matklad's Arts&Crafts
Visit matklad.github.io → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jul 2019 – Oct 2026
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I feel like I got substantial value out of Claude today, and want to document it. I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don't expect to say anything particularly useful or novel. However, I am constantly complaining about the lack of boring AI posts, so it's only proper if I write one.
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
In my last post about Zig and Rust, I mentioned that Rust is a scalable language. Let me expand on this a bit.
A short post about a neat little Zig idiom. Consider your average {sum type, variant, tagged union, enum, alt}:
This post is a case study of writing a Rust application using only minimal, artificially constrained API (eg, no dynamic memory allocation). It assumes a fair bit of familiarity with the language.
An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren't web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I'd much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this stuff from trawling MDN, so perhaps it is valuable to document…
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I had a productive day today! I did many different and unrelated things, but they all had the same unifying theme:
More or less the title this time, but first, a story about SIMD. There are three levels of understanding how SIMD works (well, at least I am level 3 at the moment):
I want a better shell.
Something truly monumental happened in the world of software development in 2025. Safari shipped a reasonable implementation of text-wrap: pretty: https://webkit.org/blog/16547/better-typography-with-text-wrap-pretty/. We are getting closer and closer to the cutting-edge XV-century technology. Beautiful paragraphs!
I find myself writing yet another toy parser, as one does during a Christmas break. It roughly follows Resilient LL Parsing Tutorial. Not because I need resilience, but mostly because I find producing a syntax tree and a collection of diagnostics a more natural fit for the problem than bailing out on the first error.
This is an introductory article about shell injection, a security vulnerability allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user's machine. This is a well-studied problem, and there are simple and efficient solutions to it. It's relatively easy to design library API in such a way as to shield the application…