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.

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.

It is totally bananas:

https://archive.is/BcMRF

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

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

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

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

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/

> (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)

> (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JFC.

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

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

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

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

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

It was really cringey.

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a psychopathic person?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

unless passionate crime is what you had in mind

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

I 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.

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

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

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.

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.

The fact is - he killed his wife.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus spoke Zarathustra..

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

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

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

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

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.

Ain’t killed anyone, though.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Does your statement apply to them as well?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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'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.

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.

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

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

    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. 

[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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> and the hiring of poor boys as prostitutes makes a difference

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

> Child brides in modern Yemen or many other places

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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...

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

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

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

and Thompson:

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 :-) ).

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

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

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

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

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.

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.)

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

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