These are some users Ciro Santilli particularly respects, mostly due to their contributions to systems programming subjects:
- unix.stackexchange.com/users/885/gilles-so-stop-being-evil
- stackoverflow.com/users/379897/r-github-stop-helping-icea
- stackoverflow.com/users/196561/osgx
- stackoverflow.com/users/50617/employed-russian Employed Russian. Binutils, ELF, GDB, claims to work at Google. The only Russian sounding name on GDB and Binutils git log is that of Paul Pluzhnikov: www.linkedin.com/in/paul-pluzhnikov-61b9676/ and Employed Russian mentions one of his commits at: stackoverflow.com/questions/3718072/gdb-takes-too-long-and-ctrl-c-has-no-effect Ex physicist: www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul_Pluzhnikov
Ciro also really likes the following users, a bit less like Gods, and bit more like friends:
- partly because they were close by on the yearly reputation charts for a long time circa 2020, so it feels like they also focus on replying to important questions rather than answering new duplicates immediately:
- stackoverflow.com/users/642706/basil-bourque: GCC dev, but started replying lots of Java questions as of 2021 it seems for some reason
- stackoverflow.com/users/541136/aaron-hall: Python, NixOS and Haskell more and more it seems. Also pro freedom of speech, gotta love those religious liberal Republicans. Reminds Ciro of Ron Maimon very slightly, maybe it's just the New Yorkedneess. Ciro once met another intelligent dude who liked both Haskell and NixOS, there must be some correlation.
- VonC: Git God, VonC is just Super nice, gives clear credit to others, always positive interactions. Love this dude. Twitter: twitter.com/VonC_. He was the one that held the Necromancer record in 2019 before Ciro took it.
- Peter Cordes. An assembly maniac this one. And a really nice one too. Sometimes pedantic, but always nice, and always correct. He's been going into God level more and more it must be said:
Other interesting people:
- stackoverflow.com/users/560648/lightness-races-in-orbit Lightness Races in Orbit. C++ God. Interesting aesthetics. Real name: Tom Lachecki, British, as per:As of 2023 marked "retired" from Stack Overflow, rep graph suggests since 2020.
- stackoverflow.com/users/3681880/suragch the number 3 necromancer dude. But then in 2022 he found God and mostly quit: suragch.medium.com/programming-was-my-god-89b625164a69
- www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1ealv82/the_fall_of_stack_overflow/ The Fall of Stack Overflow
Nothing personal, just Ciro Santilli strongly disagrees with the moderation philosophies of these users.
One particular type of user Ciro particularly dislikes are those who do more moderation than content. Ciro finds it very hard to understand why some people spend so much time moderating. Maybe that's how politicians exist, some people just like that kind of activity.
The moderators tend to have lower intermediate rep. They spend too much time moderating and too little time coding.
- Users who are publicly against the ability to criticize the character of politicians, shown after "I think Trump is disgusting as a person" was removed from Ciro's profile: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/stack-overflow-forbids-criticizing-the-character-of-genocidal-political-leaders-like-xi-jinping
- Journeyman Geek:
- is also against political speech against the CCP in Stack Overflow
- deletionism: single handedly deletes opposing answers without giving any explanation TODO example;
- closurism: superuser.com/questions/248517/show-keys-pressed-in-linux
- Journeyman Geek:
- Yvette Colomb deleted a few of Ciro's answers, related: Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019.
- chrisF: envorces Stack Overflow no duplicate answers policy: stackoverflow.com/questions/9242135/how-to-force-rsync-to-create-destination-folder/72178249#72178249
- meta.stackexchange.com/users/361484/luuklag meta.stackexchange.com/questions/18614/style-guide-for-questions-and-answers/326746?noredirect=1#comment1283471_326746Fair comment, but do you need to flag before comment, and downvote? That answer was clearly a labour of love, on a subject that will never ever make anyone any money (markup style). Too much meta rep, too little programming rep.
Flagged as spam, there obviously is affiliation between the first link and the poster, which is not disclaimed.
- Cody Gray
- Charcoal bot people: charcoal-se.org/
- askubuntu.com/users/10616/thomas-ward Thomas Ward deletionism:
- e.g. convert here's a bug report answer to comment: askubuntu.com/questions/1464992/cant-drag-clip-to-timeline-in-kdenlive-in-ubuntu-23-04/1469359#comment2575312_1464992
- askubuntu.com/questions/524242/how-to-find-out-which-nvidia-gpu-i-have/1469351#1469351 deleted a perfectly valid "Settings -> Details -> About" GUI answer
- Machavity stackoverflow.com/users/2370483/machavity.Deletionism: stackoverflow.com/questions/13714454/specifying-and-saving-a-figure-with-exact-size-in-pixels/64632093#64632093. Edit: reverted.
- askubuntu.com/users/10616/thomas-ward Thomas Ward deletionism:
- Dharman
- security.stackexchange.com/users/6253/schroeder: deletionism security.stackexchange.com/questions/231637/signal-contact-people-or-have-people-contact-me-without-revealing-phone-numbe/245665?noredirect=1#comment591690_245665
TBD:
- webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/users/88163/rubén: possible deletionist webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/149933/why-does-the-archive-org-of-most-youtube-videos-fail-with-sorry-the-wayback-mac, but: might reconsider: webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4502/why-were-not-customer-support-for-your-favorite-company/4503?noredirect=1#comment5167_4503. Didn't: archive.ph/wip/EyZS7
Not so strong, but bad experience:
- Zac67 networkengineering.stackexchange.com/users/36720/zac67: you cannot mention any specific device, even if it is for illustrationa purposes...That's like, the opposite of reproducibility...
Deleted answers are dumped at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues
Some people have been creating YouTube channels that just post and go over a large number of Stack Exchange questions, some of them with a quick random intro video. Perfectly legal due to CC BY-SA but really weird stuff!
- Roel Van de Paar www.youtube.com/@RoelVandePaar. This one seems to be the OG. As of June 2024 it had 2M videos (!), 161K subscribers and only 47M views. youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Roel_Van_de_Paar mentions "he has the highest number of uploads of any YouTube channel". Interestingly at www.linkedin.com/in/roelvandepaar/?originalSubdomain=au he says he is a test engineer at MariaDB.
- Peter Schneider www.youtube.com/@peterschneiderQandA e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBQhrKRpUdI "How to put a newline special character into a file using the echo command and redirection operator?" from unix.stackexchange.com/questions/191694/how-to-put-a-newline-special-character-into-a-file-using-the-echo-command-and-re)Stackexchange
- Sophia Wagner www.youtube.com/@SophiaWagnerQandA. As of June 2024 it had 14k videos and only 88k views, so she made 88 bucks on it.
- E.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=elIlkJneVBI "Vertically stack multiple images using ImageMagick" goes over superuser.com/questions/290656/vertically-stack-multiple-images-using-imagemagick
- www.youtube.com/@LukeChaffeyTechInfo Luke Chaffey, an Indian-American dude, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmx6mN_G83s "Do Boost Geometry nearest queries always sort results ordered by smallest distance first?"
- www.youtube.com/@pythonoracle The Python Oracle. Speech synthesis, with different accents. Cute!
They sent one of the rare spams Ciro actually was interested in!!! Likely going down lists of top Stack Overflow users.
They have some kind of cryptocurrency, TCHME token, as a reward. Ciro wonders if the value of TCHME will ever be high enough to serve as a valid incentive.
Also, what is the total TCHME supply? Can the website devs issue as much as they want? They do giveaways e.g. as shown at: twitter.com/TeachMeAsap/status/1621353671840899072
And a centralized system with a certralized marketplace would work just as well for the initial phases. But fair play, the idea is interesting.
Ciro Santilli's account is www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli/, see also: accounts controlled by Ciro Accounts.
No good per-sub way as of 2022:
- www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/27eziq/view_top_posts_of_a_specific_timespan/
- www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/9ebxl3/how_do_i_find_old_posts_on_a_subreddit/
- www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/aywras/how_do_i_search_reddit_for_posts_in_a_specific/
- www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/etsomx/how_to_get_top_posts_of_past_months_of_subreddit/
- www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/kaf1yz/finding_top_post_of_specific_month/
- www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/k663qy/introducing_rereddit_go_back_in_time_to_see_top/
- www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/stui9i/is_it_possible_to_look_up_the_top_posts_of_the/
www.forbes.com/sites/joewhitwell/2019/04/12/the-student-room-founder-charles-delingpole-talks-building-a-business-at-university/?sh=74645472643b The Student Room Founder Charles Delingpole Talks Building A Business At University (2019)
They could have been Facebook!
Founder: www.linkedin.com/in/delingpole
Ciro Santilli does the same via Google searches and Twitter/Reddit searches for himself, you can't invent anything new nowadays:
Kibo was known for his high-volume but thoughtful posts, but achieved Usenet celebrity circa 1991 by writing a small script to grep his entire Usenet feed for instances of his name, and then answering personally whenever and wherever he was mentioned, giving the illusion that he was personally reading the entire feed.
What do you prefer,
1 \times 10^{10} or 1E10. Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact