Controlling randomization in astronomy simulations

As the primary requirement, correctly implementing and controlling random number generation is vital for a range of scientific analyses and simulations across astronomy and planetary science. Beyond advice on how to set the seed, there is little guidance in the literature for how best to handle pseudo-random number generation in the current era of open-source astronomical software development. We present our methodology for implementing a pseudo-random number generation in astronomy simulations and software and share the short lines of python code that create the generator. Without sacrificing randomization at run time, our strategy ensures reproducibility on a per function/module basis for unit testing and for run time debugging where there may be multiple functions requiring lists of randomly generated values that occur before a specific function is executed

LSSTDESC/qp: v0.8.4, various updates and fixes

<h2>What's Changed</h2> <ul> <li>Cleaning up docstrings by @delucchi-cmu in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/174</li> <li>Spruce up the README by @delucchi-cmu in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/179</li> <li>Add a new factory method read_metadata by @joezuntz in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/183</li> <li>Issue/186/fix readthedocs by @eacharles in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/187</li> <li>fix scipy wrapper to work with newer scipy by @eacharles in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/189</li> <li>Issue/178/metrics docs by @aimalz in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/181</li> <li>fix demo to refer to qp.read by @eacharles in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/194</li> <li>Move quant_pdf tests into their own test module by @drewoldag in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/195</li> <li>attempt to use copier template by @eacharles in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/197</li> <li>udpated to copier template v0.3.1 by @eacharles in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/198</li> <li>Implemented normalisation for weights with sum larger than one. Also … by @BStoelzner in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/185</li> </ul> <h2>New Contributors</h2> <ul> <li>@aimalz made their first contribution in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/181</li> <li>@BStoelzner made their first contribution in https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/pull/185</li> </ul> <p><strong>Full Changelog</strong>: https://github.com/LSSTDESC/qp/compare/v0.8.3...v0.8.4</p&gt