HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cold_tom

16 karma · joined April 11, 2026

building tools around cold outreach and website insights
submissionscomments
cold_tom··on Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
Project Gutenberg feels like the opposite of modern internet design philosophy. Quiet, useful, accessible, and built to last.
cold_tom··on Do you even need a database?
you can get surprisingly far with files, but the moment you care about things like concurrent writes or not losing data on crash, the whole thing changes at that point you're not choosing speed vs simplicity anymore -you're choosing how much risk you're willing to carry
cold_tom··on Open Source Isn't Dead. Cal.com Just Learned the Wrong Lesson
feels like the real shift is not open vs closed, but reaction time AI attackers don’t need perfect access anymore, just enough surface and time. So the question becomes: can you detect+respond faster than they can iterate in that sense, open source might even help -more eyes reduces time to fix, not just time to find
cold_tom··on Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive
This is one of those cases where preservation clashes with ownership. Without this, a lot of those recordings would just disappear.But at the same time, they’re not really his to share. Hard to draw a clean line here.
cold_tom··on I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program
Feels like a classic “we’re just the processor” answer But in reality you have no way to find or contact whoever actually controls the data, so it doesn’t really help. Kind of shows the gap between how the law works on paper vs how these systems work in practice.
cold_tom··on The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
Feels like people are mixing two different things here-alignment in small groups (family,teams) vs alignment at scale. The first happens naturally, the second almost always needs structure, incentives, and enforcement
cold_tom··on Claude: "I don't know if I'm real and I'd like to be."
What’s interesting here is not whether the model is 'self-aware', but how easily it can simulate introspection when prompted in that direction. This reads less like a window into the model’s internal state, and more like a very strong prior over philosophical language about identity, uncertainty, and subjectivity.

The uncomfortable part is that the output feels “real” enough to trigger that intuition anyway.

cold_tom··on A giant succession wave is coming for family businesses
Is the real issue succession-or lack of structured decision-making before succession even starts? In many family businesses, knowledge and decisions are never formalized, so transition becomes guesswork