The case of the 500-mile email

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

by kachnuv_ocasek • 15 years ago

169 18 15 years ago

ibiblio.org

eitally• 15 years ago

An oldie but goodie, but still worth a bump. If only more networks were c-limited!

mikeryan• 15 years ago

There's an associated FAQ which addresses some of the questions you may have about the technical veracity of the story.

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

shrikant• 15 years ago

Interesting anecdote and discussion a previous time this came up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652

monochromatic• 15 years ago

Seen it many times, but it's such a great story... who can complain about it being reposted?

arethuza• 15 years ago

Having been involved in "rationalizing" a systems of hundreds of emails servers dotted round the world down to something manageable I can honestly say that nothing about the weird and wonderful ways that email can fail surprises me any more.

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

I wonder how many times this has already been posted to HN. Not that I'm complaining: every time I re-read it, I'm charmed and delighted all over again.

WalterGR• 15 years ago

This Google query works fairly well:

site:news.ycombinator.com link:http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

Link to said query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...

Query returns:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068

re• 15 years ago

I suspect that the link: operator doesn't work well (or at all) anymore, and that those results are only getting returned because the comments contain all the words in the URL (because someone invariably links to the FAQ). Other searches (to articles linked from http://news.ycombinator.com/best) come up empty:

http://www.google.com/search?q=link:https://github.com/blog/...

http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://blog.instapaper.c...

http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://mobile.nytimes.co...

wgrover2• 15 years ago

Worth reading just to find out about the units(1) program. How did I miss that all these years?

btilly• 15 years ago

If you like the program, read through the data file: http://futureboy.us/frinkdata/units.txt

Some pure gold buried in there. For instance search for candela.

3pt14159• 15 years ago

Hahahahahhah Hilarious.

  Define the default symbol for the imaginary unit, that is, the square root of negative one. The default Unicode codepoint for the imaginary unit. (DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL I)

  \u2148 := <<IMAGINARY_UNIT>>

  Also used for the imaginary unit (especially by electrical engineers, who use "i" to indicate current. (DOUBLE-STRUCK ITALIC SMALL J)

  \u2149 := <<IMAGINARY_UNIT>>

  Redefine the letter "i" to also be the imaginary unit

  i := \u2148

wgrover2• 15 years ago

On the kilogram: "I dislike having a prefixed unit as the base reference. What a horrible decision. Why don't you just have it go to ten and make ten a little louder?"

Exactly right.

Sniffnoy• 15 years ago

Hm, is there an archive of old versions of units.dat anywhere? Occasionally units get deleted from it - I used to keep old versions but I'd forgotten about this some time ago and haven't done so in a while. (Also that was several hard drive crashes ago so I no longer have the copies I made.)

nfriedly• 15 years ago

FYI units on OS X doesn't recognize millilightseconds, but you can do this:

  You have: 3 lightyears / 365 / 24 / 60 / 60 / 1000
  You want: miles
  	* 559.21802
  	/ 0.0017882113

saturn• 15 years ago

nice, except there's more than 365 days in a year : )

  You have: 3 lightyears / 365.25 / 24 / 60 / 60 / 1000
  You want: miles
  	* 558.83525
  	/ 0.0017894361

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

IMO the most amusing part of this story is the behaviour of the statistics professor.

matthias• 15 years ago

It's good ol' chestnuts like this that made me think of the "rerun" button: http://bit.ly/ek6kqi Instead of upvoting you would click the rerun link to signal the content as duplicate (but worthy). This would move it out of the news and to a dedicated classics page of timelessly good content.

The case of the 500-mile email

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