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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?



Also check out Kragen's examples from a thread a couple of years ago!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988917


Wow, that’s an awesome resource actually. Thanks!


> 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)


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


Neat! Thank you!


TIL -- thank you, brother!


You can just save a step and ask ChatGPT the answer. It can google the current spot price of gold.


Sure, but then I need to do all the math to verify the answer it gives me isn’t gibberish anyway.


You can just save a step of double-checking everything by using WolframAlpha

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


What if its wrong


>25580 acre-feet of water

This is why we can't have nice things.




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