Polaris Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow suspension for vote fraud script 2019 Updated 2025-07-16
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'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.
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. Epic Stack Overflow users Updated 2026-01-30
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. 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:In 2024 VonC was found to have been used LLMs to generate part of his answers, and later publicly apologized: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072/a-commitment-to-amend-and-move-forward It is not clear why he had used them though. He remained user #1 in 2025 however, even despite not using them anymore as far as it is known.
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
Stack Overflow users Ciro Santilli dislikes Updated 2025-09-09
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
List of Stack Overflow users Updated 2025-09-09
Physics Stack Exchange Updated 2025-07-16
Matrix ring Updated 2025-07-16
The matrix ring of degree n is the set of all n-by-n square matrices together with the usual vector space and matrix multiplication operations.
Ciro's Edict #5 Link to an image or video in another file that has an
\x on title from another file Updated 2025-07-16Issue report at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/198 Suppose you had:
programming-language.ciro
= Programming language
\Image[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/python-logo.jpg]
{title=The \x[python-programming-language] logo}
== Python
{c}
{disambiguate=programming-language}= Logos I like
\x[image-the-python-logo]Now, when rendering
\x[image-the-python-logo], we would need to fetch two IDs:image-the-python-logofor theTheandlogopartpython-programming-languageitself, to know that\x[python-programming-language]should render asPython
But after group all SQL queries together was done, there was no way to know that rendering
image-the-python-logo would imply also fetching python-programming-language.This was solved by adding a new database entry type,
REFS_TABLE_X_TITLE_TITLE to the existing References table, which tracks dependencies between IDs. Hermitian matrix Updated 2025-07-16
Invariance of the speed of light Updated 2025-07-16
This single experimental observation/idea is the basis for all of special relativity.
Special relativity is the direct result of people bending their backs to accommodate for this really weird fact.
History of special relativity Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
- Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter III "Relativity, the special theory" has a good sketch as you may imagine.
Special relativity experiment Updated 2025-07-16
- moving magnet and conductor problem: the more experiments confirm Maxwell's equations, the more special relativity has to be correct
- aberration TODO more precisely how it is evidence.
Einstein synchronization Updated 2025-07-16
Lorentz transformation Updated 2025-07-16
The equation that allows us to calculate stuff in special relativity!
Take two observers with identical rules and stopwatch, and aligned axes, but one is on a car moving at towards the direction at speed .
When both observe an event, if we denote:It is of course arbitrary who is standing and who is moving, we will just use the term "standing" for the one without primes.
- the observation of the standing observer
- the observation of the ending observer on a car
Note that if tends towards zero, then this reduces to the usual Galilean transformations which our intuition expects:
Maxwell's equations require special relativity Updated 2025-07-16
The following aspects of Maxwell's equations make no sense without special relativity:
- the Lorentz force would be different observers have different speeds, see e.g.: charged particle moving at the same speed of electrons thought experiment
- Maxwell's equations imply that the speed of light is the same for all inertial reference frames
When charged particle though experiment are seen from the point of view of special relativity, it becomes clear that magnetism is just a direct side effect of charges being viewed in special relativity. One is philosophically reminded of how spin is the consequence of quantum mechanics + special relativity.
Spacetime Updated 2025-07-16
Relativistic mechanics Updated 2025-07-16
Special linear group of dimension 2 Updated 2025-07-16
Lie algebra of Updated 2025-07-16
Finite special general linear group Updated 2025-07-16
Just like for the finite general linear group, the definition of special also works for finite fields, where 1 is the multiplicative identity!
Note that the definition of orthogonal group may not have such a clear finite analogue on the other hand.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.