moultano

As someone who has spent a lot of my life editing bezier curves, this is really fantastic.

The one sticking point is instability in the middle of s curves which seems difficult. We're getting better control for every fully convex or non-convex path in exchange for chaos at the boundary between the two. I wonder if incorporating some other error term of the curvature in those regions might help, perhaps guaranteeing that the curvature derivatives are close to continuous whenever the curvatures themselves get too small?

One other thought is that you could use a saturating function of the tangent circle radius so that 0 curvature points don't have to have their control points go to infinity, perhaps making the saturation point a function of the distance to the nearby nodes to keep the scale reasonable.

Personally, I decided that being ambitious at work wasn't as important to me relative to being involved in my kids' lives, and intentionally pulled back. I'm fortunate that my work offers part time options, so I went down to 80%. I take two half days per week to spend the afternoon with my kids after school.

I think it may not be in the underlying BirdColorBase data, unfortunately.

I may have to figure out how to retitle it. I would not have expected so many people to think that about birds!

This is awesome. Are ordinary objects bright enough to register their spectra in it?

You might also enjoy this, a project to find real world things with all the cyans you can't display on a computer screen. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-... After doing this I was looking for some way to do spectrophotometry with a small enough amount of equipment that my wife would approve of, so that I can add more things to the list and confirm their color.

You can click them.

I have another article about that! https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cr...

i-Ready has two products, i-Ready diagnostic and i-Ready learning. The diagnostic is solely used for adaptive testing. The learning software is used for classwork, homework, and lessons. The learning software is what this is about. Lots of schools just use the diagnostic tests.

Thank you! Two of my favorites. I'm honored.

Wow! Great suggestion. Whether to count coconut milk as milk is a decision I had not yet had to make.

My thinking at the moment is that I probably would not. It seems like further research would reveal a whole new region in the upper left, clustering with Dan Bing, of "asian milkless crepes."

Aggakake is on the chart!

It's easy, if you normalize it so that it sums to one, it drops a dimension, and becomes an equilateral triangle.

French toast isn't plotted because the recipe doesn't customarily start with flour, but if you do plot it it ends up in the lower middle. If you have exceptionally eggy challah, then you might be able to push it into the abyss, but really exceptionally eggy, like 1:1 egg to flour by weight.

A related idea that I'd like to see more people do. If you have 10-20 tweets on a subject, plug the holes and turn them into an essay on the real internet. My first step in writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763 was to copy a bunch of tweets into a doc.

Micro blogging is a great way to brainstorm and iterate on your thoughts over time, but eventually you have enough material to graduate from micro blogging to blogging, and more people should do it.

I think most great parents didn't feel ready, and in some sense not feeling ready is evidence of the kind of conscientiousness that makes you a great parent. I think it is a valuable service to push people who want kids but aren't sure when to have them to have them earlier than they otherwise would. You never know how difficult it will be for you until you start trying.

> This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.

I'm describing my impression of other people's experience there, not mine, (note the word "exclusively") the sort of downside I see of living an inward life of hedonism.

This essay was in part an inspiration for my (much more upbeat) essay which was on here yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452763, and I linked it at the end, but I thought it deserved a submission on its own.

The graph is just to clearly convey the idea, not to give it any more connotation of rigor than the idea itself has. The idea has a long enough history and enough research behind it to be in psychology textbooks and be referenced on Wikipedia, but it seems to resonate for some people and not others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#:~:text=Propor...

I 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 make collective alternatives competitive.

Yes, I wish we could serve static content more like bittorent, where your uri has an associate hash, and any intermediate router or cache could be an equivalent source of truth, with the final server only needing to play a role if nothing else has it.

It is not possible right now to make hosting democratized/distributed/robust because there's no way for people to donate their own resources in a seamless way to keeping things published. In an ideal world, the internet archive seamlessly drops in to serve any content that goes down in a fashion transparent to the user.

Notable how this is only possible because the website is a good "web citizen." It has urls that maintain their state over a decade. They contain a whole conversation. You don't have to log in to see anything. The value of old proper websites increases with our ability to process them.

I love that book. It's an all time favorite, and an inspiration.

I just wrote a novel at 41, and am starting the process of trying to get it published. Almost everything about aging in the article hit home, but something that struck me very differently about writing, is that I'm not trying to be "recognized." I made something I think is beautiful, and I want to share it with people. Hopefully one of the benefits of aging is being less dependent on others' judgement.

I love Charley Harper's depiction of all the colors in a winter bird feeder. https://charleyharperprints.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/W...

Red winged blackbirds are another all time favorite of mine. It is so startling when you see their wing colors flare, and hear their strange polyphonic song. I wish I got to see them more.

Yes, it's possible that some of the diversification within those clades happened before the impact, but the start of the radiation is so close to the impact that I think it's unlikely that it happened earlier. It would be too much of a coincidence, and the error bars for the molecular clocks almost always include the impact.

Huh. Here they only sing in the morning. Are you sure it was a mockingbird? I've heard people have that reaction to whippoorwills and other nightjars that sing loudly and repetitively all night.

It's leftover from when all mammals were nocturnal. Color vision is useless at night, there aren't enough photons to care about their frequency, so mammals lost it almost entirely and only primates have re-evolved the red-green distinction. Birds were big stomping dinosaurs, and out during the day, so their color vision is great.

Some mammals can see UV even though they can't differentiate it from other blues. One theory I recall reading is that detecting UV would interfere with our unusually high visual acuity, but I forget the argument why.

Is there a way to import your Goodreads library after profile creation? I skipped it because I couldn't get it to download on mobile, but will probably only use the site if I can import it later when I'm at my desk.

Yes.

Clever!