Top all-time · #2293
Ryan Moulton
Personal blog · moultano.wordpress.com · on HN as moultanoaidatamath
Ryan Moulton's personal blog at moultano.wordpress.com covers ai, data and math. Since 2013, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 123 times, most often “Why deep learning works even though it shouldn’t”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ryan Moulton's blog for essays on colour and displays, such as the breakfast-food colour space and where to find colours screens can't show, plus pieces on tech and nature.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Described as a unique mix of tech and nature; other articles called well made; one post 'nice to read' and bookmarked as a long read.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why deep learning works even though it shouldn’t7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-10-19
- The Hunt for Dark Breakfast – Can we derive breakfasts we have never observed?4 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2026-02-23
- The Deadweight Loss of Entertainment4 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2025-12-10
- Tour of the Sacred Library4 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-07-21
- Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-06-19
- MinHashing3 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-11-18
- Ranking the Prettiest Birds with Math3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-08-14
- Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation?3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-10-03
- Small Products that Improved my Life2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-09-23
- If childhood is half of subjective life, how should that change how we live?2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-30
What Hacker News says?
> but the middle "Text-to-Image Diffusion Model" step that magically outputs a 64x64 pixel image of an actual golden retriever wearing an actual blue checkered beret and red-dotted turtleneck is where I go "WTF??". It doesn't output it outright, it basically forms it slowly, finding and strengthening more and more finer-grained features among the dwindling noise, combining the learned associations of memorized convo…
Comment linking /2020/10/18/why-deep-learning-works-even-though-it-shouldnt/
on “Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model”Submitted Why deep learning works even though it shouldn’t as a story · 356 points
HN discussionhttp://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-ta... Minhashing: https://moultano.wordp…
Comment linking /2019/10/02/why-do-companies-with-huge-resources-still-have-terrible-moderation/
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Logs, Tails, Long Tails (2013) as a story · 214 points
HN discussionI wrote this following a similar line of thought, but with the root problem being a collective action problem around community rather than an internal psychological tradeoff between short and long term. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-dead-weight-lo... I certainly think hijacking our short term rewards is a big part of it, but in addition, that hijacking prevents people from putting in the effort that…
Comment linking /2025/12/09/the-dead-weight-loss-of-entertainment/
on “Thin desires are eating life”Submitted The Abundance of Silicon Valley as a story · 184 points
HN discussionRyan Moulton's Articles kind of a unique combination of tech and nature: https://moultano.wordpress.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Cross Views as a story · 173 points
HN discussionThis trend among other things is one of the inspirations for writing this essay that was well received on here a few weeks ago. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2020/06/21/the-defaults-dont-... I really feel like we don't have any effective model for how to integrate parenthood in our lives anymore, and so having kids has become almost an affectation or a hobby, rather than something that everyone bases their life aro…
Comment linking /2020/06/21/the-defaults-dont-work/
on “The global fertility rate is falling”Submitted Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation? as a story · 172 points
HN discussionThis 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…
Comment linking /2021/07/20/tour-of-the-sacred-library/
on “Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)”Submitted There are infinite worlds to explore as a story · 113 points
HN discussionI wrote a guide to the Minhashing family of algorithms that goes into a little more depth than is covered in the LSH section of this course. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsx... You might find it useful if you've ever thought about using MinHash and wondered how to incorporate weights rather than treating everything as a set.
Comment linking /2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsxyg4467-6/
on “CS246: Mining Massive Data Sets”Submitted A Few of the Birds I Love as a story · 101 points
HN discussionYou all might enjoy some of the things I've made with it. Tour of the Sacred Library — A short story illustrated with VQGAN+CLIP https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/tour-of-the-sacred... Doorways — A series of images exploring "semantic symmetry" using CLIP's embeddings to do visual analogy completion. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/08/23/doorways/ Depth of Field — Exploring the scale of the Hubble Ultra…
Comment linking /2022/03/24/depth-of-field/
on “The Weird and Wonderful World of AI Art”Submitted Depth of Field as a story · 89 points
HN discussionmost 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/2…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2025/02/17405320419888595852203168102922.jpg
on “Cross Views”Submitted Tour of the Sacred Library as a story · 86 points
HN discussionIf they look inverted you are probably diverging your eyes instead of crossing them. In that case the images in this section should look correct. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cr...
Comment linking /2025/02/24/you-should-make-cross-views/
on “Cross Views”Submitted The Defaults Don't Work as a story · 86 points
HN discussionSee: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/why-do-companies-w...
Comment linking /2019/10/02/why-do-companies-with-huge-resources-still-have-terrible-moderation/
on “A Facebook content moderator’s resignation note”Submitted The Things They Won’t Believe as a story · 34 points
HN discussionIf you're new to the idea of locality sensitive hashes and want to learn about them, or would like to use one on on massive sparse data and a key-value store, I wrote up a post that walks through all the families of minhashing algorithms starting from the beginning (and culminates in our work extending them to probability distributions.) https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsx... This is my favo…
Comment linking /2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsxyg4467-6/
on “A neural algorithm for similarity search (2017)”Submitted Small Products that Improved my Life as a story · 19 points
HN discussionIf you were curious about the reference to MinHash in the OP, I just wrote a gentle guide to the MinHash family of algorithms (including our recent research extending it to probability distributions.) https://moultano.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsx...
Comment linking /2018/11/08/minhashing-3kbzhsxyg4467-6/
on “Show HN: All-pair similarity search on millions of sets in Python and on laptop”Submitted How Karma Systems Should Work: The Beta-Binomial as a story · 12 points
HN discussionAuthor here. Glad you all are enjoying this. It was a lot of fun to make. You might also like my previous piece that had an accompanying narrative. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/tour-of-the-sacred...
Comment linking /2021/07/20/tour-of-the-sacred-library/
on “There are infinite worlds to explore”Submitted The Hunt for Dark Breakfast – Can we derive breakfasts we have never observed? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in AI art, I've made a few more things built out of a series of generated images around a theme. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/08/23/doorways/ https://moultano.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/tour-of-the-sacred...
Comment linking /2021/07/20/tour-of-the-sacred-library/
on “Depth of Field”Submitted MinHashing as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
