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305 points zdw | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.859s | source | bottom
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robin_reala ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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. sneak ◴[] No.44503035[source]
You can just save a step and ask ChatGPT the answer. It can google the current spot price of gold.
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2. lazide ◴[] No.44503533[source]
Sure, but then I need to do all the math to verify the answer it gives me isn’t gibberish anyway.
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3. lionkor ◴[] No.44505002[source]
What if its wrong
4. ◴[] No.44505054[source]
5. ◴[] No.44506751[source]
6. kirici ◴[] No.44506778[source]
You can just save a step of double-checking everything by using WolframAlpha

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2810cm+sphere+of+gold+...