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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty cool, it's one of the rare applications I've used where the things I've tried "just work". For example "10 kg to g", "c", "c to km s^(-1)", "c to km/s" all work intuitively. It's great it works at the command line too.

Something I wish I'd had when I was studying Physics.

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All of these things work in Google, btw. Google has one of the best unit conversion tools, and it's built into the search.

I've always been frustrated by how Google's unit conversion doesn't integrate well with its calculator.

That's why 99% of the time there's no need to use the calculator, just type your formula straight into the search.

And use a remote server with at least 1RTT of delay to do basic arithmetic. Big Data indeed.

It's not so basic though. Google knows the current value of most currencies, for instance. It's actually more efficient for the central servers to pull that data and the clients to query once in a while, rather than every single client (local calculator) to constantly keep all that data up to date. And that's just the currencies.

How many times in you lifetime does the inches-meters conversion rate will change?

Currencies I can understand hitting a remote server, but general unit conversion and basic arithmetic?

Also, how that statistic goes? Each Google search costs burns them about $1 in electricity costs? ;).

How is wolfram alpha? I always use it for more complicated pure math, but I don't think I ever used it for unit conversion.

It's great at unit conversions. You can do things like "number of milliseconds between amsterdam and paris at speed of sound". I use it all the time.

Your query doesn't exactly work though, it's interpreted as "paris at speed of sound". However "time between amsterdam and paris at the speed of sound in milliseconds" does work, returning 1.26*10^6 ms.

(shame smiley) I could've tested the query, but I wrote it on mobile.

Hahah, I was also on mobile. The mobile website of Wolfram Alpha works pretty good, they also have an app but haven't tried it yet.

You can convert 100m to femtoparsecs, for example.

Oh wow, even microparsec/kilofortnight in m/s works now. This did not work for many years, and prompted me to write my only ever e-mail to Google with a complaint about 5 years ago.

Unfortunaetly, the conversion 30 miles per gallon in liter/100 km still displays an equal sign, which is technically wrong. However, this conversion is so useful, that I won't complain about it.

Plus exchange rates

10EUR + 11 USD + 1500 USD + 500CAD in ZAR

There are side effects.

https://i.redditmedia.com/4FDIQLPJFtaOSXIDOlj6I9lCpVYdz8O06Y...

I always used my HP48; it had great unit support.

GNU units(1)

Included on OS X, too! (though apparently a BSD version). Wow, I did not know this.

That's very much the BSD version, which is far more limited in capabilities.

GNU Units is available under homebrew (as "gunits" IIRC).

Thank you very much for the feedback!

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