skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SYSTEM is root.

SYSTEM is arguably not a user, because a user has things like a password, groups, and other user properties. SYSTEM on the other hand is a built in low level security context which cannot be removed, altered, or shared across a network. You cannot login as SYSTEM, but processes can run as SYSTEM. It has a static SID on all Windows systems as S-1-5.

Some of the processes that run as SYSTEM in SYSTEM: ntoskml (Windows Kernel), all drivers, and all interrupt handlers. A few key services (not all, and fewer every release).

Literally it doesn't get higher than NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM on Windows. The administrator account no longer exists on most Windows installations at all, and the administrators group is just that, a group.

It is like root on UNIX, if the root account had been configured to disable interactive login and to allow sudo only.

PS - SYSTEM is sometimes called NT AUTHORITY in documentation. I've seen it called both, I've also seen it called "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM." I believe the NT AUTHORITY is referring to the lowest level of permissions within the OS, and SYSTEM is at that level/root of the permissions table. So really NT AUTHORITY and SYSTEM are equivalent.
I think you're looking for Eben Moglen.
The average yc founder in this batch is about 30, but the average college/university graduate is much younger than that. What did a successful 30 yr old applicant do for those 8ish years after graduating?
(I'm not totally clear whether it was meant to be 1penny for each speck avoided or 1penny vs all specks.). But two follow-up questions :

a) would you press the 7bn specks button for an individual 'reward' of $70million?

b) would you press the N-specks button if given a choice between that and the 1-torture button?
We Experience the World We Infer, Not the World as It Is
Well is that not the point of nicotine gum and patches?

Anyway, it's a bad analogy because apathy regarding privacy is not an addiction. It's just apathy, informed or uninformed. Anybody who was likely to care about privacy but was ignorant/uninformed should not need to be weaned off privacy-abusing services. Anybody who was never going to care about privacy need not be pursued further.
It would with an unlimited supply of coolant, but bringing mass is expensive. Unless you start grabbing asteroids and using your waste heat to vaporize them or something....
It's really just way too damn high. Live in somewhere like Sunnyvale or San Jose, maybe.
That's weird. I thought you may have been misspelling the city name but I get a temperature even if I mash on my keyboard.
Do you think the increasing cost of living in the valley is detrimental to starting up?
Yes, this year.
Yep it is THAT obvious...
Does anyone have rough pricing on these? They're not available for web order and I'm trying to compare/contrast without having to deal with a sales rep hounding me.
In Portland we're also in the process of replacing another bridge which as a single sidewalk less than 2ft wide directly adjacent to traffic, no barriers. It's dangerous and awkward to try and move past another person on foot on it, and near-suicidal to try and cycle across. So I will be happy to have 4ft for biking and walking, really.
> I just invested in a company that I believe will take 20-30 years to work.

How do you conceptualize investments on that sort of timescale?

20 years ago was 1995, and 30 years ago was 1985. So much has changed between then and now. I understand that broader market trends can sometimes be predicted, but when you invest, you're betting not only on a market trend but on a specific instantiation of that trend.

How do you conceptualize an investment in a specific team and company on that sort of a timescale, when there's already so much uncertainty around what markets will even exist in 2045?
Inside the Bubble Bus: Riding SF's latest private alt. to public transportation
Consumers are given applications not documents.
If you think it's dangerous as well as being possible, I'd imagine you'd jump at the chance to help guide it to the least damaging end.
Also, what if we cannot arrange for the trip initially...?
How do you feel about what the constant influx of 22-year-olds making six-figure salaries is doing to the culture and social fabric of San Francisco?
I saw in the recently published YC stats that you have accepted companies from a number of countries in the current batch. Do you see any major differences in work culture/ethics between say US and european founders?
Stallman's answer:

"I am skeptical of advice from people who disagree with what I stand for."
Ask HN: Give up scheduling rights in return for deep discounts on home services?
My company, The Happy Home Company, is experimenting with ways to make home services much more affordable, and I'd like your thoughts on this idea.

Something we're playing with is offering deep discounts (50%-80%) for people willing to accept a window of time for their service to be performed, rather than a specific time.

For example, rather than you scheduling a house cleaning for Wednesday at 10:00am, cleaning might be done on Wednesday or Thursday between 9 - 6, whenever is the most efficient time for the service providers to clean your home.

Doing this enables us to leverage the buying power of a neighborhood, and fill in the "down time" service providers experience.
The sign-up process is pretty demotivating. Give me a way to at least see something happen before I go through the whole e-mail confirmation thing.
Nope, it is MORE privileged than full Administrator!
thanks for doing this..are there any plans to do a YC program for people who have to keep their job to maintain their visa status. I am not sure how can one apply when on H1B..?
I have never cared too much about "validation" or "verification of the concept". I trust my own judgment, and the companies I've made the most money on had far, far more people saying the idea was stupid than validating it.

I just try to evaluate every idea on its own merits and potential, and not worry about anything else. I suggest you do the same.
What do you say to the argument in http://lesswrong.com/lw/n3/circular_altruism/:

>But let me ask you this. Suppose you had to choose between one person being tortured for 50 years, and a googol people being tortured for 49 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. You would choose one person being tortured for 50 years, I do presume; otherwise I give up on you.

>And similarly, if you had to choose between a googol people tortured for 49.9999999 years, and a googol-squared people being tortured for 49.9999998 years, you would pick the former.

>A googolplex is ten to the googolth power. That's a googol/100 factors of a googol. So we can keep doing this, gradually - very gradually - diminishing the degree of discomfort, and multiplying by a factor of a googol each time, until we choose between a googolplex people getting a dust speck in their eye, and a googolplex/googol people getting two dust specks in their eye.

>If you find your preferences are circular here, that makes rather a mockery of moral grandstanding. If you drive from San Jose to San Francisco to Oakland to San Jose, over and over again, you may have fun driving, but you aren't going anywhere. Maybe you think it a great display of virtue to choose for a googolplex people to get dust specks rather than one person being tortured. But if you would also trade a googolplex people getting one dust speck for a googolplex/googol people getting two dust specks et cetera, you sure aren't helping anyone. Circular preferences may work for feeling noble, but not for feeding the hungry or healing the sick.
The problem is that ESR and the "open source" people have a fundamentally different understanding of software freedom than do the FSF. I'm not judging one over the other, but I think it's a mistake to conflate the two. It's not simply the narcissism of small differences; they have fundamentally incompatible motives, even if their means can be seem as congruent.
Context: http://www.reddit.com/r/AlienBlue/comments/2znkjk/i_paid_for...
The reason to have sleek exteriors or to look cool is because you need be aerodynamic (because you're in the air) or need to look cool (because you're in a movie, or you're a consumer good).

Being neither in much air nor in a movie nor a consumer good, real spacecraft don't bother with expensive, constrictive, and (more importantly) heavy exterior shells. Instead, form follows function.
Seconded: statistics such as these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77525

... seem to show that very successful sole founder stories do exist. But nearly everything from the YC orbit says "find a partner or you'll fail," etc.
I think those are pretty good definitions. But I would emphasize that the distinction between lower and middle classes is that middle-class people have at least a little bit of discretionary income. Lower-class people have to spend everything they get on food, shelter, and clothing.
How to make autocorrect amazing
Yes. By now, The Simpsons have surely made every joke possible.

General Disarray: "Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!"
Mr. Stotch: "That's it! Butters, you are grounded for plagiarism! Go to your room!"
When it comes to well formulated talks about free software, none seems to beat those from Stallman's lawyer, Eben Moglen. He knows very well how to speak to a crowd, and tends to use local references and languages to explain concepts (professor of law and history of law). Stallman has excellent skills in seeing problems in software before they get noticed by everyone else, but when I want to introduce someone to the philosophy of free software I would rather put on a talk like Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media from 2012 or the now 11 year old talk Die Gedanken Sind Frei from 2004.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOk4Y4inVY

2: http://www.archive.org/download/3_do_t1_11h_3-Moglen_a/3_do_...
SlideMail (YC W15) Is an Intelligent Email App for the Rest of Us
I think the biggest problem is that it's making housing totally unaffordable. I think it's critical SF fix this, and that the only real solution is more supply.

Unfortunately, homeowners are the ones that vote, and they are loving the increase in home values and don't want to see a lot more supply get built.
That doesn't tell you whether you will start the station oscillating in some mode of vibration. For that you'd need a model of the stiffness and structure of the station.
OT: I appreciate that most people want a simple, lightweight reader. But for myself, can someone recommend a sophisticated RSS reader for power users? I need to process feeds as efficiently as possible; a serious bottleneck is simply reading all the headlines to find the articles I want (and I'm picky about the feeds I download). I don't want simple, I want fast; I don't care about complexity or a learning curve, as long as it doesn't delay me as a user. I want the Vim (or Emacs?) of feed readers:

* Immediate responsiveness, especially displaying article content

* Information-dense, well-designed UI, so my eyes can skim headlines quickly.

* Search and sort

* Deduplication

* Automatic grouping: This feature would reduce the headlines I need to review by 50% or more, I would guess. Group articles regarding the same topic, similar to what Google News does (but with my feeds and a more information-dense UI). For example, automatically group articles about the new Samsung wearable announcement, so I can choose the best one to read or simply delete them all.

* Filtering: Based on headers or full-text, especially to highlight my favorite feeds and authors.

* Analytics: Which feeds, authors, etc. do I read the most? From which do I open the full article the most (I download all summaries, for speed)? It would help me weed out less productive feeds.

* Efficient management of feeds: Auto-discover changed feed URLs, etc.

* Security: No external connections from within articles without user confirmation. That is, no image downloads, beacons, etc. No JavaScript.

I'd happily pay > $100 for all that.
Can I ask what exactly you where watching for with your fuzzer? Where you just waiting for Safari to crash? Then what?
I put in "Canada" with nothing else, and even still got an answer back.
It's a pity that we have RethinkDB and ArangoDB, but MongoDB still owns the mindsets...
Hi guys,

Vu, the founder here. I wanted to take the time to thank all of our amazing beta testers who kept coming back to use the app even though there were bugs. You guys are the real MVP! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Email is hard and there will still be some bugs, but our heart truly bleeds for our users. Whenever we see a crash report, it feels like physical pain and we'll work tirelessly to address these issues, day and night. Thanks you guys!
Hey, folks. This is a chat app I’ve put together than lets people chat through live sketching. It goes through Heroku, so you don’t need to be on the same WiFi to interact with your chat partner (as is the case with many whiteboarding apps). I’d appreciate any feedback you have.
The release dates were purposefully close together.
Is YC India in your plans ?
Surely there are 13th amendment concerns with selling the hacker.

Do you mean that they used to sell the exploits to other hackers at Pwn2Own?
Edible insects are a novelty today, but they'll be mainstream tomorrow
He's not a failure. He's a success, not a big success but a success nonetheless. What he failed at was keeping his wealth.
Woot woot, congrats ladies and gentlemen :)
Perhaps more worrying, they may have sold them elsewhere first and informed the purchaser that they have until the competition date to use it. Better business if you have to come back after the disclosure date for more holes...

Nohig ethical at all going on here.
This is so encouraging to hear! I'm not much of a writer myself, but I am super happy that Google is able to translate quality into results. Keep it up!
What's funny, is back in the mid-late 90's, I found a lot of bugs in Netscape Navigator simply by running the browser in a more secure OS (Windows NT) vs. Windows 9x... There were a lot of conditions where the browser would crash in NT, but in 9x meant you had an exploit.

Many of those were pretty simplistic... fortunately for almost everyone at the time, the browser wasn't a widely used method of exploit, and to my knowledge compromising distributed computer networks via such compromises and ad networks wasn't thought of either. Though by 2002/2003, I had started blocking Flash, Java and Adobe Reader at home when I saw what could be done in the browser.
Will YC invest in a startup that has the potential to be a billion dollar B2B company in 10-15 years and not a quick exit ? Since it is B2B, it will never have a million users or be viral but more like solid few thousands customers.
I have a quick bug to report. The location search has some flaws and appears to match the first city it finds regardless of any state added. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the location string is returned to the user exactly how it is entered, so the bug is not immediately evident.

One example, "Portland", "Portland, ME", "Portland, Maine", and "Portland, Fake State" all return the weather for Portland, Oregon.
Any recommendations for getting funding for growing projects with proven/consistent revenue streams that do have those smaller returns?

Seems there should be groups interested in lower risk/lower return models, but they don't seem to exist.
You don't what? What policy? Information hazards? What?!

I feel like I just stumbled into a Scientology auditing session or something reading your comment.
Are you a native or have you moved there from somewhere else? I think the dual to "the grass is always greener" is that you might not realize that some things are problematic, or that there are better alternatives, unless you've have the chance to look at it from another perspective.
Thanks Sam.
Yes. I have worked in a startup for few years. I made very good friends, some technical and some management.

I found a good guy who is on the management side, I asked him whether he is interested in startup. He is just married, from a middle class family and he is not willing to take any risk.

I also know technical people. Unfortunately I did not find good people on technical side but they are very talented. When I say good, I mean honest people.
Somewhat, although this is tangential. A lot of that is because research has shown that a not-insignificant part of addiction is the social/behavioral side of things. Lighting up. Habit.

Nicotine gum and patches allow you to conquer one aspect of the addiction at a time, which may be more achievable for many.
I'm glad for what he's done, but every day he's out there yelling and screaming and generally causing shit for no reason he's damaging the open-source movement.

There are undoubtedly others that are able to fill that role, and while they may not be as bombastic or driven, they could be more constructive and willing to engage in serious discussion rather than mock and ridicule anything that is not pure.

His stubborn refusal to use things like Google Docs makes him completely blind to what that sort of tool can do. Where's the open-source version of same?

It's like to him using the MIT or BSD licenses is the same as heresy and if he had the power to, like some ordained pope, he'd excommunicate all those that refused the GNU license.

That's why being "creepy, petulant and obnoxious" is a serious problem.

I don't understand how he can be almost literally losing his mind about Windows, which is of no real threat to anyone, when the real problems are closed source code inside hardware embedded in cars, medical equipment and voting machines where the stakes are much, much higher.

If you ask me, he's fighting the right war on the wrong battlefield.
Ah. This is better phrasing of what I was trying to ask with my 10,000X return question.
> there are rumors going around that Yishan was bribed to step down so that Ms. Ellen Pao could become interim CEO just in time for her trial against Kleiner Perkins. Could you comment on her character?

It's bad enough that you're publicly asking sama for petty gossip on an AMA like this, but ending it by making this about Pao's character, not Yishan's character, the changing of the guard at Reddit in general, or even the KP lawsuit, is really low.
Is there a chance to be approved if my startup is an incubator/accelerator a la YC in another region of the world?
Adam is super smart. In fact, I asked him for an updated list at dinner a couple of weeks ago and I predict he will be right again.

I'm not going to share my list because I've found that people put too much stock in it. I don't mind talking about things like nuclear energy or biotech, because people are either going to start those companies or not.

But I don't want to cause founders to start or stop working on specific idea because I say something like "I think enterprise software is great" and they really want to get into YC. I never used to worry about this, but I've since found it happens surprisingly often.

The best companies are usually started before any trend is obvious. By the time the trend is obvious, it's too late.
Thanks for answering, Sam. Perhaps I should clarify: does YC accept companies whose core tech is only buildable in 3-5 years - i.e., 3 months of work on the tech gives no salable product.

I am following the YC adventures with interest, and look forward to seeing the long-range horizon ideas.
What do you think are some of the unsolved problems in the location based apps field?
Ditto for the Mirs and Tiangongs. They only had 2 to 6 sausages. The ISS is more of a Swiss army knife.
Clearly you didn't even look at the links provided. :)
hello sam

How do you get the (gut) feeling that you should definitely invest in a particular idea (or company)? (how do you make such a decision)?
Looking at how teespring is teasing its job-seekers
Anything that somehow includes my saying "Think safe thoughts!" in a causal chain is already essentially inevitable. The future is not easily shaped.
Development of Doom
Definitely a chance, but if you want to get into YC you should just apply to YC.

It usually hurts you if you've gone through another accelerator because our bar is much higher. In that case, we expect you to be already accelerated, and we find that many accelerators are actually more of a brake pedal.
They have to exploit the fully patched versions (on the day). Prior to the contest, vendors are free to patch the exploits, if found.
That's wonderful! It's not the QWERTY, but the C-C#-D-D# keyboard.
Sam, our YC application is almost ready, can I post it tomorrow? :)
Yes, I think it's the biggest long-term risk to the valley's continued startup dominance.

http://paulgraham.com/marginal.html
Does changing some of the variables help?

I believe there is a secret government agency with the purpose of controlling the entire world will come about.

I believe that this agency will control everything, and will punish all people it determines learned about it's possibility and did not either work to make it a reality, or immediately turn themselves in to the authorities.

In light of this, it's important to keep knowledge of this future event from people so they aren't targeted.

Whoops, I just posted this to a public forum.

Regardless of whether the belief is true, if the poster believes it, then they are acting in a reprehensible manner. If you incorrectly believe you have a button that sets off a nuclear warhead in a heavily populated area and choose to press it, you still shoulder some responsibility for your intended actions.
To mitigate this problem, Google has recently announced that they are running a similar program year-round:

http://blog.chromium.org/2015/02/pwnium-v-never-ending-pwniu...
It's large when you present it as a single-day payout. If you imagine it might have taken a year of work to discover and exploit these vulnerabilities, with no guarantee of success, then the money is actually relatively low compared to standard tech benefit packages. Tons of respect for anyone who does this and avoids the urge to go to the black market (or NSA, etc).
One possible contributory force here might also just be the smaller size of the market for >$1k meals, resulting in less total creative effort being brought to bear on the problem. Intuitively this seems very likely: a large fraction of the world's population cooks on a regular basis, and the sheer scale could overcome even very large forces that select for highly skilled and creative chefs to cook in fine dining.
I think the dust speck argument would be better if first framed as a preference for yourself:

If you were going to live for 3^^^3 lifetimes, would you like to be tortured for 50 years in exchange for one fewer dust specks in your eye during each of those lifetimes.

I think most people would answer no. So the debate has nothing to do with morality in general. Instead the debate is about Scope Insensitivity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/), that our emotional reaction to things isn't diminished by even infinitesimally small quantities (see also Useless Medical Disclaimers http://lesswrong.com/lw/h4/useless_medical_disclaimers/).

I think I can make that position seem more reasonable if framed another way: Would you risk a 1/(3^^^3) chance at 50 years of torture, in exchange for getting rid of one dust speck out of your eye? I think most people would say yes. You couldn't even get out of bed in the morning if you weren't willing to take even incredibly small risks.

There is a much higher probability than 1/(3^^^3) that you could get in a car accident with injuries that cause 50 years of incredible pain, yet you will still probably risk driving for even trivial things.

And if you lived for 3^^^3 lifetimes and took this risk each time, you would likely suffer 50 years of torture during at least one lifetime.
And of course he's not going to comment on pending litigation. That would be... highly inadvisable.
Do you think the YC formula would work outside the valley, where it's harder to find plenty of young early adopter types?