Comment by jonathankoren
2 years ago
I will always remember the Slashdot comment that said that removing the passenger seat of your car so you could sleep in your car was a reasonable thing to do, and everyone saying it was suspicious was a hater. (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
I think it was my first experience with absolute egregious fanboism.
That /. thread was amazing. So many people trying to justify behavior that cleanly pointed to murder. Not every action by itself, but the combination of all of them: buying crime books, removing the seat, cleaning his car and there were more actions. But the slashdot technical community defended him until the moment he confessed.
It was really cringey.
Don’t forget, leaving his cell phone at home on the day of his wife’s murder when he otherwise always carried it with him.
It wasn't fanboism, it was something else entirely: solidarity of the ingroup.
Hard to believe for the younger folks around here, who grew up in a culture that praised and valued technical skills, but Slashdot was a place for the prior generation, for whom technical skills were mocked and ridiculed.
Hans was "one of us", and it's a very human thing to believe that a member of your specific outcast group would ever be one of the baddies.
The fanboys spilled over to HN as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240814
Best comment on that thread, calling out their ridiculous takes:
> I gotta say it: the guy was a f-cking murderer and yet you guys are arguing about whether he got a fair trial, even after he led the cops to the strangled, decomposing corpse. And then complaining about the sheer brass neck of a journo who fails to show appropriate respect to this f-cking murderer. What, just because he hacked on Linux once upon a time? Jeez, you really couldn't make this stuff up.
Nah man. The best is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=241000
Hans Reiser gives a jailhouse interview to Salon, and when he comes off as unremosrseful murderer, the peanut gallery says:
> I find it to be just another case of math envy, the imbecile KNOWS that he could never in a million years achieve 1% of what Reiser has achieved, however Reiser is now a convicted murderer, thus the idiot can now feel better about himself, and hurl contempt and scorn on Reiser.
Like anyone gives a shit about some computer filesystem.
Bruh, it was a filesystem with online resizing.
It is reasonable, although niche enough to be a bad defense.
Here is a popular Instagram account where someone does exactly what you are saying is unreasonable: https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic
> Here is a popular Instagram account where someone does exactly what you are saying is unreasonable: https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic
Except they don't. First post shows them asking themselves if there's a more comfortable way, second post shows them installing a flat surface.
https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic/reel/CyGu0vUuXsz/
https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic/reel/CyWqTSSJV7U/
Except they do. They don’t reinstall the seat. And hence removing the seat for the purpose of camping was indeed a reasonable thing to do.
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It's certainly not common, but I had a friend in highschool that took out the front passenger seat of his VW bug, to make it easier to get surfboards into the car. He normally just had a folding chair for passengers.
Did this friend also do it exactly when the murdered wife and mother of his children went missing?
Driving with a folding chair in the car seems very dangerous. Is that legal where you live?
No, not at all. But it was a while ago, safety laws weren't enforced as heavily, and we were young and felt indestructible.
Here's a 16 year old Hackernews thread from the day after the conviction, you'll see lots of even to this day prolific HN commenters writing that well we don't know if he REALLY did it, and even if he did, he has definitely down a net good for humanity with his contributions to software (and then tptacek reliably shoots them down)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=176098
It was probably him.