Hans Reiser leads police to body, believed to be his wife | Hacker News Reader

Hans Reiser leads police to body, believed to be his wife

sfgate.com

53 pointsmqt66 comments

"It just doesn't seem right to me that that can happen in America," Dunn said. "I thought the jury had the last say."

This is incorrect. The jury determines guilt, not sentencing.

I wasn't really paying attention. Did you guys know this (from wiki):

In 1999, while working in Russia, Hans Reiser selected from a mail-order bride catalogue[8], and subsequently married, Nina Sharanova (Нина Шаранова), a Russian-born and trained obstetrician and gynecologist[9]

In Russia, there are trained physicians who sign up to be mail-order brides. Can you believe that? I figured they were all crack whores or scammers.

I don't know what the situation is like now, but several years ago, one of my farther relatives, a doctor in a senior position, was recieving 700 Rubles a month as her paycheck ($30 today).

When I visited Russia in 2002 on the four hour flight back I was sitting next to a girl who was 22, bright, attractive, had just dropped out of her senior year of college studying French and German literature ... and was a mail order bride on the way to be with her new husband. We talked almost the whole way and it took me some time to put together the pieces since she didn't just come out and say it. It was her way out. The logic was that even if things really went to shit that she could put up with it for three years until she had permanent residence and could get divorced if she needed to. It certainly changed my view on the stereotype.

Apparently Reiser became confused and thought it was 'f-stab' rather than 'fs-tab'.

Now he's fsck'd.

That said, he is a pretty serious hacker.

I'm not sure how to work this into a joke, but I could never get reiser-fsck to ever work properly. So many filesystems lost...

Wonder if he'll work on ReiserFS from prison. It's open source, so much more useful for society then breaking rocks.

No more doubts, folks.

"Officer Roland Holmgren, Oakland police spokesman, said the body has not been identified."

Dude, like oh my god, he could have led them to another body that just happened to be there! We just don't know!

That would have made such a great plot point for the third Dirk Gently novel.

But, alas, Douglas Adams is dead.

Damn, now I've made this story even more depressing. Time for bed.

Well... It can still be developed into a movie.

Oh, god, this is what I get for not going to bed quickly enough. Touché.

Best part of the whole article:

> The issue was "whether Hans would summon up the intestinal fortitude to do this - he did," Du Bois said.

Seems to me that if you have the 'intestinal fortitude' to kill someone, you probably don't blink at the thought of showing off the dead body when you have so much to gain by doing so... but bonus points to the lawyer for almost making us think it was a tough decision by his poor client.

Murder is usually an act of weakness, not courage.

Please explain.

Murder happens when a person lacks the strength needed to resist their rage, and not because that person has the guts to carry out the morally reprehensible. People as bright as Reiser often have pretty persuasive demons.

I remember reading that one thing that separates us from other primates is our (relative) mastery of our emotions.

All the morally reprehensible stuff I've done took more balls than just being passive.

Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment" offers an interesting exploration of this idea.

Man, that was a painful book to read. I winced through the whole thing.

I loved it. Was it painful because you didn't enjoy the writing, or because of the murder aspect?

The writing, and plot, was great. But it's not a happy book, is it?

I used to read Dostoevsky when I was younger; tried to re-read C&P recently and couldn't stand it. Too painful. So the moral would be: read Dostoevsky while you still have the intestinal fortitude of youth.

I think he just used his superior intellect to deduce where the real killer hid the body.

Hans Reiser's life will make a great movie someday. But who should play Hans? Steve Buscemi?

Yeah, I love movies about guys who commit murder, lie about it, come clean only to try to save their own ass, and leave their two kids without any parents in the process. I'll be first in line for a ticket, for sure.

And wrote a filesystem chose by several distros as the default. He was a seriously smart guy - and thats what make the story relative.

A lot of smart people have mental illness.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -Hemmingway

>A lot of smart people have mental illness.

How can you question his sanity? Just because he does something unusual doesn't mean he's crazy. I don't question the sanity of really smart people (say, Bobby Fischer or James Watson) because I can't fathom what goes on in their minds. Sure, I'd find Hans Reiser guilty if the evidence warranted it, but accuse him of being insane? That would be arrogant.

Mental illness does mean insanity or crazy.

It could be a deep bout of depression that caused him to bury his wife. Regardless of circumstances, it is not a reasonable thing to do.

This sure made me think of the recent "Don't talk to police" thread. I'm not saying he's innocent or anything, and clearly murder is a bad thing (which sounds trite and insensitive), but it just seems like a really bad move on his part. Maybe it got sold to him as saving his own ass, but it seems like it did the opposite. Being convicted is only part of the process - there's appeals, and appeals, and more appeals.

And again, apologies if I sound insensitive. I don't know any of the individuals belonged, and murders are so often in the news that it's easy to discuss them without any real emotion.

Perhaps the guy really isn't an emotionless robot built entirely of ego -- and, now that his self-defense instinct has exhausted itself, his urge to stop lying, express some entirely authentic and long-suppressed remorse, and save his wife's family and his own children from a lifetime of uncertainty has finally won out.

(For further insight into this aspect of the human psyche I recommend Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.)

Or, perhaps he's an emotionless robot playing the role of a remorseful human being. If so, I think it's about time. It's not as if Plan A was working out well for anyone.

Requiescat in Pace

He is getting a second-degree conviction instead of first-degree. From the article:

The maximum sentence Reiser could receive for second-degree murder is 15 years to life. Reiser had faced a term of 25 years to life under his first-degree murder conviction.

Considering his sentencing hearing is in a couple of days, I think it makes logical sense.

Either I skipped right over those 2 paragraphs, or it wasn't there when I read the article. It says "Updated at 20:11 PDT" Either way my point has been invalidated.

Ever tried to make an interesting movie about guys who love their wives, are great fathers, and never do anything bad?

The sarcasm is because the body isn't even in the morgue and we're talking about entertainment value.

Yeah but people make Challenger jokes all the time.

Still?

And yet so few Columbia jokes.

Capra did OK at it.

Little House on the Prairie :-P

Not movies, but the premise to a large percentage of all sit-coms ever made.

Best movie of '07 according to the Academy was No Country For Old Men, a story of a man who goes about flipping coins and killing people with an air gun.

Yes, morbid stories make for good movies. Even true ones.

That was a fictional movie.

The movie was unpredictable with stunning visuals. I found the representation of death and violence in the movie fantastic. It was portrayed as sudden and uneventful, only lasting a split second.

/end rant - but to claim the movie was about flipping coins and killing people doesn't do it justice.

An older movie by the same authors--"Fargo"--was based on facts and was even better than "No Country for Old Men."

I liked There Will Be Blood a lot more -- my favorite movie of the last few years, plus it had a soundtrack by the great Johnny Greenwood.

Was I the only one that identified with the main character? I think that's why most people found it a difficult movie.

You weren't. Running through my head practically every day: "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." I like to think it's mostly cautionary, but, you know.

Also, if you can still edit that post, I'd advise taking the "h" out of Jonny Greenwood's name before one of those annoying Radiohead fanatics points out the mistake. :)

Too late, can't believe I missed that, I am indeed one of those Radiohead fanatics.

I actually have extra tickets for the Seattle show (I got my tickets for DC+Cleveland+Philly and Seattle was still available so I got them to ebay) that I would sell for what I paid. Section 101, row 10.

But this guy also codes a filesystem during the process!

The guy is a total scum bag and just about the last person anyone needs to make a movie about, but it might be worth it just for the "you're about to experience chaos" line. Classic.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/oakland-califor.htm...

I'd see it w/ Steve Buscemi.

I see this as more of a 1990s-style Law & Order episode. Especially since there were alleged Russian Mob connections to his wife, and they cover that on the show from time to time. (Or did, I have only watched through season 5 ;)

I imagine Ben Stone and Reiser wouldn't really get along, which could be amusing.

I swear Law & Order: Criminal Intent had an episode where a computer programmer murders his wife, but I can't find it right now (and Wikipedia's listing makes it hard to browse by subject).

Doesn't matter much, most important is to have David Lynch direct it.

Shit, I thought he was innocent.

ReiserFS, the file system with killer performance!

i always knew he did it!!!

I am still grimacing after seeing this submission and RTA . . . what an absolute shame the whole thing, how incredibly tragic, it pains me to see this even though it basically happens every day. An innocent woman murdered, a bright man's (whom I also consider to be a fellow member of this tribe so many here belong to - regardless of what he did) life gone down the drain, two kids with no parents, the tribe getting bad press . . . this is simply horrid.

I hope she rests in peace wherever she is, I hope he gets help and is rehabilitated, and I hope the kids are in good hands.

Not hacker news? Who cares if he's a programmer; this has nothing to do with that.

Oh, come on, it is something that many, many people here find very interesting. See the thread about his conviction.

That thread is mostly off-topic (ie, stuff that could just as well be on digg).

What is the purpose of saying, "oh come on"?

>What is the purpose of saying, "oh come on"?

It's an interjection of little meaning, I was surprised to hear you call not hacker news on this. It's news. About a rather good hacker. Who killed his wife.

Off-topic discussion in a thread doesn't make the submission itself not hacker news. Also, you should check out the digg comments, off-topic comments here don't come close. Sites like Digg start getting the Youtube effect where people post comments for the sake of posting, rather than for the purposes of dicussion.

Off-topic discussion makes that thread bad evidence to cite to prove it is hacker-related news.

That's not my evidence though, the submission itself is the evidence.

> Not hacker news?

Depends on whether you prefer vi, emacs, or a rusty axe.

"vi, emacs, or a rusty axe"

Redundant. M-x viper-mode; M-x rusty-axe-mode.

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