Incoming links: Scott Hassan
Scott Hassan's ex-wife. She is a "Vietnam immigrant who attended Stanford University on a full scholarship".[ref]
- www.instagram.com/allihuynh some good family pictures, including of her mixed son, mother and some aunties. And still some Scott Hassan pics even! She really loved him...
- www.instagram.com/p/C8c52tiSQjr with possible mum is tagged in New Braunfels, Texas, possible family home
- www.linkedin.com/in/allison-huynh-57992a4
- youtu.be/PhP-iPInJLE?t=135 grew up in South Central Texas, Texas Hill Country, in a lower middle class family, youngest of seven
- youtu.be/PhP-iPInJLE?t=365 she had a medical emergency after the divorce? Or maybe she's saying the was pressed to get insurance fast just in case?
Silicon Valley Billionaire's Divorce Makes Headlines by NBC Bay Area
. Source. 2021.Larry Pages's older brother.
It is hard to find information on this little bugger! Not a single photo online!
As suggested by the "Jr.", he is named after Larry's father, Carl Victor Page.
Carl Jr. is mentioned in a few places in the book The Google Story. The full name "Carl Victor Page Jr." is never given in that source, only "Carl Page Jr." is used. These crazy Anglo-Saxons and their semi-optional middle names!
The Google Story does not cite its sources, but it likely got much of its insider information through interviews, e.g. Chapter 2. "When Larry Met Sergey":which suggests the authors actually interviewed Carl Jr., since interviews with Carl Jr. cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet. It would be interesting to know more how they got that level of access.
Carl Jr. recalls Larry as an inquisitive younger brother with wide-ranging interests
Chapter 2 mentions that Carl Jr. is nine years older than Larry. Therefore, he must have been born in 1963 or 1964. It also states that Carl studied at the University of Michigan, like his father and like Larry would also do later on:
He also enjoyed helping Carl Jr. - who was nine years older - with his college computer homework when Carl came home from the University of Michigan during breaks.Their father was a professor at the Michigan State University, which is a different university from the University of Michigan, and not in the same city, so by breaks they mean term breaks.
Chapter 2 also mentions that he was working in Silicon Valley by the time their father died in 1996:
Despite his grief [for the death of their father at the early age of 58], Larry remained enrolled at Stanford. It helped that his older brother, Carl Jr., lived and worked in Silicon Valley. They had each other, so Larry wasn't left to bear the loss alone, and the two spent time together, fondly recalling their dad and reflecting on their childhood memories.
In 1997, Carl co-founded the mailing list management website eGroups together with Scott Hassan, programmer of an early version of Google when he was a research assistant at Stanford University. Carl and Scott presumably met through Larry, but we don't have a source. The company was sold to Yahoo! in 2000. The Google Story Chapter 8. "A Trickle" mentions:Carl is listed as a co-founder in the SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105102/0000950149-00-000584.txt as "Carl Page". He does not appear on the 5% stockholders however, poor Carl.
Google's deal with Yahoo!] had special significance for Larry Page, since his brother, Carl Jr., also was in serious negotiations with Yahoo! over a major business transaction. The following day, June 27, Yahoo announced plans to buy eGroups, a technology firm that Carl Page had co-founded, for $413 million.
In 2006, he brought a company he founded called "Handheld Entertainment" public through a reverse merger with a shell company: archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/brother-of-google-co-founder-uses-shell-company-for-handheld-start-up/. "Handheld Entertainment" made an iPod competitor apparently. SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1309710/000095013606009480/file1.htm.
September 27, 2023 marked Google's 25 th aniversary and the page cirosantilli.com/carl-victor-page-jr had a small surge of views according to Google Analytics. On that day, this page was one of the top Google search results for "Carl Victor Page, Jr."[ref]. Wikipedia also had a large bump in searches for "Larry Page" on the same day: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page which must be the root cause, Larry actually managed to beat "Cat" and "Dog" on that day.
Some examples by Ciro Santilli follow.
Of the tutorial-subjectivity type:
- This edit perfectly summarizes how Ciro feels about Wikipedia (no particular hate towards that user, he was a teacher at the prestigious Pierre and Marie Curie University and actually as a wiki page about him):which removed the only diagram that was actually understandable to non-Mathematicians, which Ciro Santilli had created, and received many upvotes at: math.stackexchange.com/questions/776039/intuition-behind-normal-subgroups/3732426#3732426. The removal does not generate any notifications to you unless you follow the page which would lead to infinite noise, and is extremely difficult to find out how to contact the other person. The removal justification is even somewhat ad hominem: how does he know Ciro Santilli is also not a professional Mathematician? :-) Maybe it is obvious because Ciro explains in a way that is understandable. Also removal makes no effort to contact original author. Of course, this is caused by the fact that there must also have been a bunch of useless edits not done by Ciro, and there is no reputation system to see if you should ignore a person or not immediately, so removal author has no patience anymore. This is what makes it impossible to contribute to Wikipedia: your stuff gets deleted at any time, and you don't know how to appeal it. Ciro is going to regret having written this rant after Daniel replies and shows the diagram is crap. But that would be better than not getting a reply and not learning that the diagram is crap.
rm a cryptic diagram (not understandable by a professional mathematician, without further explanations
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Finite_field&type=revision&diff=1044934168&oldid=1044905041 on finite fields with edit comment "Obviously: X ≡ α". Discussion at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Finite_field#Concrete_simple_worked_out_example Some people simply don't know how to explain things to beginners, or don't think Wikipedia is where it should be done. One simply can't waste time fighting off those people, writing good tutorials is hard enough in itself without that fight.
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&diff=1193622235&oldid=1193529573 by user Bob K. removed Ciro Santilli's awesome simple image of the Discrete Fourier transform as seen at en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&oldid=1176616763:with message:
Hello. I am a retired electrical engineer, living near Washington,DC. Most of my contributions are in the area of DSP, where I have about 40 years of experience in applications on many different processors and architectures.
Thank you so much!!remove non-helpful image
Maybe it is a common thread that these old "experts" keep removing anything that is actually intelligible by beginners? Section "There is value in tutorials written by beginners"Also ranted at: x.com/cirosantilli/status/1808862417566290252
Figure 1. Ciro Santilli's awesome graph removed by Bob K. from the Discrete Fourier transform page.Source at: numpy/fft_plot.py. - when Ciro Santilli created Scott Hassan's page, he originally included mentions of his saucy divorce: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scott_Hassan&oldid=1091706391 These were reverted by Scott's puppets three times, and Ciro and two other editors fought back. Finally, Ciro understood that Hassan's puppets were likely right about the removal because you can't talk about private matters of someone who is low profile:even if it is published in well known and reliable publications like the bloody New York Times. In this case, it is clear that most people wanted to see this information summarized on Wikipedia since others fought back Hassan's puppet. This is therefore a failure of Wikipedia to show what the people actually want to read about.This case is similar to the PsiQuantum one. Something is extremely well known in an important niche, and many people want to read about it. But because the average person does not know about this important subject, and you are limited about what you can write about it or not, thus hurting the people who want to know about it.
Notability constraints, which are are way too strict:There are even a Wikis that were created to remove notability constraints: Wiki without notability requirements.
- even information about important companies can be disputed. E.g. once Ciro Santilli tried to create a page for PsiQuantum, a startup with $650m in funding, and there was a deletion proposal because it did not contain verifiable sources not linked directly to information provided by the company itself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PsiQuantum Although this argument is correct, it is also true about 90% of everything that is on Wikipedia about any company. Where else can you get any information about a B2B company? Their clients are not going to say anything. Lawsuits and scandals are kind of the only possible source... In that case, the page was deleted with 2 votes against vs 3 votes for deletion.is very similar to Stack Exchange's own Stack Overflow content deletion issues. Ain't Nobody Got Time For That. "Ain't Nobody Got Time for That" actually has a Wiki page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t_Nobody_Got_Time_for_That. That's notable. Unlike a $600M+ company of course.
should we delete this extremely likely useful/correct content or not according to this extremely complex system of guidelines"
In December 2023 the page was re-created, and seemed to stick: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PsiQuantum#Secondary_sources It's just a random going back and forth. Author Ctjk has an interesting background:I am a legal official at a major government antitrust agency. The only plausible connection is we regulate tech firms
For these reasons reason why Ciro basically only contributes images to Wikipedia: because they are either all in or all out, and you can determine which one of them it is. And this allows images to be more attributable, so people can actually see that it was Ciro that created a given amazing image, thus overcoming Wikipedia's lack of reputation system a little bit as well.
Wikipedia is perfect for things like biographies, geography, or history, which have a much more defined and subjective expository order. But when it comes to "tutorials of how to actually do stuff", which is what mathematics and physics are basically about, Wikipedia has a very hard time to go beyond dry definitions which are only useful for people who already half know the stuff. But to learn from zero, newbies need tutorials with intuition and examples.
Bibliography:
- gwern.net/inclusionism from gwern.net:
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
- Quote "Golden wiki vs Deletionism on Wikipedia"
Company co-founded by Scott Hassan, early Google programmer at Stanford University, and Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother.
They were an email list management website, and became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition.
The company was sold to Yahoo! in August 2000 for $432m and became Yahoo! Groups. They managed to miraculously dodge the Dot-com bubble, which mostly poppet in 2021. After the acquisition, Yahoo started to redirect them to: groups.yahoo.com as can be seen on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20000401000000*/egroups.com The first archive of groups.yahoo.com is from February 2001: web.archive.org/web/20010202055100/http://groups.yahoo.com/ and it unsurprisingly looks basically exactly like eGroups.
eGroups logo
. From the earliest archive of their "about" page: web.archive.org/web/19991004062653/http://www.egroups.com/info/top.html in 1999.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 2014 Hassan asked for a divorce, and the proceedings were a shitshow, lasting more than 7 years.
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.
- 24.234.111.66 is marked as being from Las Vegas online.
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
Screenshot of allisonhuynh.com by the Daily Mail
. Source. Scott Hassan's shitty telepresence robot startup. Looking at the demos it is so painfully obvious why they failed, that feeble tall screen on wheels. But hindsight is 20/20... It is almost as bad as OurBigBook.
The most notable usage of the product is Snowden Snowbot, which is sad, the product name seems to have been "Beam". Who would use that if not for theatrics with an exilee when everyone already has a screen in front of their face all the time?[ref]
At least this phase produced some of the only videos of Hassan in existence such as:He's got a perfect american accent, so likely not a first generation immigrant.
A Conversation with Scott Hassan by Levin Associates
. Source. - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan I delved into a bit of Wikipedia drama on the page of Scott Hassan, initial coder of Google Search, which I created an am the main contributor.Originally I had added some details about this messy divorce which saw coverage in major publications such as the New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html and Scott used puppets to remove those at several points in time over the years.Those removals were then reverted by other editors, not myself, indicating that editors wanted the details there.While preparing to finally decide this through moderation, I ended up finding that the divorce details should likely have been left out according to Wikipedia rules, because Scott is "relatively unknown" and a "low profile individual":and so I ended up removing them myself.This is yet once again deletionism on Wikipedia weakening the site, and making @OurBigBook stronger :-) Here is the uncensored one: Scott HassanI spent time on this partly because I'm mildly obsessed with founding myths of companies, but also partly to better understand the moderation process of Wikipedia.
- unix.stackexchange.com/questions/256138/is-there-any-decent-speech-recognition-software-for-linux/613392#613392 cool to see that the Vosk open source speech recognition software by twitter.com/alphacep now has a convenient command line interface called vosk-transcriber!It allows you to just:
vosk-transcriber -m ~/var/lib/vosk/vosk-model-en-us-0.22 -i in.ogg -o out.srt -t srtto extract a subtitle file out.srt from a .ogg audio input file.Accuracy is a bit meh, but we'll take it! - video.stackexchange.com/questions/33531/how-to-remove-background-from-video-without-green-screen-on-the-command-line/37392#37392 tested this AI video background remover github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover by @nadermx. It had a few glitches, but I had fun.
unix.stackexchange.com/questions/233832/merge-two-video-clips-into-one-placing-them-next-to-each-other/774936#774936 I then learned how to stack videos side-by-side with ffmpeg to create this side-by-side demo. It also works for GIFs! stackoverflow.com/questions/30927367/imagemagick-making-2-gifs-into-side-by-side-gifs-using-im-convert/78361093#78361093
Posted at: - Just found out that my Lenovo ThinkPad P14s has an infrared camera, and recorded a quick test video on Ubuntu 23.10 with:
fmpeg -y -f v4l2 -framerate 30 -video_size 640x360 -input_format gray -i /dev/video2 -c copy out.mkv- mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/112261675634568209
- twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1778981935257116767
- www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/posts/pfbid027M3n2p8snE9otAWdHtJ3ig2AhrXoDGv4h68o1z8agHceQBbFHZpEoxg7KZbiWAgWl
- www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7184755892410576897/
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1ZeR6pmf6o
- commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Infrared_video_of_Ciro_Santilli_waving_recorded_on_Lenovo_ThinkPad_P14s_with_FFmpeg_6.0_on_Ubuntu_23.10.webm
