The h Bar

12:01 AM

The only problem I see is that you place your books on the floor!

Well they'd be on a bookshelf if I had fewer books!

Really that one was not the only one on the floor, but a special case. It was sitting under a book some Amazon seller sent me instead of the one I ordered. I'm not entirely sure it isn't a political propaganda book

ACuriousMind

The Quark and the Jaguar is a propaganda book!? ;)

danielunderwood

Quarks and jaguars are both hot political topics!

I got a thing from my university's library about donating with "Inflation on our online resources like journals and databases averages over $500,000 per year."...that's kind of sad

David Z

Package Thief vs. Glitter Bomb Trap

►

danielunderwood

The dart board that moves to get a bullseye though!

How do they have so many people stealing their packages?! Clearly the solution is not to live in suburbs

ACuriousMind

12:22 AM

@danielunderwood I'm more amazed at the single thief just talking out loud. Ever heard of internal monologue??

danielunderwood

lol that part got me too

David Z

@danielunderwood I grew up in suburbs and we never had this problem... so maybe just don't live in those suburbs

danielunderwood

I'd imagine you also didn't grow up during the Amazon age! I don't know how it was elsewhere, but I remember packages being fairly rare when I was growing up

ACuriousMind

My mother still remembers a package stiolen from her 40 years ago, which is why she's always very paranoid when she sends me stuff.

Apparently her aunt hated my mother for not thanking her for a package my mother never received :P

David Z

@danielunderwood Well it's true that Amazon wasn't a thing at the time, but it wasn't rare to get things delivered

enumaris

12:39 AM

I've only lived in suburbs

never had a package stolen

danielunderwood

Ahh interesting

I've never lived in the suburbs. Also never had a package stolen

One of my girlfriends was from a suburb. It was like a foreign world to me

enumaris

SAP dude called a bit late...but it sounds like the role he has in mind for me would be a leadership kind of role so that's cool

how many girlfriends you got bro?

2

only supposed to have one at a time...

ACuriousMind

12:54 AM

@enumaris it's all negotiable

enumaris

hmmm

ACuriousMind

(although I think the past tense indicates that that this was one in a (temporal) sequence of girlfriends, not an unordered set)

enumaris

but then you would think it would be "ex-girlfriend"

I read the past tense that the girlfriend "was" from somewhere and is now no longer from that somewhere mmmhm

ACuriousMind

@enumaris How do you cease to be from a place? Reincarnation?!

enumaris

maybe, I don't presume

Semiclassical

1:00 AM

@ACuriousMind sounds like what'd happen to some unfortunate comrade in the USSR

danielunderwood

Well I suppose it also depends on how you define "from"

ACuriousMind

I don't think any branch of Soviet communism believes in reincarnation

It's more something that'd happen to the Dalai Lama

Semiclassical

metaphysically, no. bureaucratically...maybe

Secret

1:26 AM

Last night dream I have read like the longest dissertation on what is nowhere ever from Episode 2 of some nonexistent spy movie beginning. Inside the dream I tried to copy paste that text into word to read it later but I only managed to get down one paragraph. Then later scenes in the dream caused me to forgot nearly what I have read completely other than "research nowhere have been going on for ages, a term given to an as yet unidentified place"

Reading about Hinduism and Buddhism cosmology sure helps to get the dream to generate scenes on exploring these concepts

and if what is said by these two religion is true about mystical experience and dreams, soon enough those more mystical dream will be accessible and I will be able to learn more about these ineffable concepts

The Pointer

Hello all. I was wondering if anyone could help me with a question I had about information theory and physics: What, if any, parts of physics has information theory proved fruitful in expanding/clarifying our understanding? Please briefly explain why.

Secret

Probably the most important thing about information theory is it clarify the relationship between entropy and work in systems where temperature does not quite make sense

Also, black hole thermodynamics

The Pointer

Interesting, thanks for that. Would the holographic principle and related matters, such as the black hole information paradox, be another?

Secret

That I don't have enough understanding to give a valid answer

The Pointer

Ok, thanks for the info.

DanielSank

1:42 AM

For one glorious moment, I was wearing two hats at once.

I don't know how it happened.

ACuriousMind

The answer is probably caching

dmckee

2:20 AM

@enumaris Well, there is boost::qvm. ::ducks and runs for cover::

danielunderwood

The answer is also boost to many "Is there a library for this?" questions

dmckee

@danielunderwood But boost::qvm is a special kind of horror (I should know, we're using it on a project right now).

The author is some kind of template diety, so it has many extra-spiffy features ( Swizzling! Yeah!) all described in terms that no one but template gods know.

[[ What the (*)&^ is SFINE and why do I care? ]]

It's a all-header implementation (so no trouble building or linking before you start), but there are more than a dozen headers.

And to call the documentation "terse" is to damn it with faint praise.

danielunderwood

Ahh I haven't used that one

But you make it sound so appealing

dmckee

In other "C++ nightmares" new, I'm mulling over the pros and cons of using std::tuple in that one place where it would be awkward to code a decent solution without it.

But it seems so very clunky.

Anyone have actual experience?

David Z

2:50 AM

That's some fancy-schmancy C++11 weirdness isn't it :P

danielunderwood

Can't say I've ever used tuples in C++, but the times in python it has usually come out to be cleaner using a dict or class except for an occasional 2 or 3-item tuple

Though people don't really throw maps around in C++ like they do dicts in python

David Z

Yeah I don't think C++ tuples are nearly as clean as Python tuples, and same for maps vs. dicts

danielunderwood

My uses have all been stuff like (result, error) or (features, targets) and such that would map neatly to a class or dict though. I suppose there may be some that don't

Clearly the solution is boost::python!

David Z

3:30 AM

aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

dmckee

3:44 AM

@danielunderwood Python tuples are elegant and beautiful where they make sense, but std::tuples clutter up the screen.

Worse the use in this case would be map<string, 3-tuple> or set<4-tuple> or something roughly equivalent making the sprawling-types-and-angle-thingies bit even worse.

I agree that small multiplicity returns are one of the most appealing use cases for tuples.

Anonymous

So...is the blue hat the most popular one this year? :P Everyone's wearing it!

Anonymous

I must admit it looks better than most other hats...including the...umm...toilet-paper hat

dmckee

4:18 AM

At this point I have very few hats to choose from, and the other one I like (the Admiral Hopper hat AKA Identification Division this year) is what I wore most of last Holiday season.

Anonymous

@dmckee Oops, you've only 3 hats. There are a few easy-to-get hats, like the red sunglass (get it by upvoting any >1 year old post) and the team-player-hat (get it by simply visting the SO teams page)

Slereah

7:57 AM

I've used tuples

They're alright

Beats having to declare arrays

Like you don't want to define an array of two elements

Slereah

9:17 AM

Guess who just bought Lee's Manifolds and differential geometry B)

Sid

9:27 AM

@Blue be positive. Surely, Stack Exchange can't become as bad as Quora

Slereah

or Yahoo Answers

Anonymous

@Sid Stack Exchange is only great because of the number of subject experts they have. Remove that, and you're left with a corpse of a website full of...well... average people.

Anonymous

Quora started out great...just like SE. Didn't take long to go downhill - after they relaxed the quality control.

Anonymous

9:43 AM

People like Senia Sheydvasser, Alon Amit, etc. still write great quality technical answers there, but those get eclipsed by all the other b.s.

John Rennie

Wow it's stormy in Chester this morning. Strong winds and driving rain. Lovely.

Sid

@JohnRennie it's wet, dark and stormy in my hometown. Horrible weather. I still can't get out of the house

@Blue that's because of the Quality control.

John Rennie

@Sid it's also freezing cold in the UK :-)

Sid

Quora doesn't have Quality control

Anonymous

@Sid Well, that's precisely my point...

Sid

9:47 AM

Yes, I see

ayc

@JohnRennie I have an explanation or perhaps just a very good,funny thought related to determinism .I need your opinions on it...You free?

John Rennie

Yes, I'm free

ayc

@JohnRennie Its gonna take a little bit time to write up..just wait for a while

John Rennie

OK ...

@Blue while here we get bitched at for being elitist when we close and/or delete rubbish

Slereah

@Blue the plebs

just put Motl in charge, says I

Anonymous

9:55 AM

@JohnRennie I'm gradually learning to turn a deaf ear to those :P

Anonymous

@Slereah Yeeesh, I'm stealing that word ;)

Slereah

@Blue I mean, the ancient greeks used it before me

It's not really mine to steal

romans

The greeks had the hoi poloi

John Rennie

@Slereah synonyms include "the great unwashed" :-)

Anonymous

@Slereah Man, that's a good idea actually. Motl's insults are classic :P

Anonymous

He alone could drive away all the cranks

Slereah

10:03 AM

I mean, not just the cranks

Anonymous

Sed that he doesn't visit the site much anymore

Slereah

But certainly them yes

ayc

@JohnRennie We can predict the orbits of planets and understand how the stars and other macroscopic objects behave.We definitely can't predict the motion of Sub atomic particles because uncertainity principle puts limits on us.It is we who can't predict their behaviour.We know that universe is governed by a set of laws.Even if we can never find them out we have to accept the fact that there are certain laws which explain universe fundamentally.
If universe works on certain laws then it is logical to accept that whatever that’s gonna happen the very next moment is also determined by those l…

John Rennie

I think you're talking about a philosophy called eternalism:

Eternalism (philosophy of time)

Eternalism is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all existence in time is equally real, as opposed to presentism or the growing block universe theory of time, in which at least the future is not the same as any other time. Some forms of eternalism give time a similar ontology to that of space, as a dimension, with different times being as real as different places, and future events are "already there" in the same sense other places are already there, and that there is no objective flow of time. It is sometimes referred to as the "block time" or...

I suspect a lot of physicists are closet eternalists ...

Slereah

you can tell by if they use Hamiltonian GR or not

John Rennie

10:10 AM

Doesn't Hamiltonian quantum GR make time disappear completely?

As in the time evolution of all quantum states is zero.

ayc

@JohnRennie My concept seems so correct to me that it forces me to question you:Why do you even live,even if you kill yourself it doesn't matter.I know that anyone who had similar thoughts and chose to live had given himself a reason.What is the reason you had given or would give?

Slereah

@JohnRennie it's not very weird

Because it's not like a real hamiltonian

It's one of those phony balony constraint hamiltonian

Because of the bloody diffeomorphism invariance

Anonymous

> Why do you even live,even if you kill yourself it doesn't matter?

John Rennie

@Blue cos it's fun? :-)

Anonymous

Well...ummm...killing myself is gonna hurt....and if I am to die anyway, might as well live to see what the humans are upto

Anonymous

10:14 AM

More like curiosity

John Rennie

(well, as long as there are laptops and excessively big meals it's fun)

Anonymous

Yeah, and human food is fun :D

Anonymous

In short: yes, we live because it's fun to live

Anonymous

Also, no matter how knowledgeable you become there's always an uncertainty about what happens after I die?

ayc

@JohnRennie Fun is: I would say a mental satisfaction.We can assume that your body undergoes chemical reactions and the effect of them is so called fun.If you agree then you should agree that there's no difference between fun and manually making those reactions happen:lets say by using some other drugs or some thing.....You get my point?

Slereah

10:16 AM

I died once

It was alright

Anonymous

Is it like eternal sleep or will it be like - I'll still get to eat tasty food in heaven (or awful food in hell) :P

ayc

@Slereah I know,it was on times of india

Slereah

@Blue More paperwork than expected

ayc

@Blue Death is just that your biological system stops functioning.I heard this in kurzgesagt video

John Rennie

@ayc yes. It's a common theme in science fiction. For example if you could program a computer with a perfect simulation of you why not just die and live on as the simulation?

But I support computers (servers) for a living and no way am I entrusting my future to a computer :-)

Anonymous

10:19 AM

@ayc Yeah, everyone knows that. But the real question is - how does it feel like? Just like sleep? :P

ayc

@Blue Lol,there's no feeling

Anonymous

The most probable answer to the second question is yes - but that's pretty boring

Anonymous

So by extension the average human lifestyle is better than boring sleep

ayc

@Blue Boring?..It like john rennies computer only..theres no differnece

John Rennie

@Blue you get an unpleasant smell after a few days ...

ayc

10:23 AM

@JohnRennie you will get an unpleasant smell if he dies!

John Rennie

Also an irresistible urge to eat brains

Anonymous

> If you agree then you should agree that there's no difference between fun and manually making those reactions happen:lets say by using some other drugs or some thing.....You get my point?

Anonymous

Sure. But it's difficult to replicate that fun using drugs. Medical science hasn't advanced that far yet

ayc

@Blue C'mon its just an assumption.Then john rennies computer is also not that advanced..it was just an assumption to question the purpose of existence

Anonymous

I sometimes watch euthanization videos in my spare time. Helps to appreciate life a bit more

Anonymous

10:27 AM

@ayc I said: the answer is yes

Anonymous

There's no difference if you manage to replicate that feeling of joy completely using drugs

John Rennie

I use a drug called butter chicken and it makes me feel great.

It's also very addictive :-)

ayc

@JohnRennie C'mon..I use chicken kebab,chicken pakodi,cheicken fry,paneer,cholae,mutton biryani,chicken biryani,dum biryani,and a lot more

John Rennie

I do like lamb biryani. Mutton can be a bit fatty.

ayc

@JohnRennie I eat everyhitn but maintain proper weight through exercise.I dont want my BIOLOGICAL SYSTEM to get unhelathy and wear out before atleast I'm 70's

Anonymous

10:33 AM

@ayc That reminds me - death isn't as scary as the suffering some people have to go through before death (over time I've even come to the conclusion that assisted suicide is the right way to go in many such cases). Health is extremely underappreciated.

Anonymous

So, yes, keep your BIOLOGICAL SYSTEM healthy!

Anonymous

And that's a reminder for me to do exercise more regularly.....I've become a COUCH POTATO.

ayc

@JohnRennie @Blue Why maintain health when its useless?...I would give same reasons as you did and also that I'm still in High school and haven't done a lot of stuff..I have been living for only about 17 years.I havent yet studied Q.mech,relativity also...I dont have a girl friend also,yet..:(

Anonymous

@ayc "Why maintain health when its useless?" - because it's gonna hurt real bad otherwise :P

Anonymous

In the grand scheme of things your existence doesn't matter. But it should matter to you - because when you lose a body part it's gonna be painful.

ayc

10:38 AM

@Blue Thats a wonderful point.I have heard Neil degrasse tyson say something similar ina video,I dont know if its real.....If I hadnt watched that maybe I would have been "late me"

The Most Astounding Fact - Neil deGrasse Tyson

►

"We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us."..Neil degrasse tyson

Slereah

No it ain't

you crazy man

ayc

@Slereah what are you referring to ?

Slereah

@ayc this

It's the kind of dumb statements that get the wrong people interested in science

ayc

@Slereah You should say that tyson was carzy if you think that statement is crazy..But,I dont think so

Slereah

He's not crazy

He just has to sell science

Anonymous

10:45 AM

Well, Tyson is more of a publicist....a science-communicator

Anonymous

Not a scientist

Slereah

I mean someone has to

the grant money doesn't come like that

ayc

@Blue Of course..I dont disgaree...but I love that statement

Anonymous

@ayc If it is meaningful to you, of course :)

ayc

@Blue Isn't it for you?

Slereah

10:46 AM

it's nice to get people interested in science but when people start being interested in the hardest part of science first it's usually a recipe for stupid questions

John Rennie

@ayc in physics you consider a mathematical model. Then in the context of that model a statement is either true or false. Statements like the universe is in us are just meaningless.

Anonymous

@ayc It's a beautiful statement, yes but I've grown out of the pop-science phase now

Slereah

As someone once said

"Yes we're all made of star stuff but so is garbage"

Anonymous

However, indeed, people like Hawking did play a role in me becoming interested in science

Anonymous

I spent a large portion of my childhood reading pop-science

ayc

10:49 AM

@Blue This argument about existenc started becoz of hawking only....I read "a brief history of time" first chapter

Anonymous

In a literary sense it's definitely a beautiful statement but as far as technicalities go - not that much. It isn't something that would interest a professional physicist

ayc

@JohnRennie I just assumed that the statement is something like this:like the river I was talking about.....Its just that we are matter, universe is made up of matter..so basically we are the universe

Slereah

Garbage is also made of matter

I'm not sure that's a transitive property

ayc

@Slereah I'm not sure if it is,,,,,,But it sounded really good when I first heard it!

Slereah

Let's just say science is a whole lot more linear algebra than beautiful sentences

Anonymous

10:53 AM

Being a good science-communicator is difficult though. You gotta come up with literary pieces like these every now and then, to get the noobs interested (tbf, I was once a noob too).

Anonymous

People have a natural attraction towards literary beauty - but takes some maturity to see beauty in technical rubbish. If the former leads to the latter...nothing better than that!

ayc

@Blue Oh yeah...But I got interested in science in class 11 only..not because I listened to Tyson but becoz:Its a very good,funny reason..you wouldn't like it I guess..If you want to know ping me(many people rated me stupid,so I dont feel like sharing usually)

Anonymous

Sharing things which affect you at a personal level is difficult indeed. Others might not take it as seriously.

Anonymous

You can share with me, but I obviously can't say for sure I'll like it - there's always that. But won't be judging you (or even if I do, I won't say it to you). ;)

Anonymous

May 9 at 16:39, by Anonymous

Is it weird that I'm listening to Taylor Swift songs to keep myself awake before exams ?

Anonymous

11:01 AM

I've had personal instances like that ^.

Slereah

ayc

@Blue Great!..When I started studying physics ,math..everything.they were difficult.I got vexed and I stopped studying.I wnated to know why those stuff are so important.I wanted to explain gravity on my own without using any existing concepts.I got literally vexed.it was very difficult.I then accidentally looked at F=ma and netwons law of gravitaion.and they now seemed very amazing to me.I understood their importance andfound the beauty of those two equations.I then got interested like hell

@Blue I know ...very strange way

Anonymous

Nice. Now it's time to move on and ahead. :)

ayc

@Blue hmmmm

Anonymous

I gotta leave now. See you around!

Slereah

11:08 AM

later

ayc

@Blue Cu later

@Slereah you wanna say something?

Slereah

On what topic

ayc

@Slereah Nothing I mis understood "later"

@Slereah see you later......bye....Ihave to go too,,,,,,,BYE!

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue

How much difference is there in ee and cs

Wait I'll have this discussion in 6 months from now

Or luckily I won't have to

Akash. B

11:30 AM

@AvnishKabaj whoa! is that a hat ?

Anonymous

@AvnishKabaj Lot of difference

Anonymous

If you want CS go for CS, not EE

Anonymous

Otherwise you'll unnecessarily have to waste time on electrical machines, transistors and stuff

Anonymous

But if you like those, then of course....you should choose carefully

Anonymous

In hindsight, I think CS would have been better for me

Akash. B

11:41 AM

what CS and EE?

Slereah

Computer science and electrical engineering

Avnish Kabaj

@Akash.B yes

Akash. B

@AvnishKabaj its too big

Avnish Kabaj

@Blue EE can't sub in for cs

I see thanks

@Akash.B :D

Slereah

Don't do either

Do PHYSICS

Avnish Kabaj

11:43 AM

Okay

Yes sir

Research scope in India is = 0

Akash. B

@AvnishKabaj I don't think so

Slereah

12:32 PM

arxiv.org/pdf/0706.1572.pdf

neat

Pretty recent paper

Branching spacetime is utter nonsense but it's a pretty fun model rly

Slereah

12:48 PM

"Combinatorial funny business can be characterized as absence of prima facie consistent scenarios, while explanatory funny business characterizes situations in which no localized explanation of inconsistency can be given."

Sir Cumference

1:31 PM

2

Q: How did Biden become VP? (naming of 2012 VP113)

The Carnegie Science article Solar System's Edge Redefined describes the discovery of the object 2012 VP113. Wikipedia's article 2012 VP113 says: Nickname: 2012 VP113 was abbreviated "VP" and nicknamed "Biden" by the discovery team, after Joe Biden, who at the time of discovery, was Vic...

Heh, the way it was written I thought it was off topic

Slereah

2:02 PM

"I do not balk at giving up the notion, held sacred until now, that space-time is a Hausdorff manifold. But I do balk at trying to invent a causal mechanism by which a measurement of the spin of an electron causes a global bifurcation of space-time,”

my sides

Secret

2:32 PM

"And I do balk even more a spacetime where its topology changes in a probabilistic fashion"

Think of a spacetime which is like a liquid where at no points its local metric is static

Slereah

2:51 PM

"In the original formulation of BST, it was stated that (continuous) splitting along a simultaneity slice was conceptually possible, but "appears weird"."

Secret

So you mean it branches indefinitely along the simultaneity slice?

enumaris

4:36 PM

whompwhomp

danielunderwood

4:49 PM

Wooo Tuesday

enumaris

wooo

danielunderwood

this Tuesday feels like a Monday

enumaris

yeah kinda

is there a subroutine in C++ like in Fortran

or just functions

danielunderwood

I don't really know what a subroutine is. I always equate them to functions, but I don't know how valid that is

enumaris

in Fortran a function can not modify its arguments and will return a value

a subroutine can modify its arguments

danielunderwood

4:53 PM

Ahh

have a seat

Anonymous

7

A: What is the difference between a function and a subroutine?

I disagree. If you pass a parameter by reference to a function, you would be able to modify that value outside the scope of the function. Furthermore, functions do not have to return a value. Consider void some_func() in C. So the premises in the OP are invalid. In my mind, the difference betwee...

danielunderwood

There's a time in every man's life when it's time to learn about pointers

enumaris

lol

at least that was my understanding when I was coding in Fortran

Anonymous

Pointers are evil things...

Anonymous

(Or at least the interview questions on them are :P)

enumaris

4:56 PM

the asker's perspective is the one I know from Fortran

I don't plan on ever getting back into Fortran so it really doesn't matter lol

danielunderwood

Pointers are evil if you make them evil. Kind of like templates and such

enumaris

but I was just wondering if C++ can do something like a subroutine where you modify multiple things in a sub-block of code

cus sometimes that's important

danielunderwood

Well you can pass in a pointer/reference to a function and modify the underlying memory

enumaris

when I was doing my PhD I had to turn a function into a subroutine cus I needed it to do multiple things once I added the effect I wanted

@danielunderwood ah

so I can pass a pointer to an array for example and modify that array within a function?

is this how I get segfaults?

danielunderwood

Well that particular example is a bit different. You can, but C-style arrays are pointers anyway

Segfaults do come from pointers in one way or another generally

enumaris

5:00 PM

fun beans

danielunderwood

A segfault is really accessing memory that the OS says isn't yours, but that often comes from trying to access something that isn't allocated or outside the bounds of an array

enumaris

oh

so if I do int x[5]; x[7]=9; I should get a segfault?

danielunderwood

I believe so

enumaris

hmmm

I think...iirc that in Fortran I would get a compile error..but I'm hazy on this...

something like array out of bounds compile error...

meh, I wouldn't mind if I just forgot all of Fortran lol

danielunderwood

Actually it looks like it gets a SIGABRT on my machine, which isn't quite what I expected

enumaris

5:04 PM

dunno what that is

danielunderwood

There was a warning about it, but who reads those? warning: array index 7 is past the end of the array (which contains 5 elements) [-Warray-bounds]

enumaris

hmmm

danielunderwood

A std::array didn't warn or error

Apparently it is supposed to throw an exception. Maybe I've gotten really rusty

enumaris

o.o

what do you code in now?

danielunderwood

Mostly python

I've only used C/C++ recently for microcontrollers and what you do there is a bit constrained

enumaris

5:12 PM

I see

danielunderwood

Actually I also did C++ for the algorithms course I went through, but that was somewhat constrained as well

enumaris

dafuq is a bz2 file

hmmm...

I forgot what I was doing with this training set lol

danielunderwood

It's like gz, but bz

I think it's some sort of compression format

enumaris

wondering how I load it into python

I forgot

I can open it on a text editor

but I get a bunch of hex

lol

danielunderwood

You can unzip it then read in that or directly load it with something in docs.python.org/2/library/bz2.html

enumaris

5:19 PM

I already unzipped

after unzip it's still a bz2 type file

danielunderwood

Well that's an interesting way of doing things

enumaris

lol

the bz2 file inside windows doesn't think is a zip

it's also named test.ft.txt

hmmm

danielunderwood

Ahh I don't know if windows has anything built-in for bz if you don't have 7zip or something available. Just read the whole thing in python and either use it or save it back. Something like stackoverflow.com/a/16963578/2383721 may help you

enumaris

neither read_csv nor read_pickle work from pandas directly

danielunderwood

Or pandas may have something built-in

enumaris

5:22 PM

I feel like

I probably accessed this data before...

but I just forgot how...

danielunderwood

You may be able to zipfile = bz2.BZ2File(filepath) to get it into a buffer then df = pandas.read_csv(zipfile)

(if it has csv data internally)

Or you can do a print(zipfile.readline()) probably

John Rennie

@enumaris in C and C++ int x[5]; x[7]=9; will probably not cause any error.

It will just silently overwrite some bit of your apps memory space that you didn't want it to.

For example:

int x[5];
int y[5];
x[7]=9;

will probably set y[1] to 9

That is the compiler will allocate the storage for x and y contiguously on the stack, so writing past the end of x will write into the area used by y.

Welcome to the wonderful world of C(++).

enumaris

Sounds like a horrible bug to look for lol

@danielunderwood ah that reminded me lol, I just used the bz2 module previously

yep...works...

I need to find the origin of this data set so I understand what the labels are though...that'd be good...

nvm, looking at 10 sample data points I get what the format is lol

danielunderwood

5:39 PM

@JohnRennie Ahh right! I forgot that a static array would allocate on the stack

John Rennie

Look at this :-)

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
  int x[4], y[4], i;

  for (i = 0; i < 4; i++)
    x[i] = y[i] = i;

  x[5] = 666;
  y[5] = 666;

  for (i = 0; i < 4; i++)
    printf("x[%i] = %i\n", i, x[i]);

  for (i = 0; i < 4; i++)
    printf("y[%i] = %i\n", i, y[i]);

  return 0;
}

Prints:

x[0] = 0
x[1] = 666
x[2] = 2
x[3] = 3
y[0] = 0
y[1] = 1
y[2] = 2
y[3] = 3

enumaris

yuck

John Rennie

:-)

But then bound checking arrays costs cycles, and C assumes the developer knows what they are doing.

enumaris

I assume the arguments inside main() are for arguments from console?

does it ask for you to type in stuff?

or it's one of those, if you run a program with arguments kinda deals?

You sure have a fancy hat btw

John Rennie

@enumaris yes; for (i = 0; i < argc; i++) printf("%s\n", argv[i]) prints the executable name and all the arguments

enumaris

5:48 PM

Ah

so argc is number of arguments and argv contains the arguments

dang it, downloaded imdb data set but it's a .tar.gz which windows doesn't see as a zip file...

John Rennie

Use gzip

Then tar

enumaris

I can't install stuff

John Rennie

Or just use WinZip or 7-zip as they will handle gzip and tar archives

enumaris

none of those are installed

as far as I can tell

I'm gonna try downloading a .zip from kaggle instead

John Rennie

There is a command line version of 7-zip that needs no installation.

How big is the file? If it's not too big I can convert it to regular zip for you.

enumaris

5:53 PM

I got the zip, it should be all good :D

if it actually ever finishes downloading...stuck at 114/114mb atm...

hmmm

extracting freezes the extractor lol

not good

maybe the computing gods just don't want me to use the imdb dataset lol

John Rennie

My offer is still open :-)

enumaris

it's 116mb, I wouldn't know how to get it to you unfortunately

looks like I just won't be using this dataset lol

thanks for the offer though! :D

I'm guessing it's some security software that's not allowing this

I got 3 other datasets so no big deal

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