xioxox

It also has crazy things like taxation on energy produced by your solar panels that you use yourself.

I believe there is a tax free threshold of 801€ for singles and 1602€ for couples, however.

I'm pretty sure in the UK and Germany that you can't claim tax relief on mortgage interest of your own home.

Uh, Munich has incredibly expensive house prices. It's over 1M Euros to buy for anything of a reasonable size. Developer salaries are around 65k. You can get a little cheaper by going to a neighbouring towns, but the stupidly high prices continue for many km. The main problem is the very low interest rates leading to crazy inflation.

Rents are a bit better, but compared to developer salaries it's much more expensive than the US. It's also extremely hard to find places to rent, and landlords are very picky about who they will let to.

However, there are many areas of the world where you can't grow human-edible food on the land currently being used to grow grass for feeding livestock. Of course this is not true everywhere, but a lot of area, e.g. in the UK, could only be used for grazing cows or sheep, if not left for nature.

As a comparison, I have to program in Fortran in my day job, and I really hate it. On the negative side, text handling is really horrible (even with the new variable length strings), there are very few good libraries outside of numerics, a lack of type-safe generic data structures (like C++'s STL), buggy compilers (my code has some horrific pointer hopping to work around gfortan's bugs), the C-Fortran interface is horrible to use and there's little good documentation on the language. The positive things are the multidimensional arrays and slicing, and the modules.

It can work ok if you're a single person with no children. However, you'll potentially have to pay a lot more tax if you're married where your spouse earns more or less than you. There several other reasons where legally you'll have to complete a tax return (e.g foreign income).

German taxes are really horrible, in general. They expect you to pay in advance for expected untaxed income (based on the previous year's return). Working out the taxes on the income from some ETF is a nightmare, unless your platform does it for you. Unless you really understand the system and can file your own taxes, then low-wage freelance work just doesn't make sense as the cost of doing the taxes can be higher than your income. This means people are trapped into not working.

Here's a solution which is vectorizable: http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/fast-vectorizable-math-approx/

I've also read that Chebyshev polynomials are far better for approximating functions than Taylor series (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximation_theory)

It certainly looks like they're trying to flatten cities and kill civilians: https://twitter.com/Polk_Azov/status/1506585227069689861 - it's certainly not targeted on the military

I'll be interested in this remake when it's done. I don't know what it is about Colossal Cave, but the descriptions of the caves were pure magic to me when I played this many years ago. Perhaps it comes from the real experience caving of the authors. I also loved the Magnetic Scrolls games from the end of the 80s, like Jinxter - they had some great humour (but difficult puzzles).

The GUI designer is called Qt designer - it's called designer in Ubuntu/Debian. Unfortunately Debian has really made a mess of their packaging of Qt/PyQt. They've split up everything into tiny packages and their naming scheme seems crazy - I can never work out which package to install to get what I want. In this case it's qttools5-dev-tools.

I use fork a lot in my Python science programs. It's really great - you can stick it in a loop and get immediate parallelism. It's much better than multiprocessing, etc, as you keep the state from just before the fork happened, so you can share huge data structures between the processes, without having to process the same data again or duplicate them. I've even written a module for processing things in forked processes: https://pypi.org/project/forkqueue/

I would check the model. An MFC-L2750DW printed for me from Ubuntu without installing anything.

The data from the mission will be made public after proprietary periods [1]. They have an archive [2]. I don't expect that the raw telemetry will be made available, but the raw science data in FITS format appears will be available.

[1] https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-opportunities-and-policies/... [2] https://archive.stsci.edu/missions-and-data/jwst

I remember scirate is pretty old - the domain was registered in 2007. Given the low number of comments now, and with those are concentrated into a narrow part of arXiv, it's unlikely to take off generally.

Is it just me, or are most of the results in that paper rather obvious and not very useful in general, outside of social media posts. In Facebook posts, it's not surprising that men talk more about computer games and sport, and swear more. Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious.

If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well.

Interestingly, some of the in-person debit card payments I make from my German bank appear to work internally as direct debits. They appear as "SEPA-ELV-LASTSCHRIFT" on statement. Other card payments are just called "KARTENZAHLUNG". Interestingly, the Lastschrift (direct debit) payments seem reversible on my bank interface, so I could get the money back (presumably invoking letters from the company and debt collectors).

Yes, I remember using Linux installed onto an MSDOS partition using UMSDOS. It was pretty nice to be able to run Linux without repartitioning.

In the UK, the big supermarket Tesco were criticised heavily for how they charged their suppliers for various things: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/mar/30/tesco-reduc...

You can also use lftp to transfer a directory tree using the sftp protocol:

  $ lftp sftp://hostname
  lftp ~> cd somedir
  lftp ~> mirror .
  lftp ~> quit

Yes, but I think it's a mock-up and not a real Buran. It was mostly empty inside (and dark!). They showed us the hanger which partially collapsed and damaged the Buran inside, as we were being driven along.

Kazakhstan is an interesting place. The huge open landscapes are completely different to what I've experienced in Europe. There are seemingly endless rail tracks and telegraph poles.

I've been to Baikonur to see a proton rocket launch from there, which is not typical Kazakhstan, but a little bit of Russia in the middle of Kazakhstan. Unfortunately the launch was delayed, but I did get to see the rocket itself.

I put some photos here (https://photos.app.goo.gl/W8tkAdjkeZsP3Sqh6), but this includes some of the Energia control centre and a space museum. I do have some better photos on my camera, but I still need to process them...

As a scientist, it depends on what you mean by wrong. It's nice to push an array of numbers through some array operation. If some of the outputs look like NaN or Inf then that tells me something went wrong in the operation and to take a closer look. If some optimizer was told that NaN or Inf couldn't happen, meaning that they wouldn't be generated, then some of this output could be pure nonsense and I wouldn't notice. As NaNs propagate through the calculation they're extremely helpful to indicate something went wrong somewhere in the call chain.

NaN is also very useful itself as a data missing value in an array. If you have some regularly sampled data, with some items missing, it makes a lot of things easier to populate the holes with values which guarantee they won't produce misleading output.

The cylinder approach (actually paraboloid-hyperboloid or Wolter-I optics) is the main design used today and for future telescopes for lower energy X-rays. Focusing optics have a big advantage of having a lower level of background compared to a coded mask. Future Wolter-I optics use clever designs for the telescope, such as stacking silicon wafers into modules planned for the ESA Athena observatory [1] or modular lightweight single crystal silicon mirrors planned for future NASA missions [2].

[1] https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2019/02/Athena_mir...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-new-lightwe...

One of the interesting things about the telescope on Integral [1] is that it uses a coded aperture mask [2] to image the sky in high energy X-rays to gamma rays, rather than a focusing optic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTEGRAL [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_aperture

I was wondering how quick an emulated 6502 could go. This project claims 10GHz+ using JIT emulation: https://github.com/scarybeasts/beebjit

You can already disable the linux memory overcommit feature if you want linux to never allow more memory to be allocated than exists. However, you may run into problems with programs which rely on the ability to allocate more memory than they need, or if you computer has low amounts of memory.

BepiColombo has an X-ray telescope on board which will measure the X-ray colours of the planet from X-ray fluorescence. This will be interesting, as it will enable the composition of the surface to be measured down to 10 km scales [1].

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00750-2

Interesting. I thought about writing a Matplotlib version of my Veusz GUI plotting package [1], but at the time Matplotlib was far too slow.

Veusz is quite nice in that the Python-based widget-based plotting library is the backend to the GUI. The saved documents are essentially the Python API calls used to recreate the plot. The plotting library holds the document as a tree of plotting widgets (e.g. axis, graph, function plot...) with a set of properties.

[1] https://veusz.github.io/

KDE works pretty well for me. The defaults are not bad, but it has lots of customization options. I mostly leave it on defaults, except for switching on focus follows mouse. You don't need to manually edit config files. It also has some nice (optional) animations. It's like a nicer Windows, with more customization and a more uniform UI (no mixture of historical UI elements).