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nickjj commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
nickjj · 22 minutes ago
I've been a long time Windows user (20+ years) who heavily uses WSL 2 as my dev environment with tmux / Neovim but I'm switching to native Linux before the end of this year.

I tried once 7 years ago but ran into major audio issues that were a deal breaker but I'm hoping the Linux kernel has improved. I have the same hardware as before.

My dotfiles have been public for many years and can 1 shot a new or existing system in a few minutes with a bunch of command line tools on Debian, Ubuntu, Arch (with or without WSL 2) and macOS. It has an install script and theme switching for a long time which I've used to set up a a few systems (personal desktop, laptop and work laptop).

I've been casually tweaking a laptop running Arch with niri. I'm preparing a bunch of things in my https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to prepare for that push which will work on Arch Linux and be opt-in to install and configure a GUI and assorted tools.

nickjj commented on Python Workers redux: fast cold starts, packages, and a uv-first workflow   blog.cloudflare.com/pytho... · Posted by u/dom96
maccard · 3 days ago
That proves the point, right?

`time pip3 --version` takes ~200ms on my machine. `time go help` takes 25, and prints out 30x more lines than pip3 --version.

nickjj · 3 days ago
Yep, running time on my tool's --version takes 50ms and funny enough processing 10k CSV lines with ~2k lines of Python code takes 100ms, so 50ms of that is just Python preparing things to run by importing 20 or so standard library modules.
nickjj commented on My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)   jeffhuang.com/productivit... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi
nickjj · 3 days ago
I did something similar since 2001:

    -rw-r--r--  1 nick nick    691 Mar 16  2001 2001-03.txt
I separated mine by YYYY-MM which is long enough to keep related things together but short enough where it's easy to find things within a single file. It's all super easy to grep things out on demand.

There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.

https://github.com/nickjj/notes was created so I can type things like `notes hello world` and it inserts it for the correct YYYY-MM or `notes` to open the current YYYY-MM in your $EDITOR. It supports piping into it too (good for pasting from your clipboard). It's ~40 lines of shell scripting with comments.

nickjj commented on Python Workers redux: fast cold starts, packages, and a uv-first workflow   blog.cloudflare.com/pytho... · Posted by u/dom96
zahlman · 3 days ago
> I can't say I've ever experienced this. Are you sure it's not related to other things in the script? I wrote a single file Python script, it's a few thousand lines long.

It's because of module imports, primarily and generally. It's worse with many small files than a few large ones (Python 3 adds a little additional overhead because of needing extra system calls and complexity in the import process, to handle `__pycache__` folders. A great way to demonstrate it is to ask pip to do something trivial (like `pip --version`, or `pip install` with no packages specified), or compare the performance of pip installed in a venv to pip used cross-environment (with `--python`). Pip imports literally hundreds of modules at startup, and hundreds more the first time it hits the network.

nickjj · 3 days ago
Makes sense, most of my scripts are standalone zero dependency scripts that import a few things from the standard library.

`time pip3 --version` takes 230ms on my machine.

nickjj commented on Python Workers redux: fast cold starts, packages, and a uv-first workflow   blog.cloudflare.com/pytho... · Posted by u/dom96
randomtoast · 3 days ago
One of my biggest points of criticism of Python is its slow cold start time. I especially notice this when I use it as a scripting language for CLIs. The startup time of a simple .py script can easily be in the 100 to 300 ms range, whereas a C, Rust, or Go program with the same functionality can start in under 10 ms. This becomes even more frustrating when piping several scripts together, because the accumulated startup latency adds up quickly.
nickjj · 3 days ago
> The startup time of a simple .py script can easily be in the 100 to 300 ms range

I can't say I've ever experienced this. Are you sure it's not related to other things in the script?

I wrote a single file Python script, it's a few thousand lines long. It can process a 10,000 line CSV file and do a lot of calculations to the point where I wrote an entire CLI income / expense tracker with it[0].

The end to end time of the command takes 100ms to process those 10k lines, that's using `time` to measure it. That's on hardware from 2014 using Python 3.13 too. It takes ~550ms to fully process 100k lines as well. I spent zero time optimizing the script but did try to avoid common pitfalls (drastically nested loops, etc.).

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/plutus

nickjj commented on McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash   theguardian.com/business/... · Posted by u/terabytest
nickjj · 4 days ago
It's surprising to me at how hard companies are pushing AI when it's in such a poor usability state.

I was trying to sign up my step dad to SiriusXM (he wanted it) so I called their phone number. The first interaction with the company is them saying you are speaking to an AI and to ask what I'm trying to do. So I said something like "I'd like to sign up for a new account but have a question about the promotional price". It said it couldn't understand the request and I had to repeat things a few times until it gave up and sent me to a human where the question was resolved quickly but it took minutes to reach a human.

It's wild to me that companies are putting AI at the top of their sales funnel.

nickjj commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now   dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin
nickjj · 5 days ago
One of the entries is:

> How to build a Faraday Cage for your bedroom

I'll get there eventually. A friend and I always joke about this since it took me to 2021 to get a smartphone (by choice).

nickjj commented on Django 6   docs.djangoproject.com/en... · Posted by u/wilhelmklopp
Vaslo · 10 days ago
Very cool and can tell you keep up with it just with your addition of uv!
nickjj · 10 days ago
Thanks.

Switching to uv ~6-7 months ago was so worth it. It took like 3 seconds to repackage this project thanks to uv, that's building and locking every dependency with Docker too.

nickjj commented on Django 6   docs.djangoproject.com/en... · Posted by u/wilhelmklopp
nickjj · 10 days ago
Congrats to the Django team!

If anyone is curious, I've been maintaining a Docker Compose based Django + Celery + Postgres + Redis + esbuild + Tailwind starter app for years and just updated it for Django 6.0 at https://github.com/nickjj/docker-django-example.

The only thing I haven't done is pre-configure the new CSP settings because I want to let that marinate a bit before putting it in as a default.

u/nickjj

KarmaCake day12855February 7, 2014
About
Hi, I'm Nick.

A self taught / self employed full stack developer focused on building and deploying web apps. I openly write about and make videos on just about everything I've learned along the way.

https://nickjanetakis.com/

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