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Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

(flak.tedunangst.com)
304 points zdw | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 16:49 UTC | HN request time: 1.457s | source
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robin_reala ◴[08 Jul 25 14:02 UTC] No.44500076[source]▶
If you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 and haven’t heard the original 500-mile email story, you can read it at https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles.

(discussed previously on HN 5 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 – and 10 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708)

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jeffhuys ◴[08 Jul 25 14:48 UTC] No.44500505[source]▶

   > units
   751 units, 62 prefixes
   You have: 10 miles
   You want: meters
    * 16093.44
    / 6.2137119e-05
Huh. Never knew that was a thing!
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bspammer ◴[08 Jul 25 15:41 UTC] No.44501068[source]▶
It's one of my most used utilities, as someone who can't help but nerd-snipe myself on the regular. Example questions that I've used it for, just in the last week:

If I work 42 hours/week, how many minutes is that per year?

I've downloaded 4.91GB in the last minute, what's that in Mbps? How long will it take to download a 76GB game?

This AWS feature costs $0.045/hour, how much is that per month?

This guy I read about traveled 58,000km in 27 years, what's his average speed in m/s?

How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?

If a 36 inch pipeline can deliver 25580 acre-feet of water in a year, how fast is the water flowing in m/s?

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jmoggr ◴[08 Jul 25 16:41 UTC] No.44501691[source]▶
> How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?

Is there some trick to this? Or do you have to input it like:

You have: 4/3pi(10 cm)^319320 kg/m^345000 GBP/kg

(What ChatGPT gave me)

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1. bspammer ◴[08 Jul 25 17:00 UTC] No.44501862[source]▶
units has (I assume room temp/pressure) densities for all elements, as well as some precious metal prices and currency exchange rates (you need to run the units_cur program regularly to update the database for these). It also has tab completion to make discovering these a bit easier.

The invocation is

You have: goldprice * golddensity * spherevol(10cm/2)

You want: GBP

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2. jmoggr ◴[08 Jul 25 17:22 UTC] No.44502077[source]▶
Neat! Thank you!
3. thedrexster ◴[08 Jul 25 20:38 UTC] No.44503864[source]▶
TIL -- thank you, brother!