Simon Willison’s Weblog

Permissions have three moving parts, who wants to do it, what do they want to do, and on what object. Any good permission system has to be able to efficiently answer any permutation of those variables. Given this person and this object, what can they do? Given this object and this action, who can do it? Given this person and this action, which objects can they act upon?

— wkirby on Hacker News # 16th April 2024, 7:49 pm

Spam, and its cousins like content marketing, could kill HN if it became orders of magnitude greater—but from my perspective, it isn’t the hardest problem on HN. [...]

By far the harder problem, from my perspective, is low-quality comments, and I don’t mean by bad actors—the community is pretty good about flagging and reporting those; I mean lame and/or mean comments by otherwise good users who don’t intend to and don’t realize they’re doing that.

— dang # 19th February 2024, 3:57 pm

I think that “bad technology” can kill a startup, but slightly different variations of good technology don’t have much effect. Choose what you know/like best. And Ruby and Python are both in this latter category.

— enko on Hacker News # 2nd October 2010, 11:19 am

When all of human endeavor falls under the rubric of the “hack” the word ceases to mean anything. Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a “burrito” sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide “deodorant”. Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.

— qwzybug on Hacker News # 10th August 2010, 11:54 am

Any sufficiently advanced damage control is indistinguishable from ethics.

— Eliezer # 6th December 2009, 9:31 am