Hacker News: southpolesteve

New comment by southpolesteve in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"

southpolesteve — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:42:01 +0000

I worked on IceCube. Was at the South Pole for a little over a month. Wild once in a lifetime experience. And if I am being honest I was terribly bored after the first 2 weeks. Its very flat and white and cold and not much to do. I was asked to go back the next year and I said no.

New comment by southpolesteve in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"

southpolesteve — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:39:54 +0000

What an amazing accomplishment! I played a very tiny part in this project and went to the South Pole in 2009 to help with construction. Didn't see any neutrinos the entire time I was there though :/

New comment by southpolesteve in "IceCube observes seven potential tau neutrinos"

southpolesteve — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 13:46:58 +0000

I worked on this project in college and went to the South Pole in 2009. Happy to see it is still making discoveries!

Angular and Wiz Are Merging

southpolesteve — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 18:49:52 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/status/1770478763253379488

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39770518

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

New comment by southpolesteve in "Uber open-sources tool to automatically clean up stale code"

southpolesteve — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 01:53:57 +0000

Please do!

New comment by southpolesteve in "TLA+ model checking made symbolic"

southpolesteve — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 17:10:50 +0000

Azure Cosmos DB does. There is a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYX6UrY_ooA

New comment by southpolesteve in "The IceCube Neutrino Detector at the South Pole Hits Paydirt"

southpolesteve — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 23:38:18 +0000

I worked on this project in college and went down to the south pole after graduation to help install some of the detectors. Neat to see the results! ~10 years later.

New comment by southpolesteve in "Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?"

southpolesteve — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 02:52:51 +0000

Yes. bustle.com, romper.com, and elitedaily.com are all 100% serverless and do 80+ million unique visitors per month. GraphQL+AWS Lambda

New comment by southpolesteve in "Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript"

southpolesteve — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 16:49:19 +0000

More specifically React https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric

New comment by southpolesteve in "When I use classes, when I don’t, what I do instead and why"

southpolesteve — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 19:46:03 +0000

I also find `this` is terrible for linting. Most tools won't be able to figure you what you attached to `this` at runtime. It's a grab bag object ripe for bugs.

Amazon is Terrifying

southpolesteve — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 22:09:09 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@mikeal/amazon-is-terrifying-7333422ec40d

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529253

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

New comment by southpolesteve in "Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?"

southpolesteve — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:27:34 +0000

Very straightforward. We send text, they send back categories. We then map those to IAB categories in our own code

New comment by southpolesteve in "Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?"

southpolesteve — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:26:53 +0000

The mapping is custom. Not something they have out of the box.

New comment by southpolesteve in "A Case for Clojure and GraphQL: Replacing Django"

southpolesteve — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:32:23 +0000

I see this comment a lot. The issues are the same with any REST API. Often they have been solved many times by the community or are baked into whatever backend framework you happen to be using. GraphQL (and community) are still converging on a set of best practices, but you can still solve the issue yourself using the same techniques from REST. Here is how we do it at Bustle:

1. Wrap the entire query execution in an auth check. This is similar to whatever happens in a REST auth flow. Check the caller is legit before moving on. Nothing graphQL specific here.

2. Check auth on fields. This is a neat thing about graphQL. You can statically analyze the fields in the query to make sure the caller is only accessing fields they are supposed to. We do this by adding an `auth` property to the standard graphQL-js field object. When we build the schema we do some fanciness to wrap the resolvers in a new function that checks that field and behaves accordingly[1]

3. Throw errors on unauthorized data. Same as you would in a REST API. If you get back data the caller can't access, check it before replying. Obviously not ideal, but sometimes this is the only option.

At someone on twitter's request I wrote up some more thoughts a while back about running graphQL in production: https://gist.github.com/southpolesteve/08edb6a481c07f66eb71e...

I also gave a talk on this at Node Interactive last week: https://youtu.be/vI9ERvz9WWU

[1] https://gist.github.com/southpolesteve/e190e9572d060b5158366...

New comment by southpolesteve in "Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?"

southpolesteve — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 09:55:22 +0000

Yes. We use the Natural Language Understanding service at www.bustle.com for doing categorization of content. It maps decently to IAB categories: https://www.iab.com/guidelines/iab-quality-assurance-guideli...

New comment by southpolesteve in "Why You Should Treat C-Players Like A-Players"

southpolesteve — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 12:01:50 +0000

Martin Fowler's serverless post was written by Mike Roberts. It is just hosted on Martin's blog.

New comment by southpolesteve in "My coffeehouse nightmare (2005)"

southpolesteve — Mon, 01 May 2017 13:13:21 +0000

The place you linked in Philly is a few blocks from my house. I've been a handful of times. Much more of a restaurant. I think it is a good example of a place trying to do too many things. As a coffee shop it is pretty sub par. It does not have a good vibe during the day. There are much better proper coffee shops within a few block radius.

Of course I am just one anecdote. They could be doing amazing.

New comment by southpolesteve in "Support for tagging of Lambda functions and for the Python 3.6 runtime"

southpolesteve — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 20:58:00 +0000

We haven't seen any issues. Most of our latency critical functions are called a lot. We do get significant spikes in traffic but our CDN does handle some of that load.

New comment by southpolesteve in "Support for tagging of Lambda functions and for the Python 3.6 runtime"

southpolesteve — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 23:53:20 +0000

API Gateway needs less config since they released the proxy style integration. In Lambda's case this means you can just return a JSON object like:

{ "statusCode": 200, headers: {}, body: "

Hello!

" }

And API Gateway knows exactly what to do. Before this, yes there was some extra config and it was not fun.

PS. Our AWS bill went down when we moved everything to Lambda but that was not the motivating factor for the switch

New comment by southpolesteve in "Support for tagging of Lambda functions and for the Python 3.6 runtime"

southpolesteve — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 23:23:03 +0000

If you go to www.bustle.com or www.romper.com you get a JS app server side rendered by AWS Lambda and delivered through API Gateway (CDN in front of that). We do 50+ million unique visitors a month. Our team is super happy with the result and our AWS bill is smaller than it was on EC2. Cost was not a motivating factor for the switch but it is nice when the bill goes down.

It is most definitely ready. I gave a talk at Node Interactive last year that has some more detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4rvh_Iq6LE&index=2&list=PLf...