Ryan Moulton
moultano.wordpress.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Ryan Moulton writes occasional accessible articles on technical subjects such as deep learning, color, MinHashing and ranking, plus nature topics.
What HN saysCommenters say he posts rarely but well, praise the mix of tech and nature, and link his color gamut post and other articles.
32HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
92stories submitted
1.8Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why deep learning works even though it shouldn’t7 people · 365 points · first shared 2020 · 142 comments on HN
- 2Tour of the Sacred Library4 people · 98 points · first shared 2021 · 11 comments on HN
- 3The Deadweight Loss of Entertainment4 people · 22 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 4The Hunt for Dark Breakfast – Can we derive breakfasts we have never observed?4 people · 17 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You4 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 6Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?3 people · 174 points · first shared 2019 · 146 comments on HN
- 7MinHashing3 people · 25 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 8Fairly Ranking the Most Brilliant Birds3 people · 8 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 9The Abundance of Silicon Valley2 people · 187 points · first shared 2020 · 238 comments on HN
- 10Cross Views2 people · 175 points · first shared 2025 · 116 comments on HN
- 11There are infinite worlds to explore2 people · 116 points · first shared 2021 · 32 comments on HN
- 12The Defaults Don't Work2 people · 86 points · first shared 2020 · 30 comments on HN
- 13The Things They Won’t Believe2 people · 36 points · first shared 2021 · 7 comments on HN
- 14Small Products that Improved my Life2 people · 34 points · first shared 2024 · 3 comments on HN
- 15If childhood is half of subjective life, how should that change how we live?2 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
moultano · 2020-04-07
http://moultano.wordpress.com
I write accessible articles on technical subjects when I have some particular insight to share that I haven't seen written about before. That ends up meaning that I don't post very much, but I think the posts are very good when I do.
Here are some of my best posts.
Logs, Tails, Long Tails: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/logs-tails-long-tails/
Minhashing: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsxyg4467-6/
Why companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/why-do-companies-with-huge-r…
UncleOxidant · 2021-05-27
Ryan Moulton's Articles kind of a unique combination of tech and nature: https://moultano.wordpress.com/
7373737373 · 2026-07-31
I wonder when there will exist camera and (laser) projection systems - and with that, movies - that cover even more of the human visible color gamut
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/imax-with-laser-superb-contras… mentions that with IMAX Laser:
> Colour-wise, the full Rec. 2020 gamut/space is available—though we weren’t shown any films/trailers that actually made use of this larger colour space; they all used the DCI’s standard P3 colour space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020
I have no idea how well the analog film compares there
https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-you…
Daneel_ · 2026-07-17
Cyan is severely under-represented by monitors, so the extra pixel is a dedicated cyan. It dramatically improves the ability to display blue/green colours.
*edit: found the link I was after on this: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-you…
olejorgenb · 2026-06-20
Off topic, but the other articles are well made too. I enjoyed this one: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cross-views/
m3047 · 2026-06-08
I saw here on HN maybe a couple of months ago a post where someone had basically created a "color space" for breakfast foods... oh sweet, I found it:
The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-breakfast/
jey · 2026-06-08
Relevant: The Breakfast Simplex (https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-breakfast/…
rahimnathwani · 2025-02-26
most stereograms are designed to look correct when you cross your eyes This is how I look at stereograms (looking nearer than the page), but at least some of the images on this page seem like they're designed for the other way around (looking in the distance, beyond the page).
This one looks weird when I look at it cross eyed, but fine when I look at the other way.
https://moultano.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/174053204198…
sinenomine · 2022-12-15
It is common to switch to a conservative mode of thought upon entering one's domain of competence;
The question is, though, if the expertise and intuition developed during, say, running XGboost classifiers at scale in AdTech really of much relevance when thinking about large transformer models trained with a self-supervised objective and RLHF?
If you try to study this in depth, these models can do something the usual "datascience"-tier ones commonly cannot: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10343 https://moultano.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/why-deep-learning-works-even…
abecedarius · 2021-08-01
This kind of talk can be steelmanned, but even that version doesn't have reassuring answers to the likes of
> Okay, you’ve all told us that progress won’t be all that fast. But let’s be more concrete and specific. I’d like to know what’s the least impressive accomplishment that you are very confident cannot be done in the next two years.
(from https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/)
Just today I was rather astonished by https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/tour-of-the-sacred-library/ -- try digging up something comparable from mid-2019.
LargoLasskhyfv · 2020-10-15
This was nice to read, as was https://moultano.wordpress.com/2020/06/21/the-defaults-dont-work/
I bookmarked the site under my "long reads" tags.
The_Amp_Walrus · 2020-11-14
As a long-time reader of blogs (eg. slatestarcodex.com, kalzumeus.com, etc) I've sometimes struggled to keep up with all the posts that I'd like to read. I often don't make the time to sit down and plough through some of the longer ones.
I noticed that I listened to a lot of podcasts when commuting, so I made this website to convert interesting blog posts into a podcast. The tech component is mostly glue: the trafilatura scraper + AWS Polly TTS.
Given I find this site pretty useful, I figured that some HN readers would enjoy it as well. Here are some of my favourite articles from the past ~18 months with the accompanying audio:
Doing Business In Japan
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/e096c7623b305cb129c4dd5ecca8cd75…
A Deep Dive into K-pop
https://dormin.org/2020/09/06/a-deep-dive-into-k-pop/
https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/741f2612536071e911f9a964f5adb65c…
Peer review: Troubled from the start
https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-start-1.1976…
https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/4712ffd8d05dd1b51df2b7fedfc3fb82…
The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-
reason-your-city-has-no-money
https://media.blogreader.com.au/media/1f92611929679af2763b348b29deaa15…
A Software Engineer’s Guide to…