frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

How the Heck Does GPS Work?

https://perthirtysix.com/how-the-heck-does-gps-work
63•alfanick•3h ago

Comments

gobdovan•2h ago
Pretty cool. Would be nice to have the equation system as well in a recap, and the math not collapsed by default. Also had to look up other resources to understad that time correction refers to correcting a relatively short window of time, as it was not clear that receiver clock is actually accurate enough for short periods (milliseconds) to treat as affine.

So the trick, as always, boils down to engineering approximations, haha.

delamon•1h ago
This blog post is also worth noting: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
sam_lowry_•1h ago
Ciechanowski does a much better job explaining, I suspect the OP is just an AI ripoff.
shriracha•1h ago
hah good morning to you too HN (it's my piece and I'm not AI)
StrLght•32m ago
You don't need to belittle someone else's work. It's a series of articles, and author has 2 more articles that aren't related to articles Ciechanowski wrote at all.
codethief•1h ago
Yup, it was also posted in the other thread on GPS the other day and it is quite a bit better than OP's article, particularly because it doesn't give a false account of the involved relativistic effects:

> Satellites at the GPS altitude travel at the speed of about 2.4 mi/s relative to Earth, which slows the clock down, but they’re also in weaker gravity which causes the clock to run faster. The latter effect is stronger which in total results in a gain of around 4.4647 × 10−10 seconds per second, or around 38 microseconds a day.

> Unfortunately, this is where many sources make a mistake with their interpretation of that result. It’s often erroneously claimed that if GPS didn’t correct for these relativistic effects by slowing down the clocks on satellites, the system would increase its error by around 7.2 mi per day as this is the distance that light travels in those 38 microseconds.

> Those assertions are not true. If relativistic effects weren’t accounted for and we let the clocks on satellites drift, the pseudoranges would indeed increase by that amount every day. However, as we’ve seen, an incorrect clock offset doesn’t prevent us from calculating the correct position.

(Nevertheless there are of course relativistic effects to account for, which Ciechanow proceeds to mention and which are explained in more detail in the other link I shared here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47861535 )

NooneAtAll3•27m ago
that post is great on theory, but not the implementation

for that I'd recommend this youtube series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7JPjgHa7_A

sinaatalay•1h ago
Very cool to see these browser-native interactive 3D visualizations! Gives this such a different energy than a regular blog post would have had.

I'm guessing those visualizations wouldn't be in this post if it weren't for AI. The interesting question is what happens when ed-tech ships this pattern at scale. Exciting future.

jetsetman192•1h ago
Why would AI be needed for any of this?
sinaatalay•29m ago
It's not that AI is necessary, but it's that one may not choose to (or have the skills to) spend a whole weekend hand-coding a 3D interactive visual. But one might spin up Claude Code and build whatever the explanation actually calls for in 15 minutes.
codethief•1h ago
For anyone interested in a more detailed account of (general-)relativistic effects in GPS and other positioning systems, I really liked this article: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5253894/
keyle•1h ago
Always makes me laugh when you get some dimwit that claims the Earth is flat, but then uses Google maps in his car. Magic!

GPS are amazing. If you understand how they work, and how they reliably know the time etc. you'd think you live in the future; and yet it's everywhere, in our pockets.

openclawclub•1h ago
Great explainer. The part about atomic clock synchronization always gets me — the satellites carry atomic clocks accurate to 1 nanosecond, and the system has to account for both special AND general relativistic effects (the satellites experience different gravity AND they're moving fast enough that time dilation matters).

The correction factor is about 38 microseconds per day — small enough to ignore in everyday life but catastrophic for GPS accuracy if unaccounted for. No other engineering system relies on relativistic corrections in its day-to-day operation quite like this.

NooneAtAll3•29m ago
Page tries to load, then goes:

404 Page not found

Sorry, we couldn’t find the page you’re looking for

Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

https://social.hails.org/@hailey/116446826733136456
245•sohkamyung•2h ago•58 comments

3.4M Solar Panels

https://tech.marksblogg.com/american-solar-farms-v2.html
18•marklit•23m ago•0 comments

GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

https://cli.github.com/telemetry
16•ingve•29m ago•2 comments

How the Heck Does GPS Work?

https://perthirtysix.com/how-the-heck-does-gps-work
63•alfanick•3h ago•14 comments

Making RAM at Home [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6GWikWlAQA
427•kaipereira•1d ago•122 comments

ChatGPT Images 2.0

https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-images-2-0/
884•wahnfrieden•17h ago•738 comments

Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8M Ledger Mistake?

https://news.alvaroduran.com/p/nobody-got-fired-for-ubers-8-million
9•ohduran•1h ago•0 comments

All your agents are going async

https://zknill.io/posts/all-your-agents-are-going-async/
66•zknill•2d ago•41 comments

XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260421-00/?p=112247
62•ingve•5h ago•73 comments

MuJoCo – Advanced Physics Simulation

https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco
45•modinfo•3d ago•8 comments

Contact Lens Uses Microfluidics to Monitor and Treat Glaucoma

https://spectrum.ieee.org/smart-contact-lens-glaucoma-microfluidics
59•pseudolus•3d ago•2 comments

Laws of Software Engineering

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com
1060•milanm081•1d ago•486 comments

Garbage Collection Without Unsafe Code

https://fitzgen.com/2024/02/06/safe-gc.html
68•foota•3d ago•10 comments

Prefill-as-a-Service:KVCache of Next-Generation Models Could Go Cross-Datacenter

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15039
10•matt_d•3d ago•0 comments

Why Musicians Are Manufacturing Sold-Out Shows

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-17/how-bands-like-cameron-winter-s-geese-are-manu...
11•helsinkiandrew•3d ago•2 comments

The Vercel breach: OAuth attack exposes risk in platform environment variables

https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/26/d/vercel-breach-oauth-supply-chain.html
322•queenelvis•19h ago•109 comments

Windows Server 2025 Runs Better on ARM

https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/server-2025-arm64/
140•jasoneckert•3d ago•115 comments

CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/04/catls-new-lfp-battery-can-charge-from-10-to-98-in-less-than-...
24•PotatoNinja•1h ago•3 comments

SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

https://twitter.com/spacex/status/2046713419978453374
645•dmarcos•14h ago•806 comments

Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)

https://luminousmen.substack.com/p/drunk-post-things-ive-learned-as
168•zdw•12h ago•112 comments

Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/changes-to-github-copilot-individual-plans/
489•zorrn•1d ago•198 comments

Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

https://britannica11.org/
312•ahaspel•18h ago•105 comments

Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/14/the-mystery-in-the-medicine-cabinet
466•nkurz•1d ago•298 comments

Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment

https://www.courthousenews.com/preserved-for-billions-of-years-organic-compounds-found-on-mars/
80•geox•1d ago•3 comments

Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/meta-start-capturing-employee-mou...
624•dlx•18h ago•429 comments

Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games

https://thinkygames.com/features/10-years-of-grilling-stephens-sausage-roll-remains-one-of-the-mo...
213•tobr•4d ago•112 comments

Fusion Power Plant Simulator

https://www.fusionenergybase.com/fusion-power-plant-simulator
170•sam•22h ago•114 comments

Framework Laptop 13 Pro

https://frame.work/laptop13pro
1337•Trollmann•18h ago•672 comments

Cal.diy: open-source community edition of cal.com

https://github.com/calcom/cal.diy
222•petecooper•18h ago•54 comments

A printing press for biological data

https://www.owlposting.com/p/the-printing-press-for-biological
43•crescit_eundo•1d ago•0 comments