Cowen

5 ms·

1.
by Cowen 8y ago
> We have at least one data point that says that Signal stores exactly two integers about you For people wondering what they are: > "The only information responsive to the subpoena held by OWS is the time of account creation and
2.
by Cowen 10y ago
I'm not sure if this is an official list. But for those interested, the top offices of the military do pretty regularly publish reading lists. National Defense University (an actual part of the Department of Defense) has links to them
3.
by Cowen 11y ago
As far as votes of confidence go, Julia landing successfully at any of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks is a strong one. They all do a whole mess of complex modeling. The NY Fed in particular is a "first among equals" in the Federal R
4.
by Cowen 11y ago
If you'd asked me a few years ago, I never would've thought I would be interested in a financial newsletter. But Matt Levine's really are the best. Hilarious and insightful five days a week.
5.
by Cowen 11y ago
Evolution doesn't "require" anything except breeding.
6.
by Cowen 11y ago
I forgot who exactly put it this way, but I like the idea of thinking of direct cash transfers as the "index investing" of poverty interventions. It won't guarantee the absolute best return, but it can effectively guarantee a
7.
by Cowen 11y ago
> Political fallout would be huge if this thing doesn't go through, right? All players in the game are heavily invested in this passing because without it, years are wasted, so I'm expecting it to pass. This depends on perspect
8.
by Cowen 11y ago
The way I've always put it: Diablo 2 was a better game, but Diablo 1 was a better experience.
9.
by Cowen 11y ago
Nonsense. I'm saying that people live in the real world with real contexts, not in Context-Free-Abstraction-Land. Real contexts, where abstract concepts have been concrete realities, put natural and rational limits on the ability to tr
10.
by Cowen 11y ago
> it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things. Kind of like what you're doing right now?
11.
by Cowen 11y ago
Concepts are understood in contexts. Everyone involved in this context is American, so it's natural for slavery here to be viewed through an American context. In that context, slavery is inherently racist. After all, it's not like
12.
by Cowen 11y ago
> unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist I've never read a word of Moldybug or whatever, but in the American context, the very concept of slavery is absolutely considered racist and rightly so. Americ
13.
by Cowen 11y ago
According to some napkin math with these figures[0], the three metro areas combined account for 11.7% of US GDP in 2012. So yeah, I'm not sure what estimate they're using for the growth multiple from liberalizing land-use constrai
14.
by Cowen 12y ago
Vox did something a while back that's more along those lines.[1] The cost of care in the US is much higher than in other countries. There are a bunch of reasons for this, and everyone has their preferred scapegoats and solutions, but t
15.
by Cowen 12y ago
Food suppliers, possibly restaurants.
16.
by Cowen 12y ago
I've never cared for a lawn in my life, so purely out of curiosity, why should a sprinkler system be on in the early morning? Wouldn't morning dew take care of watering grass around those hours?
17.
by Cowen 12y ago
> For the most part, this seems like a great initiative for adding transparency but ultimately highlights a non-issue (assuming further analysis doesn't change the story). But of course, that's the best part about transparency.
18.
by Cowen 12y ago
Not that this is what you were saying, but that criticism applies to almost everyone in almost every legal system. "If only Legal System X had more People Similar To Me That Agree With My Values, The World would be a better place.&quot
19.
by Cowen 12y ago
> Maybe they counted all dependencies or libraries. This is really the only way I can imagine they got to that number. Spring, a beastly enterprise Java codebase if ever there was one, is still "only" 460K lines of Java code ac
20.
by Cowen 12y ago
If there's one situation where you definitely want to apply the rule "if it's not broke, don't fix it", it's probably nuclear missile silos.
21.
by Cowen 13y ago
Not without refueling somewhere. They didn't have enough gas to make it too far past Beijing. [0] [0]- http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/interactive/2014/03/world/malays...
22.
by Cowen 13y ago
I prefer the second one. Explicit is better than implicit.
23.
by Cowen 13y ago
> It's not just a dramatic change; for most, it's a cliff thrown in the middle of the learning curve. When I transferred to a new university I was placed in their first year calculus program over my own protests. I had already
24.
by Cowen 13y ago
I know very little of this competition, but it's possible that's a case of a non-representative training set rather than overfitting. Learning fluent English doesn't teach you Portuguese.
25.
by Cowen 13y ago
This sounds like a great offering for an unlocked smartphone. I'm personally in the market for a cheap, unlocked smartphone, and if this is as good as the reviews sound, I'll probably buy one straight away. But I think the real te
26.
by Cowen 13y ago
There's a reason I used the word "ostensibly."
27.
by Cowen 13y ago
Ostensibly the goal of all government intervention in financial systems is to make them more transparent and secure. Whether or not they accomplish those goals is obviously a matter of serious debate, but Velde's reasoning there is con
28.
by Cowen 13y ago
I'm not going to comment on the blogs vs. real journalism debate, but I'd say Wonkblog is probably one of the best American political blogs running today. Politics is such a polarizing and passionate issue that these blogs easily
29.
by Cowen 13y ago
With crouton, there are very few Linux apps that you can't run on a Chromebook. While I haven't tried it with SublimeText, I have run Eclipse on my Chromebook. It's not the smoothest experience, but it can get the job done. S
30.
by Cowen 13y ago
Probably not much. Motion sickness is mostly caused by your brain trying to resolve opposing signals between your eyes and your sense of motion. If you're looking at a non-moving scene like a screen in the car, but everything else in y

More ›