Years ago, you could get discounted flights to Europe where you couldn't check in any luggage. Why? That allowance was taken up by documents for various clients. This was usually quicker than any courier services at the time.
I've had friends who worked in the oil and gas industry. One story I was told was where parts were desperately needed to repair a drill bit on a gas platform. The best option? Someone would fly halfway around the world, drive to a particular factory, wait for the parts and then fly back. This was cheaper and faster than any courier service, even if you spent $10,000+ on the ticket.
This was exacerbated because a person with 200lb of machine parts could walk through customs where a shipment might get stuck in customs for weeks. And each day of non-operation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The manufacturer scrambled it down to the local airport, where they bought it a passenger ticket on the next plane out. While it was in the air, they arranged for an express courier in the destination city to pick it up from the airport and break the speed limit all the way to the phone office. Whereupon the driver asked the recipient which driveway to use because "the one that looks like the main entrance doesn't look like it's meant for truck traffic".
Truck? What?
Evidently the courier service heard the declared value of the shipment and just assumed it must be enormous, so they sent a semi. This enormous truck had picked it up and had been hurtling down the road, empty, with a pizza-box-sized parcel on the floor of the cab, where it would be safer.
I would’ve been part of the chain that got a semi out to deliver it.
The specialty pharmacy fucked around and found out. I social engineered my way up the chain of command, interrupting the medical director’s dinner. They ended up hiring a courier to fly it halfway across the country. A dude showed up the doorstep at 4AM (four hours before it was needed) with a box packed with dry ice. The poor courier dude had a three hour cab ride, which probably cost more than the drug.
I made the courier and driver breakfast and coffee. The courier was fascinating, he had great stories and basically had a career mostly built on corporate screw-ups.
Those plane tickets, with coolers of ice in hand, are crazy to me.
And yeah, there are those cases where batch 1 was sent 'on time' with Courier 1 who didn't realize what they had, and let it thaw. And so backup batch 2 was sent 'super-express' with Courier 2 with minutes notice.
I was a summer student at a company that manufactured top drives for drill rigs. My days were mostly spent filing drawings and preparing documentation packages. One morning when I arrived at work, the head of the department asked me, "do you have a passport?"
He gave me a package of documents, an 18" machined steel rod and tickets for a flight that was roughly three hours from takeoff.
After driving home to pick up my passport and then across town to the airport, I didn't have enough time to check bags or even read the documentation I'd been given. I guessed the value of the part being 'under $1000' and US customs took me aside. While I was waiting, I read the documentation and discovered it was worth ~$50, though customs let me go before I could tell them.
Shockingly, I didn't have any trouble at security carrying the metal rod. I stepped onto the plane and they closed the doors behind me.
I was told that the downtime cost around $100,000 per hour, and that I was bringing the second replacement part. The first one sent was too small, which delayed repairs by a day.
In any case, that was my first (and thus far only) visit to Grand Junction, Colorado. I was kind of surprised that Canadian customs gave me way more hassle on my return the next day, despite that I had all my documents in order by then.
So I was on a redeye that night from California to Texas with a Shuttle Cube w/PCIe slot and an ESD wrist strap under my arm. After reprogramming all of the cards in Texas it was back to the airport to catch another overnight flight to Scotland. Then after doing those cards it was on to Singapore, but I did get to stay one night in a hotel in Scotland since the soonest flight was the next morning. After doing the Singapore cards it was one night in Singapore and then back to California. Around the world in 5 days.
An ex-girlfriend worked for a large yogurt manufacturer. One of their manufacturing plants had an issue with "the culture" (the bacterial culture used for fermenting the yogurt, that is). She said product was exploding out of containers in the incubation rooms.
The operators decided to sterilize the plant and bring a sample of bacterial culture from another of the company's plants. An employee was paid to ride in a first class seat beside a temperature-controlled container of bacterial culture.
Of course, the team decided not to use those aluminum wheels and instead tried to round off any sharp edges on the remaining magnesium ones. Another wheel broke and the car was damaged too much to continue competing.
My close relative worked off shore for decades. Sometimes a down large production platform is a MILLION dollars an hour. Flying someone anywhere with a $250,000 part in their hands is nothing. There are entire industries built around "getting things to the rig/platform" faster.
They can be privately owned and operated, are very fast, and tend to have hundreds of kilos of payload capacity.
This was over the Christmas-New Year period. There was a real risk of a shipment getting stuck in customs for days or possibly even weeks. An arriving passenger's luggage doesn't go through that same process. I mean it's obviously still checked by customs but it's done so immediately.
Customs in most countries is hilariously broken, they can seize or sit on your stuff for months with no recourse and no due process.
This is normal in the IT industry. For high-value customers, vendors would be expected to fly in parts as needed. As just one example, I had a server flown in by a major reseller when the delivery service (UPS, IIRC) lost the original and the project was going to miss a critical deadline. HP's 6 hr CTR (call to repair) warranty guarantees your hardware will be restored within 6 hours of your call to support. It includes a local inventory of parts so that they can effectively replace the server if needed.
Anecdotally I once had to fly to another EU city (some 1,200 km distance), get a rented car, drive to the house of the vendor at night (he took the pieces home after we phoned him at like 5 PM on a friday, a good reason to be friends with people) then drive to another city to be able to take an early flight back next morning.
The items were (at the x-ray machine in the airport) a bit suspect (they were drilling bits for a tunneling machine, in practice looking a lot like hand grenades) but I managed to convince the police they were spare parts/consumables.
But that was years before checks at boarding gates were tightened (yes, we could bring a water bottle) I wonder if they would pass today.
So someone out there must have made a courier-as-a-service website for this?
Sign up some people to be on standby, with a passport and a list of countries they have visa for, list them with their current location.
Person signs up to potentially make a few grand if they get the call.
Firms who are in need of a person throw in the money and the tickets.
Does that work? If I need something carried by a person from London to NYC today, what do I do?
We used it on a contract job in Tennessee once, to get a replacement UPS sent. Expensive, but worth it.
I was working on the demo software for the on-stage reveal of a certain super secret cell phone from a certain manufacturer. Every time the phone had to have its firmware updated or the hardware switched out some guy had to come to my office and carry it back in-person to the HQ.
I remember one time I wrote the codename of the device on the outside of the anonymous box because I was worried the courier person might end up just leaving it at the reception at HQ and then the box would get opened by someone who shouldn't be seeing it. I thought having the codename on the outside would at least let it get routed internally to the team working on it.
I got a very, very angry phone call from someone at certain manufacturer swearing and cursing at me saying that someone could have seen the name and everything would have been exposed, blah blah. Total bullshit.
In the end the demo went ahead successfully in front of a world-wide audience. The live demo was supposed to be loaded onto some certain servers, but time ran out and it ended up running off a PC in my business partner's closet over his home DSL. A certain CEO was not aware of this as he held the device on stage. Watching the event on a stream from the BBC was a pants soiling moment.
He loved doing demos without a network connection etc. Back then WiFi was always restricted and hot spots too slow.
They were still a courier service. I once sat next to a guy (in first class!) who was accompanying checks to Hawaii. Yes, not so long ago they had to physically travel to the issuing bank. He was basically retired so he did this to travel, around and earn some money.
At the end of the flight they let him leave first. He told me they would let him off and he would go down to the tarmac to watch the cargo hold be unlocked and make sure the cargo wasn’t tampered with.
I’ve also had someone hand carry electronics to / from a customer. Sometimes it’s just easier.
I didn't see anyone specifically put on a plane to collect a part - but there was no need, as the field team were flying around all over the place anyway. So, a manager would accost someone going from Aberdeen to Houston, for example, and ask them to put a 10kg part in their luggage on the return journey. Then the part would get dropped off at the Aberdeen facility, and put on the next chopper to the offshore platform that needed it.
Doesn’t that just create TWO cadavers?
Fortunately looks like the growth curve is less than linear.
Wouldn't that just be a courier then?
I played around with the title and character limit for a minute, and managed to get: "A small flat-rate USPS box's weight limit is physically impossible to exceed". How's that?
This isn't useful for USPS box packaging; I just think it's neat.
edit: Also, inertial confinement fusion plasmas go up to about 1,000 g/cm³,
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0008231 ("Unified first-principles equations of state of deuterium-tritium mixtures in the global inertial confinement fusion region")
Airlines work the same way. 2x50 lb bags cost $30 each. One single 100lb bag has a $200 surcharge.
- 1 small 40lb box - $260
- 3 small 40lb boxes grouped as one shipment - $750
- 8 small 15lb boxes, one shipment - $840
One guy mailed a bank. One brick at a time.
It gives me a UPS 2nd day air quote of $338.90 from 27518 to 95050 for a 12" x 8" x 8" box weighing 115 lbs. That's supposedly 66% off retail ($1000.12).
But as sibling comment mentions, think of the person delivering a 115 lb package. I semi-recently shipped some treadmill parts to a recycler and they went via three boxes (the recycler paid for them).
It’s kind of a silly purchase considering it’s a lot of money for 2 metal cubes, but it’s honestly very impressive just how heavy that small cube is - both objectively, and when compared to the aluminium cube. Also makes for a great talking point when having guests over.
Right now, I can order a 66lb "Happybuy" anvil for $153 with free prime shipping. One assumes that the $153 includes the cost of shipping it all the way from China in the first place.
For comparison, a similarly sized anvil from a reputable local dealer costs $949 plus tax and shipping at the lowest rate (UPS standard) is $93.
https://sites.google.com/site/fluordoublet/%E3%83%98%E3%83%B...
A few years later, the ExPack was deprecated and replaced with the LetterPack envelope, which now has a limit of...only 4kg (8.8lbs). Hah!
Pun of the day.
They make rubber adhesive strips with four or five wee bits of tungsten in them, but they are too expensive for general use, nor do they offer the precision you get from a continuous length of lead tape. They are also too thick to install on the handle pallet under the grip, which is no problem with lead tape since it's about 0.3 mm thick (rough guess, I haven't actually mic'ed it).
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RPOI7F4/
I, too, felt bad for the guy until I saw him toss it on his shoulder like it was nothing, carried to the garage and gently set it down. Not a big guy, either. :-)
*'Other Regulated Materials - Domestic'
So the volume of the box is 82.6669921875 cubic inches. Assuming we're shipping a block of Tungsten at 0.7 lb/in^3, then our shipment would weigh 57.86689453125 lbs, which is less than 83% of the maximum allowed weight of 70lbs.
I wonder how closely my results agree with the Twitter post...
FYI next time you can use something like nitter (eg. https://nitter.net/PaulMSherman/status/1516936733769801734) which works with scripts disabled.
The interior dimensions (8 5/8" x 5 3/8" x 1 5/8") are ~75.333 in^3.
If you filled the box with pure osmium, the densest substance known to man, it would weigh ~61.48 lbs.»
Should have said densest substance on Earth. Fill it with neutron star and you’ll be approx. 30 trillion kg overweight.
Had to post this correction before @neiltyson popped in with an "Actually..."
I don't have anything to plug, so just try to be a little bit better than normal if you happen to think of it, but don't make a big deal out of it--no one's asking you to be a saint.
This struck me as the most frighteningly bizarre, arbitrary and pointless rule I had heard in a long time, and I spent a while trying to fathom the logic of it.
I suppose it isn't really a surprise - laws surrounding weapons reflect two conflicting views and intuitions, on the one side that they are inherently scary and suspicious, on the other that they are unremarkable if handled responsibly. I wish our laws reflected a neighborly attempt by the two groups to live together and avoid unsettling the one and persecuting the other. Alas, they flip randomly between the one view and the other, managing to cause these issues for BOTH groups!
Most staggering example was trying to get a very very small box of engine controller CPUs from Penang Malaysia to an auto plant outside of Philadelphia to get there before 8am shift start. Only way to make it work was hand carry from Penang through Singapore to Anchorage, clear customs and then rented Learjet to Philly.
Penalties for late delivery were massive. In this case had we been a couple hours later would have resulted in cascading loss of production resulting in auto union people needing to work during their summer shutdown and quite large cost.
Semiconductors are different from other parts. They take a long time to manufacture. And, sometimes you think you've made them but they just die for whatever reason. If you want to make a new factory it takes years too. I wonder if the auto companies have learned to keep some semiconductors around just in case. Oh wait. No.
I feel old.
(edit: changed from 744 to 745 to take long October months with winter hour changes in account, add a second to that if you want to be sure about leap seconds)
Until as recently as 2019 this approach - using a prototype - was the only extant mass definition, the prototype kilogram lived at a specialised laboratory and its clones were used around the world to define mass (yes including the pound if you're an American).
[ Today instead the Planck constant is defined to be exactly 6.62607015×10^−34 kg x m^2 per second and it's possible to build devices such as a Kibble balance to estimate what the kilogram is from knowing this definition, the better your Kibble balance the better the estimate ]
IIRC the English unit for mass is the slug. If the tecnical limit is 70lbs or so, that is must technically be read as lbs force -- aka force of gravity which varies with location.
https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/n/neutron+star#:~:text=....
Densest material on earth
There are denser materials, but you would struggle to send them via UPS
For example, you need to compress the implosion-type nuclear device with another implosion-type nuclear device first to get it to fit in the box.
It would be remarkable, but I guess it's hard to imagine how that could work.
There was a suggestion that hydrogen metal could be metastable at low pressure -- it would be much denser than molecular hydrogen -- but it looks like that's controversial:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen
edit: Turns out diamond is ~70% denser than other forms of carbon, so that's sort of an example. Though its density is pretty low in absolute terms (~3.5 g/cm³).
Like a balloon exists at STP despite being internally at higher pressure, but balloons also pop. Tempered glass also exists and significantly higher pressure and likewise explodes. Often metal structures will retain some stress (sometimes quite high) after manufacture.
The amount of energy released at some of those other materials if they had the magical property of staying together... would be terrifying if popped.
[0] free Prime shipping for the win
I was able to buy a 2" tungsten cube from Alibaba for $312 after shipping. It was cheaper than any (re)sellers I found on Amazon/eBay/webstores. It came out to 137% more tungsten for only 56% more cost. $39.00 per cubic inch versus $59.26 per cubic inch.
Having it next to an aluminum cube of the same size is fun.
People putting listings on amazon are exploiting what a particular market will pay.
The electrodes aren't very big, but the density is definitely weird.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28318754 ("My Tungsten Cube", 330 comments)
Amazon negotiates with UPS and other couriers, and they have their own shipping service, so their merchants pay a lot less than the "retail" cost for shipping to amazon customers. For that 66lb anvil, amazon charges ~$35 for fulfillment including picking, packaging and shipping. About 50 cents a pound. Amazon also charges other fees including the commission/referral on the sale, storage, etc that are mostly not based on item weight, this is about $20 more for a $150 sale.
Retail cost to ship a 66lb anvil UPS from LA to SF would be about $90. With a regular commercial discount about $65, more for longer distances and less for shorter. If you are in the business of shipping a lot you can negotiate a slightly better rate than $1 a pound.
In my case, free shipping didn't turn out all that great; it was damaged when it got to me. Fortunately I was able to get free replacement parts from the company.
I suspect Amazon probably lost money on that deal since they had to hire specialty movers, but who knows?
plus, you look official like that.
Another case is for shipping products to customers. With how insurance works, the insurance would cost you more than just sending the item again. However, proof of delivery is really nice for if a customer claims something was never delivered.
Or you could have not and actually let him do it, then you could say it happened.
my story, about 1988. we had a system in Omaha with a broken power supply (it was big, say 6U, custom voltages). there was a spare in Rapid City, and downtime was charged by the hour.
no problem, took the spare in a box to the airport. they told us it was too big for counter to counter; but a ticket could be purchased and it would be put on the plane. No, problem.
"Give me a coach ticket to Omaha." "Sorry sir, those are all sold. We do have a first class ticket available." "In that case, OK"
The box went in the cargo hold.
Incorrect. The avoirdupois pound (lb) is historically a unit reflecting the long conflation of mass and force, but the modern unit of that name is expressly a mass unit that is a derived unit of the kilogram. The corresponding unit for force is the pound-force, (lbf).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)
The pound unit of force is abbreviated ‘lbf’.
Look at me though, judging people's decisions on the internet through a second hand story.
Happy - human technology is capable of these things.
Sad - only the hyper-wealthy can afford it.
Hopefully in 20 years treatments like these will be accessible to 'commoners'. So much progress has been made in the last 50 years that I wonder what the next 50 hold.
And we will have clean fusion energy while our General AI robots take care of our needs. Maybe just bigger smartphones, who knows?
A distinction which blew my mind as I had had the ammo shipped to me recently, and it would never have occurred to me that there was a problem, so long as it was packaged safely.
These days, Acme is better known for these[0]. :)
Flat rate is particularly interesting because the single rate applies, as implied, regardless of weight or distance. I sell a product that is 3 lb and fits into the aforementioned padded flat rate envelope. This means that I can ship it to the farthest reaches of Alaska or Guam for the same $8.45 (USPS commercial rate) as to any other US address.
https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Cold-Steel-Computer-Aided-Manufa...
For anybody else interested I did some search-engining on Chuck Hutchins' name and came up with this neat blurb about him: https://www.machinedesign.com/archive/article/21818368/the-c...
In fact, if the parcel is - er - damaged while in their care, the USPS will owe me. They better rush.
I wanted a friend to open the box, be scared by the air/hissing sound, back away, and before he could react?
Sex doll floats to the 12 foot ceiling in his office.
I had issues with the trigger, it deploying correctly, tried it a dozen times and gave up.
My other concern was it mistakely deploying while in transit with the post office.
Tracking down obscure stuff like this is soothing :)
Thanks, those two items were the part I was missing. (I already assumed supersonic would be out for noise/ground damage reasons)
30 Minutes to travel 27 miles across London in the middle of the day ! Stansted Airport, Essex to Cromwell Hospital, Kensington, London
I do wonder if they'd do that today - save one person's life by ploughing through central London at 70mph? There are so many cyclists and pedestrians not paying attention - it would feel safer to just helicopter it over?
London now has an air ambulance service, which it didn't at the time- though the air ambulance also have some impressively fast cars (Skoda Octavia vRS IIRC) for when conditions don't allow the helicopter to fly.
My back of the envelope calculation shows that 1 gram of neutronium (approximately a mole) will release 43MW of energy continuously. Multiply that by 10^14 (the number of grams of neutronium per teaspoon) and the resultant energy release would be unimaginably huge. 'Explosively' does not even begin to describe it.
Uranium is a comparable price and density to tungsten, but buying iridium is gonna be at least 50x the price for something 10% denser.
Also, if your house burns down your tungsten cube will still be intact, so you don't have to insure it.
I've taken another crack at it. Now someone will complain about USPS being missing, but "flat rate" implies someone's rate, and it's not as if USPS is a misleading surprise.
(Submitted title was "It is physically impossible to exceed the weight limit for a USPS flat rate box".
First edit was "It is impossible to exceed the weight limit for a small USPS flat rate box".)
p.s. If anyone wonders why HN spends so much obsessive energy getting titles right - I wondered that for years, too. Then it eventually made sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573. It's like this tiny corner of the universe where one's voice can be heard and correctness actually matters.
That's my theory anyhow. All I know for sure is that the beast likes it if you soothe it about titles.
I usually cringe when people show me mainstream news titles (I attributed it to a good literature teacher who taught me to read someone's agenda and bias), but it might also be getting used to that calmed "bookish as PG said' tone here.
In theory that way you still get titles shortened where possible, but don't have to wrestle with this kind of issue. Of course the cost is added complexity, so likely not worth it. Maybe just increase the limit then?
(fueled by three amazing strong coffees in Ginza and the first idle moments on the interwebs I've enjoyed in a long long time)
HN: one of the last remaining Great Good Places of the Internet, a lone tavern in an iconic gateway town to the now not-so-wild west.
Beyond the western borders of this little town, the tech gold rush has both expanded to epic proportions, affecting all the economies in the world, and also gone through enough booms and busts that the phrase "gold rush" seems somehow off.
As more and more young'uns join and jaded veterans return to throng the tavern alike, it often seems to be on the brink of either exploding with the largest gun fight in history, or jumping the shark [1].
And yet, against all odds, it retains its original magnetism - drawing throngs that grow in number and diversity while seers like https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 and https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tptacek continue to return - dispensing worldly wisdom worth its weight in gold from corner tables.
The secret is the man at the corner of the bar @dang, always around with a friendly smile and a towel on his shoulder. The only sheriff in the west who still doubles as the friendly bartender: always polite, always willing to break up a fight with kind words and clean up messes himself.
Yes a cold-hard look from him is all it takes to get most outlaws to back down, yes, his Colt-45 "moderator" edition is feared by all men, but the real secret to his success: his earnest passion (some call it an obsession) for the seemingly sisyphean task of sustaining good conflict - letting it simmer but keeping it all times below the boiling point based on "the code":
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
May the last great tavern in the West and it's friendly bartender-sheriff live long and prosper.
---- [1] - I hope I didn't jinx this by writing this "ode" :)
Funny thing is, while Depleted Uranium is about the same density as tungsten, it's also a fair bit cheaper (for major nuclear governments) because it's an otherwise nearly useless byproduct of the uranium enrichment process, and there's around a million tons of it sitting in storage worldwide.
If I might play devil's advocate a bit—aren't submitters not supposed to be creative in titles?
"Unless it's misleading or clickbait", yes, but I don't think there's a correlation between click-bait and length. I feel like a lot of titles get edited because of the character limit.