Hacker News: dustingetz

New comment by dustingetz in "Clojurists Together – Q2 2026 Open Source Funding Announcement"

dustingetz — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:39:52 +0000

what needs funding is clojure core, Clojurists Together is a nice effort to try to fill a gap but what my business needs, and other business owners tell me they need, is for the core language (clojure and clojurescript) to not feel like it is falling apart. I want to invest my money in targeted, specific high value problems and get leverage on my money by sharing the cost with other business owners who need the same issues fixed. Until such a vector exists, the next best thing (for my business) is to fund a few key maintainers directly via github sponsorship. But because it is indirect and not outcomes-driven, the money amounts will be smaller. My business can afford to invest more than the $2400 per year that we have been donating since the release of Electric. My business has employed 4 devs for 5+ years, I can find more budget for investments in Clojure. Businesses pay for things (unlike individuals). We want to pay. We want our key dependencies to thrive. But there is no vector to invest in the specific core issues that would benefit my business to improve. And this makes me sad because over the last few years I find myself leaning more and more away from Clojure, even repelled (as if by some invisible force), instead of leaning in.

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?"

dustingetz — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:40:20 +0000

+1 about overseas freelancers. And US customer to European freelancer is not the arb it used to be. The California SaaS sector has collapsed in the wake of venture capital rotating into AI-native, saas budgets (salaries) are down, the dollar is down, and remote European salaries are up. Zoom latency across 7-8h timezone difference is workable, the current arb is to hire from further and further east. Unless there is a war disruption such as an attack on the trans Atlantic internet pipes.

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?"

dustingetz — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:30:00 +0000

i was very early to React (like adopted for an enterprise app the day it came out publicly) and developed probably the first forms and state management libraries. they had screenshots of the enterprise app. so anyone who googled “react forms” in 2014 would end up on my github as there was nothing else, and saw my screenshots, which created some inbound and also gave me a credibility edge when replying to JDs in 2015-2016 which helped me charge high fees. But this would not work today. Companies have brought the whole developer economy inhouse to push down costs, that category of development (applications) is considered solved by buyers for better or worse, there is not much of a freelance application development ecosystem anymore.

New comment by dustingetz in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"

dustingetz — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:34:28 +0000

Human dev labor cost is still the high pole in the tent, even multiplying today's subsidized subscription cost by 10x. If the capability improvement trajectory continues, developers should prepare for a new economy where more productivity is achieved by fewer devs by shifting substantial labor budget to AI.

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How do you handle clients who don't pay on time?"

dustingetz — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:44:29 +0000

it doesn’t work if they are insolvent, and it can also backfire if they see this clause as a way to get a cheap cash loan. you should still have the clause but i think if this as a tool for the collections attorney to use if the customer defaults.

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How do you handle clients who don't pay on time?"

dustingetz — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:33:52 +0000

upfront billing of professional services (“consulting”) is worse for a few reasons, (1) requires the customer to trust you more (they cannot withhold payment if you screw them or violate the contract) but generally the service provider is the riskier party (2) it causes service gaps (lost billable days) when the customer is late which is almost every month, (3) it requires you to define in advance exactly how many units will be billed and causes a service gap when you hit the retainer limit, (4) it gives the customer a natural ability to throttle billable hours which leads to unpredictable revenue. This all leads to higher bill rates, which is less palatable than a commitment to full time services contract. everyone involved wants predictable spend.

if this is an annual renewal payment for a saas, you need a process to follow which must include 60 and 30 day notices before the invoice, the rest varies greatly based on size - is this $1200/yr (credit card auto charge) or $120k (high touch sales rep)

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How do you handle clients who don't pay on time?"

dustingetz — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:25:50 +0000

this does NOT need to be explained. They have accounts receivable too. They know how this works. Put the process in the contract and follow the process.

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How do you handle clients who don't pay on time?"

dustingetz — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:12:33 +0000

net 30 terms, invoice exactly on time NEVER late, “please find attached invoice N, also kindly following up on invoice N-1 which is now past due”, each invoice lists invoice history and payment status (red if overdue), solvent companies will respond, insolvent companies will ignore, send a polite second reminder at 1 week, all solvent companies will respond and remedy here, if no reply send notice of breach at 2 weeks, even insolvent companies will reply to this, they will lie and tell you payment is en route but it will get stuck over some technicality, follow breach process exactly, disengage services after cure period expires and hand it to collections. If your customer is not communicating with you about invoices THEY ARE NOT SOLVENT. If payments are slowing down and tardiness is increasing, they are not being forgetful, THEY ARE RUNNING OUT OF MONEY. They are fundraising behind the scenes and they are hoping for the best while transferring risk to you, or their customer is delinquent and they are aligning payments to transfer that risk to you. Most customers see themselves as good and honest, they are mostly not supervillains trying to screw their counterparties at every opportunity, but they are also taking on hidden business risks and they are underwriting that risk with assumptions like “this payment aligns with this source of cash and everything is balanced and proper”. The moment their assumptions are violated, the moment a risk appears that they don’t consider part of their risk model, or a hope/expectation did not pan out, they will experience anxiety and fear, they will tighten their control over their cashflow to try to establish agency and fortify themselves against the threat.

The relationship is NOT more important because THEY ARE NOT SOLVENT. Do not allow subcontractors to send their own invoices, you must do this yourself to ensure that all communication is exactly on time and never late. Lateness and inconsistency on your side erodes your ability to run a tight collections process, because if you are lackadaisical about payments then they can be too. When you lose control of collections it is not because of text vs email or language, it is because you don’t respect your own process and therefore they don’t respect it either. And when the water gets choppy, they will not think twice (they will not even think at all) about pushing on boundaries because you did not clearly establish them. They are facing a threat, their amygdala is in control, they may not even consciously realize they are doing it. But your process will make that boundary a bright red line, it will force them to make screwing you a conscious decision. And you will know exactly where you stand at all times.

New comment by dustingetz in "When AI writes the software, who verifies it?"

dustingetz — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:20:35 +0000

try this for a UI

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: Are junior devs getting worse?"

dustingetz — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:43:31 +0000

hiring criteria is not uniform, it varies widely across all companies. Keyword driven hiring + contrived interviews that are disconnected from the actual work being performed (but easy to evaluate - this is substitution bias) has damaged engineering culture everywhere. The easy money period of 2018-2022 exacerbated these trends by removing accountability and causing rushed, loose hiring.

New comment by dustingetz in "AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder"

dustingetz — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:04:14 +0000

how do you know there is such thing as good code foundations, and how do you know you have it? this is an argument from ego

New comment by dustingetz in "The Evolution of the Interface(2000)"

dustingetz — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:32:12 +0000

(2000)

New comment by dustingetz in "Skip is now free and open source"

dustingetz — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:54:57 +0000

Jetbrains

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?"

dustingetz — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:14:21 +0000

real answer - have generational wealth, attach the documents to your trust. This should last either until your nation’s currency collapses or the trust value does.

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?"

dustingetz — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:05:54 +0000

the question is more about making the content readable by his progeny. Otherwise, encode into bitcoin ledger, done.

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?"

dustingetz — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 03:24:49 +0000

20 years - google doc with backups in your email and wherever your taxes and medical stuff is, and printed copy with your home records

40 years - print and bind the google doc in 20 years, store it with their stuff when they leave the house.

60 years - publish the book buy a bunch of copies and distribute

100 years - it needs to be a very good book

New comment by dustingetz in "AI is a business model stress test"

dustingetz — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:13:45 +0000

backend devs needing to be fullstack but consider frontend to be beneath them

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: What's it like working at early-stage YC startups?"

dustingetz — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 11:12:05 +0000

join after the A if you care about money. Join before the A if you are uniquely mission aligned or technology aligned, e.g. it’s 2016 and you want to work in VR, and aren’t optimizing for money right now. Early stage is fun and you’ll learn a lot and that’s about it.

New comment by dustingetz in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

dustingetz — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:15:02 +0000

skill issue

New comment by dustingetz in "Ask HN: MIT grad, junior dev layoffs – watching my daughter lose faith in merit"

dustingetz — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:59:40 +0000

Timing imo. I think the tech labor market bottom is in the past, venture capital is flowing again, companies that over hired have corrected it, interest rates are on their way back down, and a bunch of huge IPOs are lining up for 2026 - Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Databricks, Canva, Discord - which is going to inject a bunch of liquidity into tech capital markets. And the jury is still out on AI, very much at the top of a hype cycle, CEOs and boards have prematurely declared to their customers and the world that AI is working (because saying that makes their stock price go up) but the enterprise outcomes don't seem to be there.

My advice to your daughter: to try to make software into a fun hobby, watch a ton of coding youtube, AI and youtube are tearing down hurdles to learning, make a twitter, talk about your hobby, farm those likes. What were her favorite courses at MIT? it's true that software is increasingly competitive and yet the barriers to becoming competitive are ever lower (FOR those in a supportive environment who can make space to take advantage)