jbssm

It'a quite clear after you understand semi-advanced physics that nothing could exist before the universe started.

Now, you could contest the Big Bang, but from the moment you assume it happened then I don't see nothing absurd in the sentence: "First, when the universe began there was no God"

Because unlike you put it, this is NOT an assumption. If the Universe did had a beginning (and all measurement indicate it did) then this (nothing existed before, not even God) follows directly from the laws of physics.

In fact Dawkins greatest problem when trying to explain people this, is exactly the one I feel when trying to explain other parts to believers. They are ignorant about certain parts of science that make what they are saying impossible, and since it's fairly advanced science, they just refuse to believe it and trying to understand it.

I would welcome to discuss religion with another person from my area (astrophysics) but I've never met an astrophysicist that was religious... I guess because it would be really hard to mix both things.

I know very little about FreeBDS and bhyve. But, is it possible to pass direct access to the GPU to the virtual machine this way?

That way it would be possible to play the games in Windows or to use CUDA in a Linux guest inside bhyve.

I fail to see how a desktop UI based on HTML5 can be marketed as "light".

Does PyPy work with Python 3?

Python 3 has been out for 7 years and I refuse to use anything that doesn't work in Python 3, it's just ridiculous to keep building stuff for Python 2, it's hindering the language and keeping it back in the past.

People turned away from Explorer to Firefox because Explorer became a bloated browser, full of bugs.

What did Firefox do with that market share? Created a bloated browser, full of bugs.

My thoughts exactly.

Coming from Vim I really wanted to like the idea of some fully async editor with Vim ease of navigation and Emacs power packages (org mode, async repl like iPython, etc) so I found the idea of Spacemacs awesome.

But in practice it's just too broken, after almost 2 days where I fully dedicated my time to do something as simple as showing line numbers in a consistent way, showing the Git gutter and showing the syntax checker marks in the gutter and being unable to solve the issue, I just gave up.

Mind you, this is just a small thing that should work right away (and does work right away in Vim), but seems impossible in Emacs because the packages just don't play nicely with each other. Worst, asking for help in Stackoverflow amounts to nothing, seems like the Emacs/Spacemacs just has their config and they don't want to touch it afraid to break it. The open bugs in Github for many of the troubles in Space are just mostly closed without an answer (really, for instance getting the theme colors to actually work in a terminal in OSX is a nightmare and nobody cares about it and the devs just close the bugs without solution).

Still, I'm still thinking about giving one last effort of just ditching Spacemacs and try to config Emacs from origin with evil mode and build from there, let's see.

BRIGHT SIDE: The philosophy being Spacemacs is really nice tough. I've been changing my Vim config to use a consistent approach to the <LEADER> keybindings and it's really productive and intuitive.

I just which there was some package that allowed to see the available keybindings in a small window at the bottom in Vim like you do in Spacemacs. That would be absolutely great.

Is there any good alternative library to DataFrames?

What is the difference between this and privoxy with an ad blocker?

I try to se Safari, but tab management is awful. There isn't (as far as I know and I really searched for it) any kind of session management that allows me to keep a separation between my work browsing sessions and my home/personal projects sessions.

There is very little to think about here. World GDP/World population is ever increasing. As such it should be obvious that sons have a better life than parents except in the presence of: 1- local conflict or 2- in the presence of a class that amasses of an unfair amount of resources.

We are clearly in situation no. 2 and these are exactly the periods in history where revolutions start. When the rich get so greedy they make people's quality of life decrease in a broad scale they invariably are tamed by violent uprisings.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+gdp+%2F+world+pop...

The moment, licit activities move money to illicit activities, they get targeted as illicit activities themselves.

So, yeah, money laundering needs to work both ways.

All nice and dandy in theory, clearly disproven by practice.

Heath costs and medicine costs in Europe and Canada are lower than in the USA.

Finance prediction is just a game of pure chance, a random walk.

Thing is, the game is rigged and when the big players loose, we all pay the bill.

Octave is quite slow tough.

Like I said. I was mixing Perl's and Python philosophy.

It's strange I know. I work in Python almost every day and I've never touched Perl code.

At least, I guess I'll have a silver lining at cracking my head in vectorizing everything from now on.

My bad... I sometimes mix Perl and Python philosophy.

I actually, more and more think that python is an excellent language for science.

The only issue is that, when it comes to numerical computation, there is only "one right way to do it", which goes against Python philosophy. Meaning, either you do it while using vectorial operations mostly everywhere, or it's just too slow to work.

The only real advantage I see in Julia, is that it doesn't constrain you to a specific way to think about calculations. You can think about them in a vectorial way (which is not always possible) or you can just use an iterative approach. Both work fine.

This is what I mainly expect to get from Julia, but we must admit that the inertia behind python and it's excellent libraries for numerical computation, make it hard to change to Julia.

I believe is just a question of mentality. Programers, being traditionally more closely related with the new technologies and the internet, soon saw open source projects as a way to improve their skills and promote themselves at the same time.

Artists, lagging behind in new technologies, still didn't embrace these projects as means to self promotion. But I believe this will greatly improve with time.

I don't really get the point of this article. The author claims that HTML is ready to replace TeX and then proceeds in presenting us 2 examples, and those two examples look great in TeX and awful in HTML.

Actually the break of price parity between China and Western exchanges is historically very bad news for bitcoin. It will mark China as purely speculative and will break ties with the only force that was keeping the price at the 300 USD level in the past months.

It's similar to what happened with MTGox. When the price parity was over (although there was always a ~1-2% premium on MtGox price) bitcoin crashed hard and never recovered.

This is a nice work method. But my biggest grip with it is that I use the GPU for CUDA calculations.

At least in OSX it's not possible to directly access the GPU trough a VM (in Vagrant or any other way), while in Linux it's possible with KVM.

How does it work on Windows?

Strangely my workflow is in a place where most of my graphic programs also exist on Windows (Lightroom mostly, everything else is easily changeable).

It's my terminal workflow that I can only use on a Mac/Linux. Zsh, Vim, Tmux, LateX, Python and mostly a package manager (Apt on Linux, Homebrew on the Mac). Most of which I can just configure in a new system pulling the config files from my Github repository in less than 15 minutes after a fresh install.

That's what's mainly holding me from going back to windows (and the Application update process which is still awful as I can see from my VMware installation of Windows 10... seriously, updating the various components of Visual Studio in a semi manual way is just ridiculous), is there any good alternative for the Shell in windows that doesn't involve considerable tinking?

Well, for scientists wanting to publish, GGplot it's quite unpractical. Most of the time we have to publish in B&W magazines and GGPlot simply lacks the capabilities to do so properly (por instance B&W filling patterns).

Matplotlib with some good definitions ends up providing much better results and nicer looking plots fro B&W unlike what people normally think.

Thank you both, there are very good news. I'll give it a try as soon as 0.4 is launched.

Is there any progress when it comes to the slow package loading times of Julia? That made it quite unusable as a data exploration language when I last tried it about 1 year ago, but perhaps there was progress in that regard.

I wonder if I'm entitled for a compensation. Perhaps starting a class action lawsuit against TSA would be the way to go.

I'm an astrophysicist, we don't really trust p-values. But it could be handy in some other areas.

I see, thanks. I my own code I suspect that it's the for loops I can't vectorise that are making R taking so long in some operations, so this is where this project would help.

Must give it a try then.

I don't know almost anything about Haskell (tried to learn it some years ago but never pass form the basics).

Yet from what I'm seeing we are only calling R functions from Haskell. I'm probably missing something on the explanation, but how does this speed up R?

This is really nice. Does it allow to work on multi file documents? i.e. when wiring a big document like a thesis, it's nice to have the chapters divided by different files.