Hacker News: justinlloyd

New comment by justinlloyd in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026)"

justinlloyd — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:40:34 +0000

    Location: San Francisco, CA and Los Angeles, CA
    Remote: Yes, hybrid considered for the right money.
    Willing to relocate: Not at this time
    Current Level: Senior Staff / Principle / Lead

    I'm a seasoned generalist with deep focus in certain areas such as game development, performance engineering, systems engineering, low-level engineering and embedded software.

    What I shipped this year for money: Performance improvements to HFT code (Rust & C++) for financial trading. Firmware for the hardware of an ereader (Rust+ARM).

   What I shipped last year for money: High performance (C++) server backend for a video game.

    Current side-project: Deep internals work on VS Code Web: using quilt to maintain patches against upstream, extending it with inline agent panels and custom completion providers, backed by a bespoke C# server replacing the Node.js REH with my own dedicated server - similar in spirit to Coder's Code Server or OpenVSCode-Server.

    Technologies: kernel drivers, systems engineering, video games, AI, LLMs, caching, graphics, rendering, assembly languages, generative AI, heavy focus on back-end systems, and to a lesser degreee, full-stack.

   - Languages: C++, C, C#, Go, Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Lua, + more.
   - Backend: node, FastAPI, Django, PostgreSQL, mySQL, RocksDB, GraphQL, SQLite.
   - Engines: DumpsterFire, UnrealEngine, Unity3D.
   - Platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, SONY PS2/3/4, XBOX360/One, Switch, embedded, web
   - Frontend: Next, React, Vue, Pixi
   - DevOps/Cloud: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, VMs, Vagrant, VMWare, TeamCity, Jenkins, CI/CD
   - AI/ML: Model training/tuning, LoRa, RAGs, PyTorch, TensorFlow, SciKit, OpenCV, etc, etc, generative AI and computer vision.
   - LLM Integrations: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude plus many others, local and cloud.

    Résumé/CV: https://justin-lloyd.com/ (PDF at the bottom of the page)
    Email: justinrlloyd@gmail.com

    MSc in CompSci and MSc in AI/Robotics

    20+ years of experience in performance critical systems engineering, video game development, embedded (C/C++/Rust/Asm), low-level engineering & AI, full stack and high performance backends.

    Open to full time or contract. Looking for something low-stress and interesting, so open to unconventional setups, but base comp still needs to be grounded in reality.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2026)"

justinlloyd — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:23:45 +0000

    SEEKING WORK | Remote
    Location: Los Angeles, CA and San Francisco, CA

    I'm a seasoned generalist with deep focus in certain areas such as game development, performance engineering, systems engineering, low-level engineering and embedded software.

    What I shipped this year for money: Performance improvements to HFT code (Rust & C++) for financial trading. Firmware for the hardware of an ereader (Rust+ARM).  

    Current side-project: Deep internals work on VS Code Web: using quilt to maintain patches against upstream, extending it with inline agent panels and custom completion providers, backed by a bespoke C# server replacing the Node.js REH with my own dedicated server - similar in spirit to Coder's Code Server or OpenVSCode-Server.

    Technologies: kernel drivers, systems engineering, video games, AI, LLMs, caching, graphics, rendering, assembly languages, generative AI, heavy focus on back-end systems, and to a lesser degreee, full-stack.

   - Languages: C++, C, C#, Go, Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Lua, + more.
   - Backend: node, FastAPI, Django, PostgreSQL, mySQL, RocksDB, GraphQL, SQLite.
   - Engines: DumpsterFire, UnrealEngine, Unity3D.
   - Platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, SONY PS2/3/4, XBOX360/One, Switch, embedded, web
   - Frontend: Next, React, Vue, Pixi
   - DevOps/Cloud: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, VMs, Vagrant, VMWare, TeamCity, Jenkins, CI/CD
   - AI/ML: Model training/tuning, LoRa, RAGs, PyTorch, TensorFlow, SciKit, OpenCV, etc, etc, generative AI and computer vision.
   - LLM Integrations: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude plus many others, local and cloud.

    Résumé/CV: https://justin-lloyd.com/ (PDF at the bottom of the page)
    Email: justin@justinlloyd.io

    MSc in CompSci and MSc in AI/Robotics and an MBA

    20+ years of experience in performance critical systems engineering, video game development, embedded (C/C++/Rust/Asm), low-level engineering & AI, full stack and high performance backends, leading and managing multiple teams.

    Open to full time or contract but prefer contract. Looking for something low-stress and interesting so flexible on money.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2026)"

justinlloyd — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:11:42 +0000

    I'm a seasoned generalist with deep focus in certain areas such as game development, performance engineering, systems engineering, low-level engineering and embedded software.

    Location: San Francisco, CA and Los Angeles, CA
    Remote: Yes, hybrid considered for the right money.
    Willing to relocate: Not at this time

    Current side-project: Deep internals work on VS Code Web: using quilt to maintain patches against upstream, extending it with inline agent panels and custom completion providers, backed by a bespoke C# server replacing the Node.js REH (similar in spirit to Coder's Code Server or OpenVSCode-Server).

    Technologies: kernel drivers, systems engineering, video games, AI, LLMs, caching, graphics, rendering, assembly languages, generative AI, heavy focus on back-end systems, and to a lesser degreee, full-stack.

   - Languages: C++, C, C#, Go, Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Lua, + more.
   - Backend: node, FastAPI, Django, PostgreSQL, mySQL, RocksDB, GraphQL, SQLite.
   - Engines: DumpsterFire, UnrealEngine, Unity3D.
   - Platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, SONY PS2/3/4, XBOX360/One, Switch, embedded, web
   - Frontend: Next, React, Vue, Pixi
   - DevOps/Cloud: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, VMs, Vagrant, VMWare, TeamCity, Jenkins, CI/CD
   - AI/ML: Model training/tuning, LoRa, RAGs, PyTorch, TensorFlow, SciKit, OpenCV, etc, etc.
   - LLM Integrations: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude plus many others, local and cloud.

    Résumé/CV: https://justin-lloyd.com/ (PDF at the bottom of the page)
    Email: justin@justinlloyd.io

    MSc in CompSci and MSc in AI/Robotics and an MBA

    20+ years of experience in performance critical systems engineering, video game development, embedded (C/C++/Rust/Asm), low-level engineering & AI, full stack and high performance backends, leading and managing multiple teams.

    Open to full time or contract but prefer contract. Looking for something low-stress so flexible on money.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)"

justinlloyd — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:55:08 +0000

    > Note, AI experience is a plus, but not welcome

?

New comment by justinlloyd in "Samsung forces ads onto fridges; is a bad sign for other appliances"

justinlloyd — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 22:02:49 +0000

You can certainly do that, but then your Samsung refrigerator will not acknowledge the water filter inserted into it and refuse to dispense water or make ice.

This is an actual thing.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

justinlloyd — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:16:36 +0000

Working on: A romance novel (of all things).

Designing: A new social media website.

New comment by justinlloyd in "A map of torii around the world"

justinlloyd — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 23:12:09 +0000

Los Angeles. Missing both my front gate and my back gate, and the temple bell just inside, and the kabukimon that leads to the engawa, covered by the nokishita. Shikata ga nai

New comment by justinlloyd in "Dear CTO: it's not 2015 anymore"

justinlloyd — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 17:10:49 +0000

My second time with "unlimited PTO." Two days in eight months. I attended a funeral. "There's never enough time. We need to get this milestone shipped. Maybe next quarter we can build in some slack for you."

New comment by justinlloyd in "Life is not a story"

justinlloyd — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 17:54:11 +0000

Same here. It's just wishy-washy uncommitted phrasing indicative of "don't make a strong opinion that is polarizing" that is so characteristic of AI generated text. I used to use an online writing service for content many years ago and one of the hallmarks of "I'm doing this for a little extra money" and "I'm a pro writer between gigs" was the "in conclusion" and "therefore" and the three part school essay structure. It screamed bad writing, and I am seeing the same kind of flags in AI generated text too.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Life is not a story"

justinlloyd — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 17:51:28 +0000

Am I supposed to take this article seriously?

I see the author is perhaps ironically rejecting a narrative by using another narrative to advocate for their position.

The author is sort of implying that there's harm to society and the individual by engaging in these narrative arcs without any actual evidence to support their position. Merely a "I feel" and "might" and "could even become dangerous."

Way too many wishy-washy phrases attempting to soften their opinion, but then goes on to present a false dichotomy of absolutes vis-a-vis: You either embrace the narrative structure and have it destroy you, or you reject the narrative structure and live a care free life.

And because of the uncommitted weasel phrases this entire article has the hallmarks of AI generated slop that someone had to rush through for publication because they procrastinated. I'm flagging this one as "yawn."

New comment by justinlloyd in "Cats are (almost) liquid"

justinlloyd — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 23:54:24 +0000

When a cat can go between two openings that are too small for the cat to pass through and the cat isn't being observed is what's interesting though and nobody has yet explained that.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it"

justinlloyd — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 19:30:58 +0000

Yes, I started a new job in March and my various marketing efforts in multiple channels contributed, but two of my personal websites, and basically the C.V. website, is brought up in conversation by other people more than any of my other public websites.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it"

justinlloyd — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 19:29:00 +0000

Yes. 100% Several times. Though it's just another marketing vehicle, and with marketing, it is an amalgam of all of your marketing efforts in all channels. And a personal site doesn't have to be a blog.

New comment by justinlloyd in "ReMarkable Paper Pro"

justinlloyd — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 06:21:33 +0000

To difficult to swat flies with and the hired help cannot spread them on the kitchen floor after mopping so that the floor dries faster.

New comment by justinlloyd in "ReMarkable Paper Pro"

justinlloyd — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:28:34 +0000

The kind of ebook reader you open to the crossword puzzle and say "harrumph" an awful lot whilst sitting in your high back wing chair in front of the fireplace where discrete employees refill your brandy snifter. You may occasionally bend down one corner of the ebook reader as you peer askance at the likes of who they are letting in these days. There is a member of staff whose sole job it is to stand nearby with a real news paper and snap the pages to show your displeasure as you return to crossword. Five down, "someone who adds nothing to the conversation beyond pointing out the minor flaws in another's statements." Begins with P... With P... Hmmm...

;-)

I kind of like this A1 ebook idea. Time to get out the wallet.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Sainsbury Wing contractors find 1990 letter from donor"

justinlloyd — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 23:46:10 +0000

The fact that telex was immensely faster, lower bandwidth, operated on terrible PSTN networks (not regular telephone networks) with absurdly low quality, could work internationally with no special hand-off equipment or special fax lines being required, and had multicast and store-and-forward built-in to the protocol and had an image printer protocol extension that was superior in quality to fax and again, required no special equipment for international transmission, could work even when the mains electricity was down (phones and telexes were on separate networks), teleprinters could be powered directly from the telex connection, could work over low bandwidth ham radio connections, and is still in use today in certain parts of the world where it is critical the information gets through, there's a reason that a lot of companies still used the telex well into the early part of the 21st century.

Not meant as a explaining type of response, merely as a "this is an interesting piece of useless information."

New comment by justinlloyd in "Copy-on-write performance and debugging"

justinlloyd — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 22:41:40 +0000

Have been running ReFS on a drive on my Windows 10 workstation for about three years, and recently started using a dev drive equivalent on Windows 10 for the past two months. Our Unreal Engine project is quite large, 600+GB straight from the P4 depot before building. I need to keep a few separate workspaces around, one for current development work, one for swarm reviews, one for "let me test out a thing that might break" because as we know, branching in Perforce can quite painful, especially on large depots. At one point I needed to have dozens of workspaces synced to specific changelists whilst we hunted down a bug in one of our levels.

ReFS, with block de-duplication and LZ4 compression has reduced the per-workspace footprint to around 10% of what it was previously. Decreased build times by around 5% and decreased archive, stage and package times by about 80% by deploying MSBuild SDK CopyOnWrite. I also moved the DDC onto the VHDX where the project resides which has further reduced the footprint of the project.

Windows 11 canary channel (still in canary I think) has a modified Win32 that supports CoW FileCopyEx. You can get similar gains by other means on Win10 and Win11 by using ReFS CoW aware utilities.

Have used XFS, BTRFS, APFS and others extensively over the years, so I am glad that Windows is finally getting in on the action.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Monopolies across the grocery supply chain squeeze consumers, small businesses"

justinlloyd — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 14:48:15 +0000

This reads like whataboutism. Very disingenuous.

New comment by justinlloyd in "Medieval game pieces emerge from the ruins of a German castle"

justinlloyd — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 23:46:55 +0000

Grew up in a 15th century farm house that was built decades before Columbus set sail and re-discovered the Americas. A few years ago the wife and I were contemplating buying a property in England where the realtor enthusiastically explained that "the plumbing was modernized in the 16th century."

New comment by justinlloyd in "Cat as a Service"

justinlloyd — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 02:14:50 +0000

There are limitations to the bandwidth available in the cat distribution network which I don't think have ever been studied adequately. There's probably a grant that could be applied for in there somewhere. There's probably some interesting research to be done in cat distribution network congestion too.

I did some computer vision research, and an unpublished (though posted on a blog) paper in the area of feline toe bean rejection on a multi-touch display in a predator/prey simulated environment, i.e. a touch screen display with a virtual mouse (prey) interacted with by a real cat AKA "an expensive cat toy."