Top all-time · #1709
Tony Arcieri
Personal blog · unlimitednovelty.comprogramming
Tony Arcieri writes Unlimited Novelty, a personal blog at unlimitednovelty.com about programming. Since 2009, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 66 times, most often “Don't use bcrypt”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tony Arcieri's blog for essays on hiring and whiteboard interviews, password hashing (including 'don't use bcrypt'), and Ruby, Erlang and concurrency.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called 'good articles', 'enjoyed quite a bit', 'worth repeating' and 'very good'; one says it is worth looking at for hashing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hi, I'm Tony Arcieri. You may remember me from such software projects as Celluloid, Reia, and Cool.io...
Most-linked posts?
- Don't use bcrypt7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-03-19
- The Trouble with Erlang (or Erlang is a ghetto)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-07-26
- "Can you solve this problem for me on the whiteboard?"5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-01-31
- Multithreaded Rails is better than Async Rails, and Rainbows is cooler than Node3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-08-10
- Debunking the Node.js Gish Gallop3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-08-10
- Indentation sensitivity: a post-mortem?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-01-15
- Reia: Pluggable Parsers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-06-30
- Why critics of Rails have it all wrong (and Ruby's bright multicore future)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-03-05
- Introducing DCell: actor-based distributed objects for Ruby2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-04-17
- The cutting edge of VM design2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-01-29
What Hacker News says?
Agreed. I wrote this blog post: http://paulbjensen.co.uk/posts/2012/07/11/thoughts-on-rails-... Then Tony Arcieri wrote this rebuttal: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gis... He made some good points in his post, but the snarkiness was in my opinion a bit uncalled for. Being labelled a Rails Enthusiast when I had worked with Rails for over 4 years (2007-2011), 2 of those at New Bamboo (a big…
Comment linking /2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gish-gallop.html?showComment=1344730626043
on “What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project”Submitted Node.js has jumped the shark as a story · 321 points
HN discussionA pair of good articles on just this kind of thing: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/12/can-you-solve-this-p... http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
Comment linking /2011/12/can-you-solve-this-problem-for-me-on.html
on “Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but...”Submitted Why critics of Rails have it all wrong (and Ruby's bright multicore future) as a story · 189 points
HN discussionOne of the reply tweets linked an allegorical article about the pitfalls of whiteboard interviewing that I enjoyed quite a bit: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/12/can-you-solve-this-p...
Comment linking /2011/12/can-you-solve-this-problem-for-me-on.html
on “Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem”Submitted Don't use bcrypt as a story · 177 points
HN discussion4 years have passed and nothing has changed http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/12/can-you-solve-this-p...
Comment linking /2011/12/can-you-solve-this-problem-for-me-on.html
on “Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry”Submitted "Can you solve this problem for me on the whiteboard?" as a story · 130 points
HN discussionI like Erlang, but the lack of libraries to me just means more things that other people have already done (for other languages) that I may have to do myself, rather than taking those pieces, and putting them together to accomplish something unique and interesting in the real world. I can appreciate the fun involved in hacking on something for the sheer joy of writing new and (hopefully) beautiful code, but the busin…
Comment linking /2011/07/trouble-with-erlang-or-erlang-is-ghetto.html
on “Why I Program in Erlang”Submitted Don't use bcrypt (2012) as a story · 66 points
HN discussionFirst, links for context. Guido's take: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358 Arcieri's take: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2009/03/indentation-sensitiv... It's not hard if we disallow statements, and make everything into an expression that returns a value -- something that Ruby does right. The value of a block of statements is just the value of the last statement in the block. So, whether you c…
Comment linking /2009/03/indentation-sensitivity-post-mortem.html
on “What Pythonistas Think of Ruby”Submitted Multithreaded Rails is better than Async Rails, and Rainbows is cooler than Node as a story · 63 points
HN discussionI write it fully acknowledging that programming language flamewars are pointless, but this article just shows that you don't even have to try hard to create a biased comparison. Here's the essential difference between Go and Erlang: Go gets most of the things right, Erlang gets way too much wrong. So what does Go gets right but Erlang doesn't: * Go is fast. Erlang isn't * Go has a non-surprising, mainstream syntax.…
Comment linking /2011/07/trouble-with-erlang-or-erlang-is-ghetto.html
on “Some thoughts on Go and Erlang”Submitted Why critics of Rails have it all wrong (and Ruby's bright multicore future) as a story · 51 points
HN discussion> The argument for evented concurrency assumes threads work. Async design isn't a reaction to MRI's crappy green threads. Truly? To my understanding, event loops require inversion of control (and likely callbacks and broken exception handling). This is a large cost that requires a benefit to be worth it. I understand that benefit to be: you don't have to deal with threads (or bad implementations of such). This blog…
Comment linking /2010/08/multithreaded-rails-is-generally-better.html
on “Threads (in Ruby): Enough Already”Submitted The Trouble with Erlang (or Erlang is a ghetto) as a story · 50 points
HN discussionhttp://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/03/dont-use-bcrypt.html
Comment linking /2012/03/dont-use-bcrypt.html
on “A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords”Submitted If Ruby is object-oriented Perl, then Reia is object-oriented Erlang as a story · 42 points
HN discussionFirst entry on the svbtle network sure. I've blogged extensively here before http://unlimitednovelty.com And while it shouldn't be news to anyone using crypto, I still feel like it's a poorly-known subject.
Comment linking /
on “All the crypto code you've ever written is probably broken”Submitted REIA language designer on Twitter/Ruby/Scala discussion as a story · 32 points
HN discussionI'm the author of cool.io and Revactor (the latter was mentioned in this article), and as much fun as it is to experiment with these ideas, the path of least surprise, especially for Rails applications, is to use threads. I wrote about that here: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2010/08/multithreaded-rails-... Have I gotten burned by Ruby libraries that aren't thread safe? Sure. I found a thread safety bug in my appl…
Comment linking /2010/08/multithreaded-rails-is-generally-better.html
on “Ruby concurrency explainined simply”Submitted Ruby is faster than Python, PHP, and Perl as a story · 24 points
HN discussionYou know, you HN guys are super buzzword and design blind. This company slaps "bcrypt", "SSL", and "open source" on a decently designed bootstrap page and the response is "this will totally work!" Sad. For example, this statement "Credentials are stored as salted hashes using bcrypt," means passwords are being passed to this provider, so you better trust them to not be snooping passwords all the time. Also, bcrypt i…
Comment linking /2012/03/dont-use-bcrypt.html
on “Show HN: DailyCred: User Accounts as a Service”Submitted Introducing DCell: actor-based distributed objects for Ruby as a story · 23 points
HN discussionI think the sweet spot for this kind of thing is when doing websockets. For a "normal" site, Rails is fine; it does a ton out of the box, and I like the language more than Javascript. However, the websocket story with Rails is not as clear as with something like Node, Erlang, or Go. This is worth repeating: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gis...
Comment linking /2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gish-gallop.html
on “RailwayJS”Submitted The Cutting Edge of VM Design (2009) as a story · 16 points
HN discussion>> Spamming the input with an array of whatever OpenSSL algorithms Ruby happens to make available, rather than using a memory hard KDF like scrypt, is a bad smell. Sooner or later key-derivation schemes gets outdated and requires a better version as happened to bcrypt [1] and will happen to scrypt [2]. It is not "whatever OpenSSL provides" but just combining strong algorithms over to spread the "getting outdated" ri…
Comment linking /2012/03/dont-use-bcrypt.html
on “Show HN: Forgiva – Never saves your passwords but regenerates them”Submitted The new Reia: now without rainbow-farting Domo-kuns as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSomeone else explicitly says "Don't use bcrypt" [1] [1] http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/03/dont-use-bcrypt.html
Comment linking /2012/03/dont-use-bcrypt.html
on “How I became a password cracker”Submitted The Trouble with Erlang (or Erlang is a ghetto) as a story · 8 points
HN discussion
