Hacker News: samjewell

New comment by samjewell in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

samjewell — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:46:27 +0000

> then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity.

Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s saying? He’s saying it could become that powerful, and given that possibility it’s incredibly important that we do whatever we can to gain more control of that scenario

New comment by samjewell in "Are ultra-processed foods as addictive as cigarettes?"

samjewell — Wed, 21 May 2025 08:39:15 +0000

Is there any way to read this article without subscribing?

I tried https://web.archive.org/web/20250506064408/https://www.natio... but I still hit the paywall.

New comment by samjewell in "The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis"

samjewell — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 21:19:48 +0000

> In fact, you should commit your LLM dialogs along with your code.

Wholeheartedly agree with this.

I think code review will evolve from "Review this code" to "Review this prompt that was used to generate some code"

New comment by samjewell in "Datadog acquires Quickwit"

samjewell — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:26:23 +0000

I work at Grafana. Can you say more about what specifically you don’t recommend?

New comment by samjewell in "On finally learning to program at the age of 40 (2020)"

samjewell — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 10:15:00 +0000

What happened to the girl you had a crush on? Did your effort to distance yourself from computers bear any fruit in any way? Do you have any regrets with that part of your story?

New comment by samjewell in "Doing too much work on one's own before looping in others"

samjewell — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 15:02:59 +0000

I'm amazed that the author doesn't recommend Pair-programming as one of the techniques to avoid "Doing too much before looping in others"

He mentions: > an engineer on a project should never go more than a week without showing something, and usually it should be more like a day

But in my experience by pairing you can shorten this feedback loop to seconds.

A few other people have commented about pairing: It's clear people have different preferences and that it's wise to use pairing at the right moments, but it still seems a glaring omission from the article to me.

New comment by samjewell in "Ask HN: What fraction of YC Startups succeed, given each successful fundraise?"

samjewell — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 23:08:09 +0000

Thanks

Ask HN: What fraction of YC Startups succeed, given each successful fundraise?

samjewell — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 21:28:46 +0000

Does anyone have any data on what fraction of YC startups go on to ultimately succeed/fail, at each successive fundraise? And I guess *how* well or badly they succeed/fail? I'm partly just curious, partly interested to try to get some kind of "expected value" of any options offered as part of remuneration. Any relevant dataset would be interesting to me - thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882847

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by samjewell in "Congratulations, Mini, you made the stupidest turn signals ever"

samjewell — Sun, 26 Sep 2021 19:24:38 +0000

Perhaps we should invest some of these energies thinking about getting on our bicycles instead

New comment by samjewell in "‘Positive deviants’: Why rebellious workers spark great ideas"

samjewell — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 16:08:28 +0000

I’ve worked my whole career in the UK (7 years software eng, plus a bit in other jobs). Sounds from your comment like you’ve had better experiences in other countries. Is that right? Which ones, and how?

New comment by samjewell in "Ask HN: How do you do design-review at your company?"

samjewell — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 14:59:35 +0000

Thanks for the comments - they're already very useful.

To explain our process: We have a single designer, and when designs are reviewed it's usually by one of the devs

In the past we've done wireframes (Sketch) and interactive prototypes (InVision) We were frustrated that: 1. Lots of issues didn't surface until we started coding, when a raft of problems/edgecases would appear. 2. It was too easy to ignore existing UI components/css, so that each design featured new component styles and css.

For approx the last month our designer branches from `master` and hacks on top of that to create designs. He then creates a PR for design-review, alongside a spec with some screenshots in Dropbox Paper. Some advantages of this: 1. We get visual diffs from Percy, so we can see what's changed easily 2. We get versioning more easily built into designs (via git)

Then just before development we'll break a story down into tasks / subtasks and log those into JIRA for development. We have trouble with: 1. Letting the designer make changes once the subtasks are created and development has started (devs sometimes chasing a 'moving-target' spec) 2. Design not knowing the current state of development

Ask HN: How do you do design-review at your company?

samjewell — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 17:57:03 +0000

We're a product team of 6, in a company of 20 people. We've tried to implement design-review to be like code-review, but we're having limited success. We've talked about:

- Reviewing "every line" of a design - Assigning designs to named reviewers, who should request changes, and then approve - A checklist of criteria the design must meet

Problems we've hit: - Design review is missed entirely before coding starts. - Reviewer barely scratches the surface, and misses huge issues - Most tickets/designs don't say whether review was passed or not

How do you handle this at your company? What tools/processes do you use?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12746054

Points: 14

# Comments: 6