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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

There was a Googler who spent some time at the South Pole station and gave a talk about it. I won't name him here, but maybe he's reading this?

What I recall was him walking around and over the actual Pole and trying to get his GPS to register 90.0 degrees. It wouldn't go beyond 89.999.

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Hackers would probably also love to consider that a lot of hardware that has code that depends on lat/lon for internal calculations can have all sorts of weird problems. When you are exactly at the pole longitude can switch from +180 to -180 rapidly and that can be a catastrophic edge case for anything that needs to do positioning.

I had the pleasure of watching an expensive drone crash into hull of a ship and sink into the ocean at the north pole for this exact reason.

How come you were at the North Pole?

There are scientific, mining, and pleasure trips

How was your food up there?

Since all the longitude lines converge there, that's expected behavior, right?

Hah, I also tried this over the summer. Closest I could get was 89°59.9990'S:

https://brr.fyi/assets/misc/gps-01.png

Very amusing to do a few "laps around the world" and watch the longitude go haywire.

Hi! Like everybody here on HN I love your site. Have you tried on a Garmin handheld too? It seems like something brr.fyi would pack for the trip

Why wouldn't you name him here?

Why do you care?

Well, I personally would be interested to see the talk/learn more about those in tech who have gone to the pole.

well, since someone else named him (and btw, I just thought it was rude, that's all):

I think this is the talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM

Glad you're being conscencious but why would it be rude to name somebody who wants to share their amazing experience? In fact, I think in today's world or would be rude not to promote their name and story link to their video.

There are several Polies here (and folks who've spent time in other cool places - Ross Island, Greenland, Atacama Desert come to mind) and at least some are in tech.

My Pole experience is a bit dated, but happy to chat about it. Blog from that is https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/

(also, I dig the single-page latex resume format!)

Hah thank you! LaTeX was the easiest way to avoid using a WYSIWYG editor

I'll check out that blog, thanks for linking!

I've been at these two places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alert%2C_Nunavut

And yes: It was cold.

About food there were supplies almost every week as far as I remember, but I believe we got UHT milk.

Pablo Cohn, I believe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaQtsft2bM

yup. It didn't occur to me that it was on YouTube.

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