Wealth tax by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Obviously coupled with measures to prevent capital flight. This would be a required step to achieve Ciro Santilli's dream of unconditional basic income.
Perhaps the election of Donald Trump in 2016 woke up the democrats at last, that they were just making empty promises without actually benefiting the poor? www.vox.com/2019/3/19/18240377/estate-tax-wealth-tax-70-percent-warren-sanders-aoc. Or is just another facade?
Bibliography:
Exam as a service by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is Ciro Santilli's name for the idea that we should not have structured degrees at university that require entry exams, only tests that anybondy could take, likely for free, and then they would just have proof that they know the stuff for e.g. teachers that care about a subject while selecting students to work with them in research.
We just need control rooms where someone can watch students for cheating. Multiple different exams can be taken in the same room of course, students just have to sign up in advance. The exams should happen regularly depending on demand. E.g. extremelly common subjects should happen every month, and highly specialized ones every 6 months or 1 year.
Questions should be always taken from an open question pool which also contains answers, thus allowing anyone to effectively study for it.
How many questions can you actually come up with about a given non research subject, right?
We then make an API available, so that students can grant access to specific results to anyone they choose, or even make the results public for anyone to see. This way the people that care about the exams can just machine learn what exams correlate with their desired performance.
Wikipedia dumps by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Per-table dumps created with mysqldump and listed at: dumps.wikimedia.org/. Most notably, for the English Wikipedia: dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
The tables are "documented" under: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout, e.g. the central "page" table: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Page_table. But in many cases it is impossible to deduce what fields are from those docs.
BitcoinStrings.com by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
bitcoinstrings.com has all strings -n20 strings, we can obtain the whole thing and clean it up a bit with:
wget -O all.html https://bitcoinstrings.com/all
cp all.html all-recode.html
recode html..ascii all-recode.html
awk '!seen[$0]++' all-recode.html > all-uniq.html
awk to skip the gazillion "mined by message" repeats.
A lot of in that website stuff appears to be cut up at the 20 mark. As shown in Force of Will, this is possibly because they didn't use -w in strings -n20, and the text after the newlines was less than 20 characters.
That website can be replicated by downloading the Bitcoin blockchain locally, then:
cd .bitcoin/blocks
for f in blk*.dat; do strings -n20 -w $f | awk '!seen[$0]++' > ${f%.dat}.txt; done
tail +n1 *.txt
Remove most of the binary crap:
head -n-1 *.txt | grep -e '[. ]' | grep -iv 'mined by' | less
First They Ignore You by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win
Nature Scitable by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2022 visible at: www.nature.com/scitable
Apparently they had a separate URL as just scitable.com, so they were somewhat serious about it before shutting it down.
As of 2022 marked:
This page has been archived and is no longer updated
RIP.
www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/ has last entry 2015, so presumably that's the shutdown year.
Self description:
Using our platform, you can customize your own eBooks for your students. Create an online classroom. Contribute and share content and connect with networks of colleagues.
so quite related to OurBigBook.com.
Wikimedia Commons by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A really good option to store educational media such as images and video!
Shame that like the rest of Wikimedia, their interface is so clunky and lacking obvious features.
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.
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,
To: 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.
I'll unsuspend you, now we've had this discussion.
Regards,
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.
Video 1.
The Great Places Erased by Suburbia by Not Just Bikes (2022)
Source. Stack Overflow, and other online forums, can serve as a sort of a third place for its more active users.
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.

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!
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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/derivative
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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