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_United_States_law#De...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser
The article also says that he wasn't diagnosed as autistic. It's interesting seeing how eager folks are to share their excuses and lies. Some don't want to see evil or fear it. A few appear to identify with this murderer.
Read the details of the case.
Did they diagnose people with high functioning autism back in the 60s and 70s? Was Asperger’s even refinished as a thing back then? I don’t know for sure that he got a diagnosis. But was pretty obvious to all in the neighborhood in retrospect.
Anyway, I shared my perspective as someone who was a little closer to the whole episode than most. Perhaps there are some details in there that did not make the Wikipedia page. You are free to discount it or not. Ain’t a thang to me.
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> He was not mean, evil, or a bully or anything
He killed his childrens mother. If those words have any meaning it was mean and evil.
He freaked out in the midst of an acrimonious custody battle. I don’t know if you know or have been close to anyone who has gotten divorced; but people can stop thinking straight when their kids are involved.
This guy is what a mean bully looks like.[1] Crossed paths with him when we were kids and I am not at all surprised he ended up where he did.
1. https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2005/February/05_crm_...
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I struggle to think what should be done when someone is dragging your children away to Russia faster than the courts can stop.
Obviously not murder, but the desperation must have been a pit of despair. The children are about 20 now (draft age) and were in Russia shortly after the case. They may very well have ended up as trench soup in Donetsk or something by now thanks to the wife's psychopathic branch of the family.
Reiser tried, albeit in probably the wrong way.
probably the wrong way?
Some of these comment are sickening.
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ReiserFS is the only Linux file system that has lost me data. Back in the day it had performance advantages when dealing with small files. But now I'd be very surprised if ext4 isn't superior to it in every conceivable way.
There's an argument for copy-on-write filesystem options but it's pretty hard to argue there needs to be more than 2 or 3 "traditional" journaling filesystems like maybe ext4 and XFS.
His letter contends that ReiserFS was intended to be more than just a filesystem, and that jibes with what he was saying about it at the time. I think that it was meant to be a queryable database that happened to be good at implementing traditional filesystem semantics, but also optimally useful through some other kind of API.
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I beg to differ. In 2024 we know that COW is bad regardless of whether we're talking about disk or memory.
I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename? I always thought it a bit weird that we were naming parts of Linux after people. We already did that once and that kinda uses up your freebie.
Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.
I 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.
> I thought the usual solution when we disagree irreconcilably with a maintainer was to fork and rename?
Yes. But that requires someone, or a group, to take responsibility for that and support the fork. Maintaining a filesystem can be a complex undertaking.
> Seems like everyone quit Hans and nobody rallied the project back together.
I think it was more like he was the core of the project with others contributing. Once he was out of the picture no one else had sufficient passion and/or time for it to take on the mantle of project lead sufficiently (to push Reiser4 onward and eventually getting it merged into the mainline Kernel and maintaining Reiser3 in the meantime & further forward).
While Reiser4 is still maintained, it has never been merged into the mainline kernel limiting its support in common Linux distributions. I don't know if that is because the current maintainers have tried to have it merged and failed for some reason, or if they have not pushed of its inclusion at all.
What is deprecated and due to be removed is Reiser3, which is not actively maintained. There are some technical issues that would need addressing soon if it were to remain, and in any case an unmaintained filesystem is a dangerous thing to rely upon if you can avoid doing so. It isn't being removed because of who started it, it is being removed because it is not well enough supported for mainstream safety.
Reiser3 won't be removed until some time in 2025, and unless you need the latest latest kernel at all times an active setup will keep working for a while after that (until the older kernel it uses falls into EOL), so you have plenty of time to migrate if you need to.
If a lot of people were relying on Reiser3 there would be a lot more noise about this. People using Reiser4 are building their own modules (or patching a kernel tree and building it in) already and this will not affect them.
If I remember correctly (and I followed the discussions on LKML at the time, but it was a long time ago), Reiser4 was not merged because it had some "cool" features that could cause problems.
For example (again, IIRC), it allowed directories to have hard links. Al Viro was adamantly against it, showing that this potentially creates some very serious problems. In particular, it allows for cycles in the directory graph (it's no more a tree), and Viro has shown that detecting or preventing such cycles may by prohibitively expensive, and undetected they would cause any program that does directory walking (like search) to loop infinitely.
This was not the only problematic feature, just the one I remember more vividly (in part, because of Al Viro's caustic argument style :-) ).
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Remember that XFS was added to the kernel in 2001, and was already well-supported by most (all?) distros by the time the Reiser3/4 issue was beginning.
People who encountered issues with Reiser3 usually migrated away, and never looked back, Reiser4 was already DOA imo before all the other stuff happened.
Instead, people integrated the interesting ideas of reiserfs into ext2, and made ext3. This is also a perfectly fine way to handle disagreement.
Also, people quit him way before that thing. He mostly supported the filesystem alone.
There is just no need for such FS today. Everything is bloated, random access is much faster (SSDs, NVMe), storage is cheaper.
It's the only FS that I lost data with.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hans-Reiser-2024
Upvoted because this links to the actual pictures of the letters.
I found this to be a great story about mismanagement. It appears Hans made a multitude of small mistakes that ended up crippling his filesystem project. It's extremely interesting to see such a thorough reflection on all the things that went wrong.
yea im thankful he shared all the failures and redesigns etc
This letter is too fucking heavy. I couldn't read it for long. Emotions overcame me. He's having a terrible time in prison. I feel sorry for him and angry at him at the same time, for the insane fucking stupid thing he did.
I followed the trial coverage at the time, on Wired. It was a fucking nail biter and by the end it was clear he'd done it and I was just like, fuck, Hans, why did you do it??
I followed it too. It's a crazy feeling: one of my favorite teachers from University (A PhD in AI at the time backbin 2001) is nowadays in prison for murder .
Apparently he is gay and slept with a student, got drunk and passion got the worst of him. This happened years after I have finished school, but finding about it was shocking.
It shows that invariably everyone has a human side that may make us do stupid things out of passion.
Why was (8chan founder) Fredrick Brennan corresponding with Hans Reiser? Anyone have the background for that?
His original letter to Hans is published here: https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%961%20Fred%E2%86%...
If I remember correctly, he sent him a letter about ReiserFS removal from the kernel out of curiosity.
he's kind of reinvented himself as a journalist/blogger type
There used to be a lot of content about Hans Reiser on Slashdot back in the days before HN.
His statements, code and conduct were controversial long before the murder.
I'm curious if anyone has insight into his technical contributions. Were they:
- ahead of their time but now superseded by other filesystems
- visionary but not fully realized/implemented
- other
It's kind of a combination of all three.
He was "right place/right time" with a working journalling filesystem for a rapidly expanding Linux world that needed one, desperately. Drive sizes were climbing incredibly fast, and FSCK times were out of control (back then, almost all distros wouldn't mount "dirty" ext2 partitions without a full FSCK, which could take ages on a 100 GB drive.
Some of the concepts of (as he says in the letter, read it) about namespaces were quite up and coming (WinFS had similar concepts, mind you). Other aspects about journaling were also "ahead of the time" but part of the reason he got their first was not making data integrity the number 1 feature (which you can still do with modern filesystems, but Reiser3 pioneered the "journal metadata only" which makes FSCK fast, and access fast, but can result in corrupt data. Most other filesystems default to slow and correct, with an option to go fast if you want.
XFS was similar, but things like ZFS are more powerful in almost orthogonal ways.
His "dream" of the one true storage that melds RAM, ROM, disk, cache, etc has yet to come to be, though you could argue that some of the S3 style interfaces are closer.
Re: “Reiser3 pioneered journal metadata only”, a metadata-only approach to journaling actually was not uncommon (although for Linux, journaling at all for a time was not available).
This first journalled Unix file system in AIX in the early 90s was metadata only, and faster fsck made it an appealing feature copied by all other commercial Unixes by the late 90s. In the latter 90s, DigitalUnix was the first Unix vendor to provide journaling data, not just metadata. Even SGI’s XFS which had a number of cool and unique features around extent structures optimized for serving video stream large file did not have journaled data.
Most people in Unix then (and now) are unaware of “uncool” operating systems like OS/400 (now iSeries) which arguably delivered on that dream of a melding RAM, ROM, disk, cache. It wasn’t POSIX/Unix/hacker-friendly/cheap but it was and I think still is a billion dollar minicomputer business for IBM. I believe they called it “Single-Level Store Architecture”.
Wikipedia for this for the interested (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i ): “Instead of operating on memory addresses, TIMI instructions operate on objects. All data in IBM i, such as data files, source code, programs and regions of allocated memory, are encapsulated inside objects managed by the operating system (c.f. the "Everything is a file" model in Unix). …The object model hides whether data is stored in primary, or secondary storage. Instead, the operating system automatically handles the process of retrieving and then storing the changes to permanent storage.”
I believe lisp machines back in the day had something grossly similar.
The difficulty (impossibility?) of implementing this sort of file system in the confines of POSIX (with extensions even?) is probably why this never happened in Unix.
As Reiner’s 2023 letter we are discussing notes, this required new information/hints flowing up and down the layers of the stack. It’d require implementing a new userspace+kernel paradigm of application development alongside the current one.
Accomplishing that sort of transformation in an ecosystem takes a very unique blend of skills and knowledge, and it’s additionally not clear how much economic benefit accrues to anyone for making this shift which is an inhibitor to realization, in Unix, of “the dream”.
But it was done outside of Unix and it quietly is running Fortune 100 workloads today … although many of them are implementing the “strangler pattern” to get those workloads moved to more conventional “modern” systems.
wow, he is an amazingly compelling and articulate writer. definitely gives me a bit of an eerie feeling, of course, because he seems like a very meticulous person and perpetrated a heinous crime in a most meticulous fashion... but... it is very hard to completely discount the idea that he has learned something from prison in a way that makes him redeemable, though i'm a bit of a softie-- him bending over backward to commend people on their work in a way he clearly didn't do at the time... that is very hard for a prideful person to do without at least some little bit of subtext... and i just didn't pick up on anything like that. the only subtext would essentially be that he is so clever that he knows the only way for him to get his roses is to genuflect. so i guess this whole thing is kind of a litmus test on how you view human nature... but it was an incredible read, at the very least.
He's serving 15 years to life, and has already served 15 years (next chance of parole in 2027). So he's at the point where its very important for him to look like he's a reformed character. That makes it particularly hard for us to judge, at this distance. If he'd remained cold and calculating, this is still exactly what we'd expect him to write.
Did you believe Red at his parole hearings in The Shawshank Redemption?
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That was fascinating. It sounds like he’s done some real introspection during his lockup, and I hope he’s able to apply those learnings to future situations.
I felt bad for him[0] while reading. He was a brilliant young person with a big dream, yet without the interpersonal skills to help him realize it. I’ve seen that so often. Maybe this will help me look past the next person’s challenging communications, and think here’s someone who means well but doesn’t know how to explain it. Reiser wants to learn how not to be an ass. I can try to learn how to recognize when someone being an ass is caught in the same traps he was. That, and how to be sure I’m not the one being the ass.
Best of luck on the continuing personal growth, Hans.
[0]Minus the obvious, of course.
I don't believe he did. He's just angling for his next parole date as he got denied this year.
That's very possible. Some of his phrasing sounded like he hoped the parole board would be reading it: I accept responsibility for my crime, I'm using the skills I'm learning in prison, etc. etc.
Still, if you asked me about my own sins, I might say similar things: I accept responsibility for acting like a jackass, I'm using the skills I've learned from mentors and through meditation and mindfulness, etc. etc. I'd be completely earnest about all that. I've behaved poorly in the past, decided I wanted to be a better person, and genuinely try to do that. If I want people to take me at my word and believe that I'm trying to be better, I have to take him at his word until proven wrong.
(One of my sins was unnecessary cynicism. I have the luxury of it not mattering to me whether he's sincere or not, and I think it's a healthier mindset for me to accept stories like his at face value than to default to mistrusting everyone. I'm not naive, though. The people in his life need to weigh that a lot more carefully than I need to.)
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Would there be anything he could say?
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He was denied two years ago.
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California is comically light on crime, I'm sure he'll be out within 2-3 parole hearings.
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Maybe he wants to learn, or maybe he's a psychopath trying to upgrade his human emulation software so he can get out sooner. Even experts find it hard to tell.
Philosophical question: if "fake it 'til you make it" allowed someone to emulate a human (I like your phrasing here) well enough that they, indeed, act like a human... isn't that good enough?
The biblical advice to "judge not, that ye be not judged" seems relevant here. It's pretty obvious to me that it refers to a person's heart, that is, their internal desires and motivations that no one but them can truly know. If that motivation leads to a person acting the way I'd like them to, and they claim it's for reasons I agree with, and I'm not on the parole board or one of their family members where I have a need to look deeper, then fine.
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Psychopaths are still people even if their brains are broken. It is indeed hard to integrate them into society, especially if their family did a bad job of it in their childhood.
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I mean nothing personal by it but all I see when I see posts like yours (and many others in this thread), is that the average person understands nothing about psychopathy. What he did was premeditated. His brain is wired in such a way that killing his wife was always an option. No amount of neuroplasticity will override this baked-in reality of who this man is. Teaching psychopaths social skills will not provide them with the idealized "personal growth" you imagine. I highly recommend, "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson (of "The Mean That Stare at Goats" fame) as an amusing but on-point introduction.
Is he a diagnosed psychopath? I'll grant that murdering one's wife seems like good supporting evidence, but I'm not aware that he's known to be one.
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When I was young, and I was first experimenting with Linux, I was kindof confused at being asked to choose a filesystem type.
I wasn't completely confused: I was a Mac OS user, and I had been around when the HFS+ filesystem was introduced to replace HFS. So I read through the documentation I could get, I learned how ReiserFS was a journaling filesystem, and decided to use it.
I kept on using ReiserFS as my preferred filesystem, any time there wasn't a need to use a different filesystem (for example, I continued using ext2 for /boot). I don't remember ever having an issue with it.
Then I started dealing with larger filesystems, and XFS was available, and I understood that XFS worked better on large storage. Around the same time, I learned of Hans Reiser being charged with killing his wife. I was confused and sad, but moved on.
I hope for all the best for Hans Reiser's children.
My journey was similar, but I started with plain EXT2 and eventually investigated (and then moved) to ReiserFS because it came back from unexpected shutdown so quickly. Knowing what I know now about filesystems, I probably could have solved my problem by mounting /mp3s read-only on ext2, but that was then.
I eventually moved on to XFS when it came into the kernel because I got tired of finding tail-packed parts of /etc/password in other important files, preventing boot.
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.
https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/wp-content/images/ep057.jpg
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
For context, I was born the year this guy went to prison. I'm almost 16.
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.
Were there technical reasons for the deprecation or was it more of a cancelled type thing?
Aside from general maintenance burden, it's not year-2038 proof. I believe that's the main reason for removing it now, so people don't run in to this in 2038 (some kernels have very long support cycles, are used in embedded devices, etc.)
Being a computer scientist in prison until death must suck so hard. Jesus Christ.
Why's it any worse than being any other kind of person in prison?
It'd suck a lot less if your main hobby was playing poker with roughnecks.
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Agreed but he's parole eligible in 2027 according to wikipedia. So it may not be life.
Why can’t people in US prisons access the internet?
Even in supposedly soft prison systems like Norway's prisoners are denied access to the Internet because it is believed that they would use it to further their criminal or terrorist activities.
"Bruk av internett i fengsel
Innsatte i fengsler med høyt og lavere sikkerhetsnivå har i utgangspunktet ikke tilgang til internett.
Unntaket er innsatte som tar utdanning under soning. De kan få begrenset og kontrollert tilgang til internett i undervisningsøyemed."
Translated by Google because I'm too lazy to type it all:
"Use of the Internet in Prison
Inmates in prisons with a high and lower security level do not initially have access to the internet.
The exception is inmates who take education during their sentence. They can have limited and controlled access to the internet for educational purposes."
Edit: forgot to add the URL
https://www.kriminalomsorgen.no/bruk-av-internett-og-sosiale...
When I was much younger, I actually wanted to end up in a Norwegian prison for the free food and so that I did not have to risk unemployment/starvation after hearing about how great it was.
But no internet? Definitely motivation for me to work hard in life and not end up imprisoned.
I think there are two issues here: why aren't they allowed and why shouldn't they be allowed.
Some prisoners certainly shouldn't be allowed to access the internet. If you're in organized crime, being able to access the internet would give you an effective way of continuing your control from behind prison walls. Many prisoners might use the internet to continue attacks on people, albeit virtual. Does this apply to all prisoners? No. Should it apply to Hans Reiser? Maybe, I don't know enough to comment on that, his relationship with his kids, etc.
The US prison system is also often punitive beyond necessary which answers why they aren't allowed internet access in most circumstances. I think if you ask most Americans about prison, they'll say that people are raped and beaten in prison. Many Americans even seem to think those are appropriate accessory punishments to imprisonment. The news reported that Reiser was beaten in prison: https://web.archive.org/web/20090609172728/http://www.kcbs.c....
Should some prisoners be allowed more internet access? I'll leave that for others as my lunch is over.
Because not being able to freely communicate with the larger society is part of the punishment? I dunno, always seemed like an obvious thing.
Why should prisons be about punishment rather than rehabilitation?
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Googling for a bit it seems like it depends on the state [1] and not the federal level. But, email can be sent or received using CORRLINKS but you have to pay a fee for sending and receiving. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_prisons
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Fund_Limited_Inmate_Comp...
Probably because you can use the reason of a gang leader orchestrating things from the inside to justify staffing to screen every email and then you charge inflated rates for that staffing.
Despite what everyone says, few things are ideological in the USA. Most things are a savvy entrepreneur locking in income from an unconventional method to draw from taxpayer money.
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.
Not "people", "some people". The more serious your crime, the less freedom you have during your incarceration.
here is a discussion related to this question that may provide some insights:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38454735
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.
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.
Very interesting observations, thank you.
Well, was only 5-10 years late for a database-like file system..
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.
He mentions her by name in the first paragraph (after the cover letter):
> I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.
He doesn't get into whether/why he is sorry:
> I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.
Hans Reiser has previously explained why he believed the murder was justified. It is not clear to me, from this letter, whether he still believes so.
He regrets “killing” other’s dreams about working on his file system.
He’s a psychopath. The whole write up does not discuss anything that was asked and he just wants recognition and fame for inventing something (queryable file system) that was already released long before that, namely BeFS, by the real file system god, Dominic Giampaolo who also wrote APFS
He does mention her by name once, but only in passing:
> I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006. > I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.
> Secondly, the person he's corresponding with, Fredrick Brennan is fascinating in his own right.
I had no idea that was that person (I am terrible with names). Thanks for pointing that out.
> QAnon
I have never heard of, seen or even got wind of a "QAnon" member, group, theory, website or whatever they say it is outside of mainstream news. According to them it's some huge group of evil people but I can't tell myself that they're a real thing. If anyone has any real world, personal experience I would love to hear it.
You can get personal perspectives here:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/
I know firsthand people with family members who got totally wrapped up in QAnon. I also have a neighbor who has QAnon stickers all over their cars.
I'm sure it's not as huge a phenomenon as some claim, but it's definitely real.
If you have a subscription, the HBO documentary I mentioned, Q: Into the Storm is excellent. I think that the struggle mainstream news orgs have in talking about QAnon is that it's very difficult to encapsulate all the interlocking conspiracies and figures. There's also a wide degree of variance for what various bits and pieces mean, but there are a few central tenets. The main one is that there's a mysterious high ranking figure in the government, Q (who gets his name due to the Q-level security clearance he or she has). Q makes very abstract posts on 4chan -- and then other sites -- that seem to suggest that there's a massive pedophile ring inside the government and that Donald Trump is working to expose it from within. Many figures are implicated and, by strange coincidence, they happen to be figures that the far right detests. The Clintons and Bill Gates take starring roles but honestly it's impossible to keep track of it all.
Into the Storm is centrally focused on the identity of Q, but in the process of pursuing the answer the creator of the documentary, Cullen Hoback, ends up going on an absolutely wild hunt. I find documentaries of this sort to be a bit hit-or-miss, but this is one of the best of its subgenre. The subculture and background surrounding QAnon is interesting in its own right but, of course, the real highlight is the characters. Fredrick Brenan, Jim & Ron Watkins, and Hoback himself are fascinating individuals.
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> the ridiculous QAnon
QAnon is a creation of MSM, and doesn't even exist, hence it's really ridiculous.
The real thing is called the Q intel drops (many times just questions), inviting followers to do research on their own, which is never ridiculous.
QAnon (often shortened to Q) is the name given to the persona that has been adopted by a few different individuals and is almost certainly currently controlled by Ron (principally) and Jim (secondarily) Watkins. Calling the posts "Q intel drops" is coded language the tells me you are intimately aware of the QAnon conspiracy group. Let me be clear: Q is some random dudes larping on the internet to give their own pathetic lives some level of importance they do not deserve. Q is a fictionalized persona.
I don't mean this as an insult, but after looking through your post history, you should consider psychological counseling. I recognize the coded language you are using. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you are in a cult. These people are taking advantage of you.
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Apparently he's been in prison for murdering his wife since 2008
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...
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From Wiki:
> On August 29, 2008, Reiser was sentenced to 15 years to life, the maximum sentence for second-degree murder. As a result of his plea bargain, Reiser cannot appeal his conviction or sentence
That would be August 2023, anyone know if he's out of prison?
A couple paragraphs below on the wiki:
> As of 2020, Reiser was housed at the Correctional Training Facility near Soledad, California, with a tentative parole eligibility date of August 2027 after parole was denied in 2022.
How does he end up imprisoned 4 years longer than his sentencing indicated?
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> I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.
From the letter dated November 2023
The letter in this link is dated 26 November 2023 and in the opening he writes he is still in prison.
The letter makes it clear he is still in prison
He was found guilty by the jury in April 2008 and led police to her body in July.