What I cannot create, I do not understand by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-29 +Created 1970-01-01
The mantra of the computer simulation engineer.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019 by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-29 +Created 1970-01-01
After Ciro Santilli got a lot of attention on Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19428700 his Stack Overflow account was suspended for 3 days web.archive.org/web/20190320163458/https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/ciro-santilli-新疆改造中心-六四事件-法轮功 and he received a magic notification that led to a private message:
Hello,I'm writing in reference to your Stack Overflow account:I don't understand why you are actively promoting and assisting people to commit fraud on the site.I've removed this from your profile github.com/cirosantilli/stack-overflow-vote-fraud-script and do not expect you to post it around the site.I'm suspending you to gain your attention on this matter.We have temporarily suspended your account; you may return after 3 days.Regards,Stack Overflow Moderation TeamTo: Aaron Hall ♦;Andy ♦;Baum mit Augen ♦;Bhargav Rao ♦;Bohemian ♦;BoltClock ♦;Brad Larson ♦;ChrisF ♦;Cody Gray ♦;deceze ♦;Ed Cottrell ♦;Flexo ♦;George Stocker ♦;Jean-François Fabre ♦;Jon Clements ♦;josliber ♦;Madara Uchiha ♦;Martijn Pieters ♦;meagar ♦;Michael Myers ♦;Rob ♦;Robert Harvey ♦;Ry- ♦;Samuel Liew ♦;Undo ♦;Yvette Colomb ♦
Ciro's reply was:
Hi mods,
Security by obscurity does not work. If that is all Stack Overflow relies on, and that is what it looks like, then it is guaranteed to be flawed and already been attacked.That is one of the reasons that my website will eventually beat Stack Overflow: github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website/tree/d77b18d2e7acb3558615797c36195f60dfd26306#pagerank-with-tags If you had messaged me and told me "take down or suspend" I would have done it immediately because I understand the meaning of political power.That would have been the better course of action for everyone: I get no block, and you get no bad publicity as I shout Kerckhoff's principle on Twitter.But maybe it is a good thing that people learn more about that. Is there an existing public discussion saying that you cannot advertise vote fraud tools on this website?If not, can you please create that meta thread as a reference for future users, and perhaps let the community decide by itself?In particular, will you still suspend me if I don't take down the GitHub repo?Because if not, does it make any sense to prevent it from being mentioned in Stack Overflow? Any good GitHub repo just gets enough Google pagerank that it won't matter.And if yes, nothing prevents me from re-uploading on an anonymous account.
Reply and unsuspend quickly followed, with link still removed:
I suspended you to get your attention. Your attitude about going to Twitter about it does not bode well with me.Feel free to have whatever you want in your GitHub repo. Just don't advertise tools to make it easier for people to circumvent the rules. As easy or as hard as it may be to circumvent them, you're handing it to people who may not be capable of doing so. It doesn't help.Don't make threats to upload on an anonymous account. Accounts created to circumvent previous warnings are not welcomed on the site.We don't need a meta thread to discuss whether it's ok to post voting fraud links in your profile and we definitely don't need to give it anymore publicity.I'll unsuspend you, now we've had this discussion.Regards,Stack Overflow Moderation Team
A meta thread was later created by Yvette, kudos, to which Ciro answered with the correct unpopular answer that will be downvoted to oblivion: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/381577/is-it-ok-to-have-links-on-how-to-create-sock-puppets-and-gain-rep-fraudulently-i/381635#381635
Yvette had also previously deleted one or two of Ciro's answers for being duplicates, which is a policy Ciro is against: if the questions are not dupes, a single answer might still directly reply to both of them.
Yvette later announced that she was leaving the website: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/399495/leaving-the-site-and-the-network-mid-election-is-not-the-best-but-theres-no. This is evil, but Ciro was happy. He does not mean harm to Yvette, but in their limited interaction, Ciro disagreed with her choices.
Participated in the German nuclear weapons program, ouch.
MOOCs are a bad idea. We don't want to simply map the pre-computer classroom to the Internet. The Internet allows, and requires, fundamentally new ways to do things. More like Stack Overflow/Wikipedia. More like OurBigBook.com.
OMG they have that. Slightly slightly overlap with OurBigBook.com.
Our WIP script: wikipedia/import-categories.sh.
Related:
- opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/1533/download-wikipedia-articles-from-a-specific-category
- webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/16359/is-there-a-way-to-download-a-list-of-all-wikipedia-categories/172480#172480
- stackoverflow.com/questions/40119322/how-to-download-all-pages-inside-a-category-in-wikipedia
- category tree on Stack Overflow
- stackoverflow.com/questions/17432254/wikipedia-category-hierarchy-from-dumps/77313490#77313490 Canon but no good answers.
- stackoverflow.com/questions/12227134/how-to-fetch-category-tree-of-wiki
- stackoverflow.com/questions/21782410/finding-subcategories-of-a-wikipedia-category-using-category-and-categorylinks-t. Actually explains it: stackoverflow.com/questions/21782410/finding-subcategories-of-a-wikipedia-category-using-category-and-categorylinks-t/21798259#21798259
- stackoverflow.com/questions/27279649/how-to-build-wikipedia-category-hierarchy
- mdkzaman.com/knowledge-graph-from-wikipedia-category-hierarchy/
Consider:
Jewish_physicists
Let's observe them in MySQL:outputs:
mysql enwiki -e "select page_id, page_namespace, page_title, page_is_redirect from page where page_namespace in (0, 14) and page_title in ('Computer_storage_devices', 'Computer_data_storage')"
+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+
| page_id | page_namespace | page_title | page_is_redirect |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+
| 5300 | 0 | Computer_data_storage | 0 |
| 42371130 | 0 | Computer_storage_devices | 1 |
| 711721 | 14 | Computer_data_storage | 0 |
| 895945 | 14 | Computer_storage_devices | 0 |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+
mysql enwiki -e "select cl_from, cl_to from categorylinks where cl_from in (5300, 711721, 895945, 42371130)"
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| cl_from | cl_to |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 5300 | All_articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements |
| 5300 | Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements_from_2009 |
| 5300 | Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements_from_2011 |
| 5300 | Articles_with_GND_identifiers |
| 5300 | Articles_with_NKC_identifiers |
| 5300 | Articles_with_short_description |
| 5300 | Computer_architecture |
| 5300 | Computer_data_storage |
| 5300 | Short_description_matches_Wikidata |
| 5300 | Use_dmy_dates_from_June_2020 |
| 5300 | Wikipedia_articles_incorporating_text_from_the_Federal_Standard_1037C |
| 711721 | Computer_architecture |
| 711721 | Computer_data |
| 711721 | Computer_hardware_by_type |
| 711721 | Data_storage |
| 895945 | Computer_data_storage |
| 895945 | Computer_peripherals |
| 895945 | Recording_devices |
| 42371130 | Redirects_from_alternative_names |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
So we see that
cl_from
encodes the parent categories:- parent categories of categories:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_data_storage, which has ID
711721
, has parent categories: "Computer hardware by type", "Computer data", "Data storage", "Computer architecture". This matches exactly on the database. These are all encoded on the source code of the page:{{DEFAULTSORT:Storage}} [[Category:Computer hardware by type]] [[Category:Computer data|Storage]] [[Category:Data storage|Computer]] [[Category:Computer architecture]]
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_storage_devices has parent categories: "Computer data storage", "Recording devices", "Computer peripherals". This matches exactly on the database.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_data_storage, which has ID
- parent categories of pages:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_storage_devices whish is a redirect gets the magic category "Redirects_from_alternative_names", a humongous placeholder with many thousands of pages: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Redirects_from_alternative_names
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_data_storage shows only two categories onthe web UI: "Computer data storage" and "Computer architecture". Both of these are present on the database and at the end of the source code:The others appear to be more magic. Two of them we can guess from the templates:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Computer Data Storage}} [[Category:Computer data storage| ]] [[Category:Computer architecture]]
are likely{{short description|Storage of digital data readable by computers}} {{Use dmy dates|date=June 2020}}
Use_dmy_dates_from_June_2020
andArticles_with_short_description
but the rest is more magic and not necessarily present in-source.
So to find all articls and categories under a given category title, say en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematics we can run:
mariadb enwiki -e "select cl_from, cl_to, page_namespace, page_title from categorylinks inner join page on page_namespace in (0, 14) and cl_from = page_id and cl_to = 'Mathematics'"
The Magnetic Moment of the Electron by Kusch and Foley (1948) by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-29 +Created 1970-01-01
Published on Physical Review by Polykarp Kusch and Foley.
journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.74.250, paywall as of 2021.
The key is to define only the minimum number of measures: if you define more definitions become over constrained and could be inconsistent.
Learning the modern SI is also a great way to learn some interesting Physics.
While this has some of the metrics features that Ciro Santilli wants to implement for OurBigBook.com, it limits the number of articles your readeres can read.
How the fuck can you publish on a website that limits the number of views for your articles?!?! When all it has is static pages + some metrics?!?!
Evil. Just learn to use GitHub Pages for God's sake.
Never trust an experiment that is not supported by a good theory by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-29 +Created 1970-01-01
Not the usual bullshit you were expecting from the philosophy of Science, right?
Some notable quoters:
- Jacques Monod has the exact quote as presented here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22042272/, though presumably it was in French, TODO find the French version
- youtu.be/AYC5lE0b8os?t=41 A Computational Whole-Cell Model Predicts Genotype From Phenotype- Markus Covert by "Calit2ube" (2013), see also: Section "Whole cell simulation"
- the book Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) mentions a few incidents of this involving Feynman, see e.g. chapter "New Particles, New Language" where he and fellow theorist Hans Bethe immediately spot problems with experimentalists' data in suspicious results
Pinned article: ourbigbook/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!
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. - 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
- Internal cross file references done right:
- 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