Scott Hassan Updated 2025-07-16
The guy who coded the initial version of BackRub, the first version of Google Search, but left before the company formed. TODO how did he meet Largey Brage? Why did he leave Google?
In 1997 he cofounded eGroups, a mailing list management website, together with the mysterious Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother. eGroups was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432m, just before the Dot-com bubble burst.
As of 2021 his net worth was of "only" $1b, even though his original Google shares would have been worth $13b. He must have sold too much too early to do other cool stuff. archive.ph/IgkMI:Did Largey give him this nice deal as a way to thank him for helping start the company, or was it just that they had no big hopes and $800 seemed right? youtu.be/pmXDtTD6vQY?t=146 suggests the stocks were part of his compensation for 3 months of coding work. Also mentioned at: nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today [2021].
In 2001, Scott married a Vietnamese chick called Allison Huynh from university and they had three children.
In 2004 he tried strike a $20 million[ref] post-nuptial after Google went public, which she declined, so things were already crappy back then.
Then, during the divorce, Scott even created a revenge website for her as well. He's so petty! Down as of 2024 of course. There are only some weird redirect archives now: web.archive.org/web/20210915000000*/https://allisonhuynh.com redirecting to sites.google.com/view/allisonhuynhcom
The divorce is covered in several major outlets:
- www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9912929/Billionaire-investor-helped-launch-Google-accused-divorce-terrorism-bitter-break-up.html
- www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html
- www.cnbctv18.com/technology/who-is-scott-hassan-the-google-founder-accused-of-divorce-terrorism-10543641.htm
- www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2020/02/28/suitable-technologies-bankruptcy-filing-scott-hassan-allison-huynh/
To be fair, he did work on a lot of cool stuff after BackRub for which he deserves credit, not the least the company that created the Robot Operating System, which is a cool sounding open source project, which is awesome. But this divorce story is so damning! He should just own up to it, split the cash, and move on... The fact that the Google money came from an investment before marriage likely complicates things.
The fact that he does not have a Wikipedia page as of 2022 is mind blowing, especially after divorce details. Maybe Ciro Santilli will create it one day. Just no patience now. OK, done it June 2022: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan let's see if it lasts. The page lasted but ended up being Ciro Santilli's first edit war, how exciting:
- December 2022: an anonymous user with IP from California removed divorce details and google share ownership details, both of which had a New York Times source: www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html. Discussion at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scott_Hassan#Divorce_details_removed_as_%22poorly_sourced_material%22_by_anonymous_user_even_though_they_had_a_source_from_the_New_York_Times It feels exactly like the type of thing Scott would have done himself. And he possibly inadvertently exposed his real IP in doing so: 24.6.226.102. It is pingable, but Nmap analysis shows nothing of interest.
- June 2024: another partial revert removing the juicy divorce details by user named "ReversingWrongs". The username choice so incredibly cute and naive it makes Ciro wonder if this is from some woman that loves him (mother, child, new partner?) rather than just a Hassan sockpuppet. OK, perhaps with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#People_who_are_relatively_unknown the divorce has to be left out? It's always impossible to decide with those wikipedia things. What you can say, is not necessarily what people want to read about, even when it is incredibly well source.
Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known factso it could be Hassan adding some actually good and interesting information to the article. That one however also has an edit to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Nagel so maybe it's not him.
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
Scott Hassan and Allison Huynh posing with a green screen in 2001
. Source. Oh, to be young and feel love's keen sting. Second brain Updated 2025-07-16
In the 2020's, this refers to writing down everything you know, usually in some graph structured way.
This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.
It is a good question, how much of your knowledge you would be able to give to others with text and images. It is likely almost all of it, except for coordination/signal processing tasks.
His passion for braindumping like this is a big motivation behind Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook.com work.
Bibliography:
Self-directed learning Updated 2025-07-16
SendGrid Updated 2025-07-16
You can either verify your sending domain by adding 3 DNS records.
Saw the email on Gmail, but Microsoft Outlook did put it into junk though. Yahoo mail also worked fine.
Sequelize Updated 2025-07-16
Some usage examples under: Section "Sequelize example".
As of 2021, this library is extremely painful to use. It does feel semi-mature, but there are just too much horrible things going on;
- the documentation is a bit messy and misses a lot of stuff. The examples are often too short, and it is hard to understand what specific options they are talking about do because they lack clear input/expected output pairs. Examples:
- the implementation has several inelegant/unintuitive annoyances/requirements of code repetition that drive you mad.The association API feels notably bad, it took a few days for Ciro Santilli to learn to do what he considers "basic" association operations, knowledge which he dumped to: stackoverflow.com/questions/22958683/how-to-implement-many-to-many-association-in-sequelize/67973948#67973948See also: how to decide if an ORM is good?.
- bugs are piling up. It appears that many key devs left, and current maintainers are just not being able to keep up.
Some glaring issues are listed at the horrors of Sequelize.
Serai DEX clearcoin traceability Created 2024-11-15 Updated 2025-07-16
Can anyone know that clearcoins came from Serai DEX? Because if they can, exchanges could just blacklist anything coming from Serai DEX.
Ciro Santilli asked at: x.com/cirosantilli/status/1855332323405009047. They replied, and the answer is yes, it is possible to know that clearcois came from Serai: x.com/SeraiDEX/status/1855337686208516523:
Serai is fully auditable. With that is full transparency into all outputs received, and all outputs sentRemoving auditability would massively incrase complexity and force users into needing to make fraud proofs if they didn't receive coins expected, or require extreme ZK proofs
Set theory Updated 2025-10-14
settheory.net Updated 2025-07-16
Notably, given the domain name, it is clear that he likes formalization of mathematics-stuff, like Ciro Santilli.
shakacode/react_on_rails Updated 2025-07-16
Lots of focus on Heroku deployability, which is fantastic: shakacode.gitbooks.io/react-on-rails/content/docs/additional-reading/heroku-deployment.html
Live instance: www.reactrails.com/ with source at: github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial Not the most advanced web-app (a gothinkster/realworld-level would be ideal). Also has clear dependency description, which is nice.
Trying at github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial/tree/8e656f97d7a311bbe999ceceb9463b8479fef9e2 on Ubuntu 20.10. Got some failures: github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial/issues/488 Finally got a version of it working at: github.com/shakacode/react-webpack-rails-tutorial/issues/488#issuecomment-812506821
Oh, and the guy behind that project lives in Hawaii (Ciro Santilli's ideal city to live in), has an Asian-mixed son, and two Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboards as seen at twitter.com/railsonmaui/status/1377515748910755851, Ciro Santilli was jealous of him.
Silicon Graphics Updated 2025-07-16
This company is a bit like Sun Microsystems, you can hear a note of awe in the voice of those who knew it at its peak. This was a bit before Ciro Santilli's awakening.
Both of them and Sun kind of died in the same way, unable to move from the workstation to the personal computer fast enough, and just got killed by the scale of competitors who did, notably Nvidia for graphics cards.
Some/all Nintendo 64 games were developed on it, e.g. it is well known that this was the case for Super Mario 64.
Silicon Graphics Promo (1987)
Source. Highlights that this was one of the first widely available options for professional engineers/designers to do real-time 3D rendering for their designs. Presumably before it, you had to do use scripting to CPU render and do any changes incrementally by modifying the script. silkqin.com Updated 2025-07-16
Holy crap amazing list of Guqin pieces by the guy for MP3 download! www.silkqin.com/06hear.htm And the explanations are insane. What a dude. Ciro Santilli's hero.
Download all MP3:
wget -r -np -l 1 -A mp3 http://www.silkqin.com/06hear.htm
Ciro Santilli Contacted John by email in 2019 telling him to put his stuff on YouTube and offering help, and he replied, but nothing came of it unfortunately. Edit: he uploaded a bunch of videos of him playing live in 2020! www.youtube.com/user/silkqin/videos
John focuses on playing the tunes in a "historically informed performance", in particular using silk strings rather than metal ones which are used by most modern artists: www.silkqin.com/08anal/hip.htm
Silk Road (marketplace) Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli has become slightly obsessed with this story, and the main mastermind Ross Ulbricht.
The best article available so far is: www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/how_i_caught_silk_road_mastermind (archive) which summarizes what one of the investigators said in a 2019 French computer security conference.
The key living posts are:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-connect-to-a-tor-hidden-service-using-curl-in-php (archive) which was originally asked under the real name, and then the username was changed to "Frosty", which matches one of the server's logins after the laptop was captured
- altoid early Silk Road mention: bitcointalk.org/?topic=175.70;wap2 (archive)
The big question is of course how libertarian free market ideologically motivated the website was, and how purely criminal greed it was.
The magnitude of the early operational security mistakes does make Ciro think that Ross did it "because he could" and "for the lolz" in a real world Breaking Bad way.
The entry in Ross' diary does resonate a lot with Ciro and any entrepreneur, full diary at: www.wired.com/2015/01/heres-secret-silk-road-journal-laptop-ross-ulbricht/ (archive).
[i]n 2011," [I believe I will be] "creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before,Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator."
Having this kind of feeling, is the greatest thing any human can have, and what motivates all great things.
Capitalizing in illegal things though is a cheat, big things take longer than a few years to reach, but reaching them is that much more satisfying as well.
Other interesting quotes:which Ciro also feels, see don't be a pussy, and:
Everyone knows I am working on a bitcoin exchange. I always thought honesty was the best policy and now I didn't know what to do. I should have just told everyone I am a freelance programmer or something, but I had to tell half truths. It felt wrong to lie completely so I tried to tell the truth without revealing the bad part, but now I am in a jam. Everyone knows too much. Dammit.
Also very worth reading is the San Francisco flat mate account: www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3q8g/my-roommate-the-darknet-drug-lord (archive).
The murder for hire allegations are also interesting: mashable.com/2013/10/03/silk-road-hits, he paid 80k dollars to undercover DEA agents!
Except for the fact that Ross was an 80 million Dollar drug lord, those accounts sound exactly like what you would expect from any other nerdy startup founder! The:
- "just do it" strategy effectively going to a minimal viable product (manual transaction management!), while making many mistakes along the way, including hiring mistakes and successes when scaling is needed
- the hardship of self bootstrapping your own social network (here with some kilos of mushrooms)
- the variety of periods, from relatively calm, to hair pulling stress during big changes
It is also amusing to see very concretely the obvious fact that the FBI can get a subpoena for all accounts you ever had, e.g. they knew his laptop model from Amazon and brought a corresponding power cable to the arrest! If you are going to be a cyber criminal, don't use your real name, ever!
Should justice be blind? Maybe. But it does hurt for mere non-blind men to see it sometimes. Especially when drug liberalization is involved.
Simple DirectMedia Layer Updated 2025-07-16
This is a really good project. So fun to play around with. Low level IO part only like drawing to screen and handling keyboard inputs.
Ciro Santilli has:
Sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism Updated 2025-07-16
smashkarts.io Updated 2025-07-16
Quite good, Ciro Santilli played this a lot in 2021/2022, his user ID: ofo5fNy7wRNC1Cw94YVB4KMOW5f2.
The physics not as good as the original Mario Kart 64, and it is notably missing jump gliding, and generally not as sharp! But it is really not bad.
Some of the weapons were too useless that you are just better firing them straight away at wall immediately to get something better, they could have a little better balancing there. I'm talking about you gatling that takes 10 seconds to finish firing, and does not kill enemies immediately. You are better off just firing that gun immediately when you get it to be able to get another gun ASAP. They seem to have done some balancing there however.
It had no chat option, but in a way it was cool to be forced to communicate non-verbally with people whose usernames you got familiar with. Funny you can love people like that, without ever talking to them. The best way of doing so being tea-bagging by going back and forth on a player after winning.
Smiley's People (TV series) Updated 2025-07-16
This is perhaps slightly worse than the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but still amazing.
Some difficult points:
- how did the general deduce that the old woman's daughter had a link to Karla? It must be linked to the fact that the Russian agent who made the offer was a Karla-man.
- some things are hard to understand without having seen the previous Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, e.g. they say nothing clearly who Toby Esterhase is, he now works on art sales
- but others are inconsistent, e.g. they changed the actor for Peter Guillam...
Smiley's letter to Karla scene from Smiley's People 1982 BBC miniseries John le Carré adaptation EP6o
. Source. Fan-uplod by Ciro Santilli, one of the greatest television scenes ever. Blocked in the UK. Smooth jazz Created 2024-09-15 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli defines "Smooth Jazz" simply as jazz that he can leave on the background to work without being particularly distracted.
Ciro Santilli's "Soft Jazz" YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcZOZrP1P_V4Sxz8y1JLKLbZOv3GLb_Xf
List:
- Page One by Joe Henderson (1963)
Social inequality Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli is extremely passionate about this issue, partly due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
One of Ciro's most direct experiences with social inequality is described at: São Remo, the favela next to USP.
We have to be careful not to make everyone poorer when trying to reduce inequality.
But as things stand as of 2020, increasing taxes on the very richest, and notably wealth tax, and investing it in free gifted education, seems like a safe bet to achieve any meaningful level of equal opportunity and meritocracy.