
How UPS Next Day delivers (photos of UPS' gigantic Worldport air facility) - timr
http://news.cnet.com/2300-13576_3-6242193-1.html
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mynameishere
And who doesn't love the UPS? I'll bet they're the most beloved company on
earth. They're like the mail, except that instead of delivering bills and
subpoenas, they deliver Christmas presents year-round.

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Hexstream
It sure feels like I'm unwrapping a gift whenever I open a package I ordered
on the internet!

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joshwa
There's a really excellent hour-long show on NatGeo called Ultimate Factories
that did a great episode on the UPS Worldport.

[http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/ultimate-
factor...](http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/ultimate-
factories/3330/Overview)

Check your local listings, it's been playing recently.

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timr
See also: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-9974653-52.html>

Nice description, including a video.

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jgrahamc
It would be nice to know why the conveyor belt system looks so complex. It
appears that aircraft arrive at the left and right hand sides of this big
building and then need to get routed to the correct slot to go onto another
aircraft. Why all the complex belts? Why can't this be solved with a single
large oval belt that kicks off packages at just the right spot to go on an
aircraft?

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joshwa
There are three separate conveyor systems-- one for smalls (envelopes), one
for parcels (boxes), and one for irregulars. Factor in the complexities with
the physical layout (branching), any data cleaning that has to take place
(mislabels, etc), the need for queuing/caching when planes are delayed, etc,
differing priorities for sorting/routing, and it starts to look like a pretty
complex system.

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eru
I guess your explanation is better informed than mine.

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eru
I wonder why my innocent, self-deprecating, and not-all-that-interesting
comment got modded down and back up to zero so often.

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pg
There are starting to be a significant number of users with a hair trigger for
downmodding comments. Dealing with this is one of my top priorities for the
site at the moment.

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eru
War behind the scenes.

I was just wondering. I could have lived with a simple downmod - but this
turns out to be more interesting (if annoying to you).

(I should have done those statistics (and a few more) about news.yc I was
talking about some time ago.)

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ovi256
[http://news.cnet.com/2300-13576_3-6242193-15.html?tag=ne.gal...](http://news.cnet.com/2300-13576_3-6242193-15.html?tag=ne.gall.pg)

This one's amazing. Hundreds (thousands) of flights above the US.

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mhidalgo
wow...

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mhidalgo
I have to say that fact that I got minus 5 from this comment is pretty
indicative of the kind of community hacker news, and I mean it as a
compliment. I saw the UPS thing and the first thing out of my mouth was wow,
it was instinctual , as soon as I submitted it I knew some negative karma was
coming my way. I forgot that I wasn't on digg.

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redorb
I suggest a new tag for headlines, much like the [exe], [vid] or [pdf] how
about a [spread] tag that indicates that in the end you will end up far away
from hacker news (in this case around 10 back clicks)

\- or perhaps I just have a case of the "mondays"

