From questions about peanut butter to “Why are we alive?”, my sporadic and random questions always makes my friends laugh. Can I put a comma after the quoted question (as seen in the example above)? Or is that illegal.
The American convention in quotations is (typically) to place punctuation inside quoted text. But I always run into situations where the punctuation of the quote interferes with the punctuation of the sentence. How would you punctuate this (American, non technical)?     When my friends ask, "What do you want for your birthday?", I never know how to respond.   It seems odd to place the last comma outside the quote simply because of the question mark. Is that the preferred (i.e. most often accepted) standard?
how to glob every hidden file except current and parent directory I want to glob every hidden file and directory, but not the current (.) and parent directory (..).  I am using bash.  Observe current behaviour:  $ ls -a .  ..  ...a  ...aa  ..a  ..aa  .a  .aa  .aaa  a $ echo * a $ echo .* . .. ...a ...aa ..a ..aa .a .aa .aaa   I would like .* to behave like this  $ echo .* ...a ...aa ..a ..aa .a .aa .aaa   There is the shell option dotglob  $ shopt -s dotglob   that works in a way; now I can use * to glob everything (hidden or not) but not . and ..  $ echo * ...a ...aa ..a ..aa .a .aa .aaa a   but now I can't differentiate between hidden or not. Also, .* still globs . and ..  $ echo .* . .. ...a ...aa ..a ..aa .a .aa .aaa   Is there a way to make .* not expand to . and ..? Filter the score of the questions on the homepage before loading them At the moment questions on the homepage are loaded by the top N most recent and then ones with a score of -4 or less are filtered out. This doesn't make much difference for a user who is logged in but consider anonymous users; their home page is only 15 questions in length. If someone was to edit several posts that bump to the top with a score of -4 or less then the home page looks tiny. At the moment on SFF, for example, the homepage for anonymous users only shows 9 questions:  At one point it only showed 3 questions (a few weeks back):  Can the filtering logic be changed to before the questions are loaded to appear on the homepage? Integration of elementary rational fractions $$\int{\frac{Mx+N}{x^2+px+q}}dx$$  When all the coefficients are given, it can be easily solved using substitution but I have no idea how to find a solution in a standard form.  What are the first steps? found a 1994 uncashed profit sharing retirement plan check I found an old un-cashed check dated 1994 for $487 from my Xerox Retirement plan with no expiration date. Can I still cash it? Explain $\iint \mathrm dx\,\mathrm dy = \iint r \,\mathrm \,d\alpha\,\mathrm dr$ It is changing the coordinate from one coordinate to another. There is an angle and radius on the right side. What is it? And why?  I got:  $2\,\mathrm dy\,\mathrm dx = r(\cos^2\alpha-\sin^2\alpha)\,\mathrm d\alpha \,\mathrm dr$,  where $x = r \cos(\alpha)$ and $y = r \sin(\alpha)$.  but cannot understand and get the right side. The problem emerged when trying to integrate $\displaystyle \int_0^\infty e^{\frac{-x^2}{n^2}}\,\mathrm dx$ where I tried to change the problem knowing $r^2=x^2+y^2$ but stuck to this part. What is the change in the title called and why is it so? Considering the three types of Devil Fruits that has been explained are 1. Paramecia Type - where the user can get super human abilities and change their body parts into weapons, etc. 2. Zoan type - where the use can turn into a particular animal and inherit its abilities 3. Logia Type - where the user's body inherits a particular element and the body becomes like air which cannot be touched or damaged by non Haki users.  So what exactly is the type of Gomu Gomu no Mi? It cannot be Zoan or Logia. It's very close to a Paramecia but still doesn't have a logical explanation to be of Paramecia type! So is it some special type of Devil Fruit? I often see tutorials on the web or posts on this site which make heavy use of the following characters at the command line. Often it seems that they are used for pretty similar purposes. What are the differences between them when used on the command line or for shell programming? For what purpose do I use which of them?  " " double quotes  ' ' single quotes  ` ` backticks I want to extrude a curve in two directions.    Or join both curves into one, is it possible? I've tried copying it and then join segments, but I don't see Remove Doubles option while working with curves. I'm a bit familarized with conditional sentences. But the following sentences with 'should' and 'happen to' are quite confusing too me. They are:   If it should rain, I will stay at home. 2.If it should happen to rain, I'll stay at home   If it happens to rain, I'll stay at home.    What are the meaings of those sentences ? Do they all mean the same ? Thank you a lot in Advance for your answer. I used sculpting on a plane, and things looks great. However, when I press P to play, the whole ground become a mess. I can see through it in various places, and there are also nasty looking black edges everywhere.  another problem, I made a UV Sphere to display the sky, but when I press , P to play it disappears! Prove Borel Measurable Set A with the following property has measure 0. This question is exercise 4.10 of Richard F. Bass's Real Analysis for Graduate Students, 2nd edition.  Let $\epsilon \in (0,1)$, let $m$ be Lebesgue measure, and suppose $A$ is Borel Measurable subset of $\mathbb R$. Prove that if $$ m(A\cap I)\leq (1-\epsilon)m(I)$$  for every interval $I$, then $m(A)=0$.  Collection of my thoughts  1. Try to prove by contradiction, suppose $m(A)=a&gt;0$ Borel Measurable Set satisfies the condition given. A property of any Borel Measurable Set on $\mathbb R$ is $A$ contains a closed set $F$ and is contained in open set $O$, and the measure of $F$ and $O$ can be arbitrarily close to $a$. 2. Obviously $A$ contains no interval, but it does not lead to contradiction, because we can find an example of $m(A)&gt;0$ that contains no interval(fat Cantor Set(remove middle 1/4 each time) has measure $1/2$ and contains no interval).  2'. For fat Cantor Set $C$ and given $\epsilon&gt;0$ how could we construct an interval I satisfies $m(C \cap I)&gt;(1-\epsilon)m(I) ?$   Maybe try to write Borel measurable set as countable union/intersection of intervals.   I'm stucked here and will appreciate any help, some examples/special case will be great too. Number of pairs of strings satisfying the given condition We are provided with a string A (may contain repeated characters as well ). One needs to make all possible permutations of A , and find out how many pairs of strings chosen from these permutations are not similar.  Two strings are similar if we can make both of them exactly same by carrying out at most 1 swap in each of them .  Example :- if we are provided with string abcd  , then for permutation abcd , the permutations which are not similar to it are bcda , bdac , cadb , cdba , dabc , dcab . Similar is the case for other permuations as well. So overall number of desired pairs are 24*6=144 .  I tried solving it for each possible pair by approach mentioned here     But as the permutations can be large enough , I need a better approach of solving this. Bias and variance in leave-one-out vs K-fold cross validation How do  methods compare in terms of model variance and bias?   My question is partly motivated by this thread: . The answer there suggests that models learned with leave-one-out cross-validation have higher variance than those learned with regular $K$-fold cross-validation, making leave-one-out CV a worse choice.  However, my intuition tells me that in leave-one-out CV one should see relatively lower variance between models than in the $K$-fold CV, since we are only shifting one data point across folds and therefore the training sets between folds overlap substantially.  Or going in the other direction, if $K$ is low in the $K$-fold CV, the training sets would be quite different across folds, and the resulting models are more likely to be different (hence higher variance).  If the above argument is right, why would models learned with leave-one-out CV have higher variance? In Quantum Mechanics we usually consider operator-valued functions: these are functions that take in real numbers and gives back operators on the Hilbert space of the quantum system.  There are several examples of these. One of them is when we work with the Heisenberg picture, where we need to consider functions $\alpha : \mathbb{R}\to \mathcal{L}(\mathcal{H})$ such that $\alpha(t)$ is the operator at time $t$.  Another example is when we deal with exponentiation of operators, like when building the time evolution operator:  $$U(t,t_0)=\exp\left(-i\frac{H}{\hbar}(t-t_0)\right),$$  Here, the $\exp$ is usually understood as being defined via the eigenvalues of $H$.  The point is, the idea of a function $\alpha : \mathbb{R}\to \mathcal{L}(\mathcal{H})$ appears quite often in Quantum Mechanics, and sometimes one needs to differentiate these. In practice we do it formally, using all the properties we would expect, but I'm curious about how one would properly define this.  If we were dealing with bounded operators, then we could use the operator norm, which is available for this kind of operator, and define the derivative as we can usually we do when there's some norm around.  The point is that in Quantum Mechanics most of the time operators are unbounded.  So in the general case, how can one define the derivative of one operator-valued function? How should I setup separate MX records for a subdomain? When should you use struct and not class in C#? My conceptual model is that structs are used in times when the item is merely a collection of value types.  A way to logically hold them all together into a cohesive whole.  I came across these rules :   A struct should represent a single value. A struct should have a memory footprint less than 16 bytes. A struct should not be changed after creation.   Do these rules work? What does a struct mean semantically? I've always wondered how to write the "A ? B : C" syntax in a C++ compatible language.  I think it works something like: (Pseudo code)  If A &gt; B    C = A Else    C = B   Will any veteran C++ programmer please help me out? Why there isn't a feature that lets any user on SO to request other user to answer their question? When I browse through other questions to find my answer, sometimes I'll find answers similar to what I'm looking for, and though they don't exactly answer my question, the author might be able to do so. Could we have a feature on SO that will let me request that another user answer my question, in case I find someone who could potentially answer my question? Moderncv package - cventry date width I am writing my CV using moderncv package, everythig is nice but I have a problem with \cventry command. I have something like this:   (it means 2010 - now)  I would want to have this in one line, rather than in two lines. I tried looking into the moderncv style files but with no success. What can I do to achieve the effect I want? Why is $\frac{1}{2\pi i}\int_{\gamma}\frac{f'(z)}{f(z)}dz$ an integer? Let $f$ be holomorphic in an open $\Omega \subset \mathbb{C}$ and $\gamma$ a closed curve in $\text{int}(\Omega)$, along which $f$ is never zero.   Are these hypotheses enough to claim $\frac{1}{2\pi i}\int_{\gamma}\frac{f'(z)}{f(z)}dz$ is an integer? If not, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for that?  I can prove that's an integer for some particular cases, for example when $\Omega$ is convex and  $\gamma$ is a circle. But I've seen people claming this in many other contexts, like when $\Omega$ is an annulus around $0$ and $\gamma $ is an arbitrary curve inside it. This isn't obvious to me at all.  Thanks!