HN user

Robin_Message

3,893 karma

Email: robin at lambdacambridge.com

Director at Lambda Cambridge (https://lambdacambridge.com)

I offer software contracting and technical consulting services.

I am especially proficient in Javascript, Java, C#, Python and Ruby, but have completed projects in pretty much every modern commercial language as well as many academic ones.

I can also offer technical and team consulting, where I can help your developers with design and architecture, as well as process, tools, and how you work, either on a one-off or recurring basis.

Previously:

  Head of Technology at Firefly ­– http://fireflylearning.com
  Head of Development at Unifyo
  PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, UK
  Intern at Google London working on Swiffy, the mad but
    cool Flash-to-HTML5 converter
  Experience in a wide variety of languages and environments,
    including low-level networking, web development,
    hardware design, and security.
Posts79
Comments1,135
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www.lambdacambridge.com 5mo ago

The Cerebral Revolution

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1pts0
en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

SIGSALY – secure speech system used in World War II

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2pts0
futurism.com 5y ago

Tesla's autopilot beta would fail drivers' license test

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3pts0
www.microsoft.com 5y ago

A Microsoft custom data type for efficient inference

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2pts0
esr.ibiblio.org 6y ago

A user story about user stories

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Tell HN: Amazon has removed searching for wishlists by name/email

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1pts0
blog.xkcd.com 7y ago

Xkcd Book Tour: Competition

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www.bbc.co.uk 7y ago

YouTube backtracks after Pokemon 'child abuse' ban

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2pts0
www.flexboxdefense.com 7y ago

Learn flexbox with a tower defense game powered by it

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3pts0
www.bbc.co.uk 7y ago

Olivia Bland's Web Applications UK Interview 'humiliating'

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3pts1
www.bbc.co.uk 7y ago

Mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

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93pts62
www.lambdacambridge.com 8y ago

Scrum disempowers developers

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332pts376
www.lambdacambridge.com 8y ago

How Scrum destroyed Agile

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www.lambdacambridge.com 8y ago

Randomise your testing

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jlongster.com 8y ago

Weird tricks with Redux

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medium.com 9y ago

The missing piece of a manager’s responsibilities

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steve-yegge.blogspot.com 9y ago

The Universal Design Pattern

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www.bbc.co.uk 10y ago

Bumble dating app blocks and shames 'small-minded misogynist'

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2pts8
uk.businessinsider.com 10y ago

Salesforce lost four hours of its customers' data

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1pts0
www.bbc.co.uk 10y ago

Computer paints 'new Rembrandt' after old works analysis (MS)

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keen.io 11y ago

How are you structuring your startup?

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1pts0
www.theverge.com 12y ago

The Navy just announced an e-reader designed for life on a submarine

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robinmessage.com 12y ago

Why Bruce Schneier is wrong about passwords

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robinmessage.com 12y ago

Laziness, Ruby, reduce and the map that wasn’t

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updates.intercom.io 12y ago

MongoHQ security breach incident report

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2pts0
www.created-to-help-you.com 13y ago

"Please do not be afraid. I am a medical robot" [video]

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15pts9
blog.xkcd.com 13y ago

Dictionary of Numbers

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www.farnamstreetblog.com 13y ago

Gaming the System

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d0x3d.com 13y ago

Teaching network security with a board game

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1pts1
dilbert.com 14y ago

Well-observed, as always

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[dead] 17 days ago

Sounds interesting but the blog seems hijacked by some advert to me, anyone else?

If that study was of submariners, is it possible long-term high-level exposure causes the body to adapt?

I am suspicious of 0.1% having a significant effect though, given oxygen is around 20% and we naturally exhale a couple of percent CO2.

I think he's doing 15% every month, not every year. It's not an implausible growth rate for a unicorn startup; it is implausible to expect it.

I've been thinking about this, and I think software is uniquely knowledge work that has the most defined structure and least personally interaction. Hell, some of the software I write is for machine to talk to other machines. It's not surprising such a closed system is so amenable to AI, and other knowledge workers are not getting the same benefits.

Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug like this to engineering.

What does that even mean? Does it mean, "our support flow is just an LLM that fobs off customers and puts their issues into the bin"? Or is there some genuine "routing" of simple bugs to engineering which accidentally drops "complex" bugs? Could you drescibe that process, it sounds fascinating?

Also, how is changing a customer's billing based on detecting a certain string in a certain place a "complex" bug? Grep the string, remove the if statement, done. I'd love a post-mortem about why this was a complex bug.

More questions than answers here Thariq.

If there is oversupply, why are retailers forced to rent and not able to purchase at the depressed market price?

(My theory, landlords are holding onto property in the hope of future returns rather than making a currently rational sale, and doing specific things like holding units empty or 364 day leases to avoid revaluations)

If I asked you for the same thing 10 times, wiping your memory each time, would you generate the same result?

And why does it matter anyway? I'd the code passes the tests and you like the look of it, it's good. It doesn't need to be existentially complicated.

It's because such research has no obvious initial use that the public must pay for it; no private enterprise will fund it, and often it will be useless knowledge, but occasionally someone will figure something out that unlocks a whole new understanding of the world.

It's publicly-funded venture capital for ideas.

The weights are aware of the end goal etc. But the model does not have access to these weights in a meaningful way in the chain of thought model.

So the model thinks ahead but cannot reason about it's own thinking in a real way. It is rationalizing, not rational.

SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Cambridge/London/Remote

I'm a software engineer with two decades of commercial experience. I've helped startups get started and big companies keep going.

I've organised a couple of jobs through HN now; it's been a good way to find interesting projects, and my clients have been pleased with the work. One said: "Thank you! I've played with it a bit and it looks very impressive! Way better than what I imagined this project could be."

I've worked on a very wide variety of web-based projects, as well as React Native, Windows, and other platforms, so I will be able to hit the ground running on most projects. If you're doing something a bit esoteric, that could still suit me – I've done image analysis of microscope images, processing big data for satellite imagery, devised novel algorithms, written network protocols, hacked on FPGAs, basically a bit of everything.

I did a PhD in programming languages so I'm pretty good at picking them up. In the last 5 years I've done commercial projects in (at least):

Typescript/Javascript (React Native, browser, and Node.js), C#, Python, Java, Swift, Ruby and Golang.

As well as building things, I am also good at talking to people to help figure out what we should be building. I enjoy working with other developers and helping the team learn, but I am also happy to get my head down and build what you need. I'm happiest on fixed-term projects that I can complete on a schedule that suits both of us, and my clients have been very happy with this process too.

For more details my website is https://www.lambdacambridge.com

Email: robin [at] the website above

This is a good writeup and a surprising bug!

For the average web app, it feels like JWT introduces some complexity (and footguns like this) for no real benefit. I mean, you can avoid a session lookup from redis or something, but that's hardly an expensive part of a request. You can always optimise hot, non-session requests (e.g. private image serving can use signed URLs)

Also, you can't revoke sessions ns unless you have a revocation list, in which case, why not just have a session list?!

Genuinely interested in real use cases for JWTs.

The visitor pattern is a way of getting multiple dispatch in a language with single dispatch.

It can also be seen as a way of encoding a functional solution to the expression problem in an OO language, which is useful when you have a set of objects and want to make it easy to add new operations to them, not create new types of objects.

SEEKING WORK | Cambridge, UK | Cambridge/London/Remote

I'm a software engineer with two decades of commercial experience. I've helped startups get started and big companies keep going.

I've organised a couple of jobs through HN now; it's been a good way to find interesting projects, and my clients have been pleased with the work. One said: "Thank you! I've played with it a bit and it looks very impressive! Way better than what I imagined this project could be."

I've worked on a very wide variety of web-based projects, as well as React Native, Windows, and other platforms, so I will be able to hit the ground running on most projects. If you're doing something a bit esoteric, that could still suit me – I've done image analysis of microscope images, processing big data for satellite imagery, devised novel algorithms, written network protocols, hacked on FPGAs, basically a bit of everything.

I did a PhD in programming languages so I'm pretty good at picking them up. In the last 5 years I've done commercial projects in (at least):

Typescript/Javascript (React Native, browser, and Node.js), C#, Python, Java, Swift, Ruby and Golang. I'm trying to find someone to pay me to do some Rust (I completed an Advent of Code in it.)

As well as building things, I am also good at talking to people to help figure out what we should be building. I enjoy working with other developers and helping the team learn, but I am also happy to get my head down and build what you need. I'm happiest on fixed-term projects that I can complete on a schedule that suits both of us, and my clients have been very happy with this process too.

For more details my website is https://www.lambdacambridge.com

Email: robin [at] the website above

Hypothecated taxes are an anti-pattern, for precisely this reason. Setting the budget and setting the taxes should be somewhat separated (but not too separated!)

To be fair, that's one of the reasons why libraries like jQuery and React exist: to smooth over the difference between browsers.

Even today, big chunk of React is masking the subtle differences in event handling and other things. And whilst it forces you into a paradigm, I've never had a bug caused by the internals of React that I've had to dig into. But maybe I'm lucky or only do simple stuff?

As to it hurting, I guess I'd say, use the protective equipment! Sure, it can be bulky and awkward occasionally, but it works and it's often better than the alternatives.

SEEKING WORK | UK/Global | Cambridge/London/Remote

I'm a software engineer with two decades of commercial experience. I've helped startups get started and big companies keep going.

I've organised a couple of jobs through HN now; it's been a good way to find interesting projects, and my clients have been pleased with the work. One said: "Thank you! I've played with it a bit and it looks very impressive! Way better than what I imagined this project could be."

I've worked on a very wide variety of web-based projects, as well as React Native, Windows, and other platforms, so I will be able to hit the ground running on most projects. If you're doing something a bit esoteric, that could still suit me – I've done FPGAs, network protocols, image processing at micro and global scale, and devised novel algorithms.

I am productive in every commercial programming language I've tried. In the last 5 years I've done commercial projects in (at least):

Typescript/Javascript (React Native, browser, and Node.js), C#, Python, Java, Swift, Ruby and Golang. I'm trying to find someone to pay me to do some Rust (I completed an Advent of Code in it.)

As well as building things, I am also good at talking to people to help figure out what we should be building. I enjoy working with other developers and helping the team learn, but I am also happy to get my head down and build what you need. I'm happiest on fixed-term projects that I can complete on a schedule that suits both of us, and my clients have been very happy with this process too.

For more details my website is https://www.lambdacambridge.com

Email: robin [at] the website above

SEEKING WORK | UK/Global – Cambridge/London/Remote

I'm a software engineer with two decades of commercial experience. I've helped startups get started and big companies keep going.

I've organised a couple of jobs through HN now; it's been a good way to find interesting projects, and my clients have been pleased with the work. One said: "Thank you! I've played with it a bit and it looks very impressive! Way better than what I imagined this project could be."

I've worked on a very wide variety of web-based projects, as well as React Native, Windows, and other platforms, so I will be able to hit the ground running on most projects. If you're doing something a bit esoteric, that could still suit me – I've done FPGAs, network protocols, image processing at micro and global scale, and devised novel algorithms.

I am productive in every commercial programming language I've tried. In the last 5 years I've done commercial projects in (at least):

Typescript/Javascript (React Native, browser, and Node.js), C#, Python, Java, Swift, Ruby and Golang. I'm trying to find someone to pay me to do some Rust (I completed an Advent of Code in it.)

As well as building things, I am also good at talking to people to help figure out what we should be building. I enjoy working with other developers and helping the team learn, but I am also a good lone wolf who gets things done. I'm happiest on fixed-term projects that I can complete on a schedule that suits both of us, and my clients have been very happy with this process too.

For more details my website is https://www.lambdacambridge.com

Email: robin [at] the website above