The best place to get answers to programming questions as of 2019. Google into Stack Overflow is always the best bet.
An overview of Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contribution can be found at: Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
Stack Overflow in a nutshell
. Source. As the "WTF look at my points" guy, Ciro Santilli approves of this meme. A few more elements could be added, notably deletion of the last link-only answer, but good enough.
By the profile image, the "Grammar Nazi" editor is actually appropriately the notorious serial editor Peter Mortensen. Ciro Santilli welcomes grammar fixes, but more subjective style fixes can be a bit annoying.
Catching mice by Nakanoart
. Possible non-canonical source: twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1376023938749190147
- always upvote questions you care about, to increase the probability that they will get answered
- never upvote other people's answers unless you might gain from it somehow, otherwise you are just giving other high reputation users more reputation relative to you
- only mark something to close or as a duplicate if it will bring you some advantage, because closing things creates enemies, especially if the OP has a high profileOne example advantage is if you have already answered the question (and the duplicate as well in case of duplicates), because this will prevent competitors from adding new better answers to overtake you.
- protect questions you've answered whenever someone with less than 10 reputation answers it with a bad answer, to prevent other good contributors from coming along and beating you
- when you find a duplicate pool answer every question with similar answers.Alter each answer slightly to avoid the idiotic duplicate answer detector.If one of the question closes, it is not too bad, as it continues netting you to upvotes, and prevents new answers from coming in.
- follow on Twitter/RSS someone who comments on the top features of new software releases. E.g. for Git, follow GitHub on Twitter, C++ on Reddit. Then run back to any question which has a new answer.
- always upvote the question when you answer it:
- the more upvotes, more likely people are to click it.
- the OP is more likely to see your answer and feel good and upvote you
- if a niche question only has few answers and you come with a good one, upvote the existing ones by other high profile users.This may lead to them upvoting or liking you.
- always upvote comments that favor you:
- "I like this answer!" on your answers
- "also look at that question" when you have answered that question
- if you answer a question by newbie without 15 reputation, find their other questions if any and upvote them, so that the OP can upvote your answer in addition to just accepting
- if a question has 50 million answers and you answer it (often due to a new feature), make a comment on the question pointing to your answer
- if you get a downvote, always leave a comment asking why. It is not because you care about their useless opinion, but because other readers might see the comment, feel sorry for you, and upvote.
- ask any questions under a separate anonymous accounts. Because:
- intelligent people are born knowing, and don't ever ask any questions, so that would hurt your reputation
- downvoting questions does not take 1 reputation away from the downvoter, and so it greatly opens the door for your opponents to downvote you without any cost.
How do you think Ciro got his rep? Just kidding.
Stack Overflow later forbade Ciro from advertising this project as described at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019". Those newbs know nothing about security through obscurity.
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019 by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16After 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'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.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,
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.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.
One may dream.
And if not, then they should fix it.
Notably, more people would try to "game" the system by quickly answering lots of small impact answers which could tilt things off a bit. Not to mention straight out fraud.
There's no point.
The question remains there, but people lose the ability to help the asker.
Reputation is meaningless regardless, since JavaScript gurus will always have 1000x more readers than low level junkies.
The deeper problem: the existence of multiple separate websites instead of just using the tags on a single website.
Examples:
The link will break, and the answer will lose. Or the person who summarizes inline will get more upvotes because people are lazy to click the link. Also, web archiving exists.
This is especially idiotic when it is a link to another post in Stack Overflow itself.
It's great right? You can't link to your other answer alone: Stack Overflow link-only answer policy, but you can't copy the other answer either.
And because not all duplicate close votes succeed, see e.g. stackoverflow.com/questions/59649238/how-to-use-the-m5ops-in-gem5-such-m5-exit-and-m5-dump-stats-in-se-mode/63955139#63955139 the result is that someone else will come and answer the same thing in a different wording.
So just do a slight variation wording yourself and get all the reputation.
Why. Why. Why is there no limit to how much I can help, but there is a limit to how many thanks I can get?
At most, limit it to a single answer to avoid highly publicized events, e.g. an answer being shared on Reddit. But across answers? It makes no sense.
The two ways main ways to overcome this limit are the 15 point answer accept reputation and bounties.
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
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