I have two student loans I would like to pay off:  A: $6000 - 6.5%  B: $3000 - 6.5%  I am receiving a tax refund of a bit over $3000.  I am not sure whether to pay off B in one fell swoop to get it out of the way, or to halve the principal of A, reducing the total interest I pay over time.  I also have two additional loans of similar principal and half the interest rate for each.  I am not sure how, if at all, they factor into this decision.  Thank you.
My Situation:   About $36k USD in graduate student loans.  There are 4 different federal loans in play, each with a fixed rate of 6.8%.   $12k w/ ~$1.2k in unpaid interest  $10k w/ ~$1k in unpaid interest  $8k w/ no unpaid interest (all principal) $6k w/ no unpaid interest (all principal)  All loans are in repayment. Some loans are subsidized, some are not. This no longer matters now that they're all in repayment though, right?     Is there a most cost efficient way to pay these loans off?  Should the interest be ignored for now on the ones that have $1k in unpaid interest for the time being, because payments to the other two loans will will go directly to principal (minus the monthly compounded interest of course)?  On the surface, I would assume that since they're all the same interest rate, it doesn't really matter, but I'm not sure how the accrued interest would factor in. I'm not interested in psychological wins like debt snowballing. I'm looking for the route that will have me paying the least.
What is the most effective way for float and double comparison? What TV show has kids entering a video game of some sort? I've been searching the entire Internet for this show about 4 teenagers that enter a video game world where they have to fight monsters that looked like insects. Every time they had to enter the world, they'd go down in the sewers and one of the guys had a skateboard, a girl had a scooter and that's what I can remember. There was also one guy that always stayed behind to check their "health" in the game and pull them out in case they took too much damage to avoid them dying inside the game. I don't know if it was animated or not so there's not much to go on at all but hopefully someone might know what show it is? I'm automating a web application (the Mantis bug tracker) and I'm getting an interesting response header from it, called Refresh:  HTTP/1.x 200 OK ... Refresh: 0;url=my_view_page.php   It seems to be acting the same way that  does, and the meta refresh technique implies that it is an equivalent of a header in HTTP.  Problem is, I can't find any mention of the Refresh header in the  or any other definitive documentation on how it should be parsed and what the browser should do when it encounters it.  What's going on here? Supposing we have a table with four columns (a,b,c,d) of the same data type.  Is it possible to select all distinct values within the data in the columns and return them as a single column or do I have to create a function to achieve this? Mathematical Prerequisites for QFT Is there any decent speech recognition software for Linux? The short version of the question: I am looking for a speech recognition software that runs on Linux and has decent accuracy and usability. Any license and price is fine. It should not be restricted to voice commands, as I want to be able to dictate text.  More details: I have unsatisfyingly tried the following:       (e.g., )  (used to run  on Linux but was discontinued years ago)      (built on the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit)    +  +  +   : only accepts voice commands  All the above-mentioned native Linux solutions have both poor accuracy and usability (or some don't allow free-text dictation but only voice commands). By poor accuracy, I mean an accuracy significantly below the one the speech recognition software I mentioned below for other platforms have. As for Wine + Dragon NaturallySpeaking, in my experience it keeps crashing, and I don't seem to be the only one to have such issues unfortunately. On Microsoft Windows I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, on Apple Mac OS X I use Apple Dictation and DragonDictate, on Android I use Google speech recognition, and on iOS I use the built-in Apple speech recognition. Baidu Research released  the  for its speech recognition library using  implemented with Torch. Benchmarks from  are encouraging as shown in the table below, but I am not aware of any good wrapper around to make it usable without quite some coding (and a large training data set):      System Clean (94) Noisy (82) Combined (176)     Apple Dictation 14.24 43.76 26.73   Bing Speech 11.73 36.12 22.05   Google API 6.64 30.47 16.72   wit.ai 7.94 35.06 19.41   Deep Speech 6.56 19.06 11.85     Table 4: Results (%WER) for 3 systems evaluated on the original audio. All systems are scored only on the utterances with predictions given by all systems. The number in the parentheses next to each dataset, e.g. Clean (94), is the number of utterances scored.  There exist some very alpha open-source projects:   (part of Mozilla's Vaani project:   ())  Vox, a system to control a Linux system using Dragon NaturallySpeaking:  +     (to be released by Google, mentioned at Interspeech 2018)  I am also aware of this  as well as this .  I am aware of  , which allows speech recognition via Dragonfly on one computer to send events to another, but it has some latency cost:  I am also aware of these two talks exploring Linux option for speech recognition:   (David Williams-King)  (Tavis Rudd) Property of Entire Functions Currently, a user does not get any notification when a trivial edit (less than 6 characters, by a user who has the ) is made on one of his/her posts. As in .  Even though the user is trust-worthy (owing to the rep of the user), wouldn't it be nice for the OP to get a notification whenever an edit is made, even trivial? Drupal is fast at develop, but the performance is so poor.  It is hard to reach 50 request per second.  And there are so many SQL queries in a simple web page.  If you test the request time of a form submit in Drupal.org it will always take seconds to finish.  How do you improve the speed of your web site? Atiyah-Macdonald, Exercise 8.3: Artinian iff finite k-algebra. Atiyah Macdonald, Exercise 8.3. Let $k$ be a field and $A$ a finitely generated $k$-algebra. Prove that the following are equivalent:   (1) $A$ is Artinian.   (2) $A$ is a finite $k$-algebra.   I have a question in the proof of (1$\Rightarrow$2): By using the structure theorem, we may assume that $(A,m)$ is an Artin local ring. Then $A/m$ is a finite algebraic extension of $k$ by . Since $A$ is Artinian, $m$ is the nilradical of $A$ and thus $m^n=0$ for some $n$. Thus we have a chain $A \supseteq m \supseteq m^2 \supseteq \cdots \supseteq m^n=0$. Since $A$ is Noetherian, $m$ is finitely generated and hence each $m^i/m^{i+1}$ is a finite dimensional $A/m$-vector space, hence a finite dimensional $k$-vector space.  But now how can I deduce that $A$ is a finite dimensional $k$-vector space? Combining two expressions (Expression>) I have two expressions of type Expression&lt;Func&lt;T, bool&gt;&gt; and I want to take to OR, AND or NOT of these and get a new expression of the same type  Expression&lt;Func&lt;T, bool&gt;&gt; expr1; Expression&lt;Func&lt;T, bool&gt;&gt; expr2;  ...  //how to do this (the code below will obviously not work) Expression&lt;Func&lt;T, bool&gt;&gt; andExpression = expr AND expr2 Nuclear Binding energy Linux: coloring bash prompt will break carriage return When I try to colorize the bash prompt like this:  export PS1="\e[0;31m[\u@\h \W]\$ \e[m "   it breaks the carriage return (instead of going to a new line when line is full, it starts in the same line and erases the input text).  If I remove the color sequence it works fine. I use Ubuntu 11.10 and terminal (guake has the same bug too). Can a monk make a bonus unarmed attack after using shocking grasp? I'm playing a 5e Wizard/ Monk build. My DM and I are questioning the viability of the cantrip Shocking Grasp. As a monk I can do another unarmed strike as a bonus action after I attack with a melee attack. Being a touch spell, can I punch (touch) with Shocking Grasp and then do my monk's bonus action? Ways to give users some specific education about question quality and topicality Important: This question is being asked here, and not on the Programmers Meta,  because I believe that several SE sites suffer from this same, specific problem.    On Programmers, I see a pattern emerging.   New User sees the "Programmers" site title, and asks their incomplete, "fix my broken code" question. Community members comment that their question is off-topic, and recommend Stack Overflow.  New User says "thanks" and leaves, leaving their undeleted question for the community to clean up.    What seems clear to me is that:   New User has never seen the "What kinds of questions can I ask about here" page, or if they have, they've clicked through it without reading it. New User doesn't know how to move their question to the right place properly  (i.e. post on new site, delete from old site). Community cleanup of such questions is onerous.  The moderators on Programmers, following the principle that the community should moderate itself for the most part, are not proactive about removing such questions unless they're especially egregious. Migration is even more onerous.   OK, so we have the .  Here's what it says about topicality, about halfway down the page:    Note to those who are confused about Programmers' site scope: it's all right there, in black and white.  However, I do notice a problem.  It's circled in red.  That's our fault, the fault of the Programmers community.  What we really meant to say was "Don't ask your code troubleshooting questions here; those belong on Stack Overflow."  Coding tools deserves its own bullet.  We should fix that.  However, what are the chances that the user is actually seeing this, and evaluating whether or not they should ask their question based on this?  So here's my question, in two acts:  ACT I:  Is there a way to highlight the pain points of a particular site to new users specifically, so that we can be very clear that we don't want those questions that are clearly and unambiguously off-topic on our site, before they ask their question?  ACT II: Failing that, is there a way that we can fast-track the removal of such questions so that they no longer pollute our front page? I've got a Canon EOS camera that takes a BP-511 battery.  The specs on the battery are 7.4V and 1100mAh.  The battery is dead and I want to buy a replacement, but I'm looking at a third party battery, because it's much cheaper than the Canon branded one.  I've found one with very high reviews online, and it seems identical except that it's rated at 1500mAh instead of 1100mAh.  So the question is: is this difference important to the camera or not? Did Sidious know the secret of cheating death? In Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Chancellor Palpatine tells Anakin the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise. He told Anakin that if he joined the dark side he could save the people he loved from death by extending their midichlorian count, just as Darth Plagueis had done (obviously more subtly than that).  When Anakin asked what had happened to Plagueis, Palpatine says:      Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew. Then his apprentice...killed him in his sleep.   It is revealed (not in the movie) that it was Palpatine himself that was Plagueis' apprentice  After Anakin and Palpatine kill Mace Windu, Palpatine says,     To cheat death is a power only one has achieved, but if we work together I know we can discover the secret.   This implies that Palpatine doesn't already know the secrets but if Plagueis taught him "everything he knew" then surely he would have.  So did Sidious know the entire time or was "everything he knew" an exaggeration?  Just to be clear when I say "cheat death" I only mean extending someone's midichlorian count, not "transfer essence" or anything else like that. What does A a() mean? That car is way better than any car any of us have/has ever driven.      None of us know/knows which direction Ron's house is (in).    I have two questions here.   In both the cases, are we to use the singular verb, or the plural? In the end of the second sentence, is using the preposition where it's been used, necessary? Would it be okay if it had no prepositions in it? I think I've got it down to the most basic case:  int main(int argc, char ** argv) {   int * arr;    foo(arr);   printf("car[3]=%d\n",arr[3]);   free (arr);   return 1; }  void foo(int * arr) {   arr = (int*) malloc( sizeof(int)*25 );   arr[3] = 69; }   The output is this:  &gt; ./a.out   car[3]=-1869558540  a.out(4100) malloc: *** error for object 0x8fe01037: Non-aligned pointer                          being freed  *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug &gt;   If anyone can shed light on where my understanding is failing, it'd be greatly appreciated.