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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be that person, but I doubt the story is true. The variance in time spent waiting in the checkout line is far greater than the time it takes to walk to the front vs back of the store.

What do you know? I google "snopes car allergic to ice cream" and find that it's an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/icecream.asp

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It's not that far fetched though.

I had a an old motorcycle years ago that was the same way as this guy's car. If I stopped to grab a snack, my bike would not start again. If I stopped for lunch, then it would fire back up no problem. Sure enough the problem was vapor lock. However the time needed for the bike to cool enough was about 15-20 minutes, not the couple minutes mentioned in this story.

It's definitely a thing that can happen, just not in the time frames mentioned here. 5 minutes for a snack vs 30 minutes for dinner sounds plausible, 3 minutes for vanilla vs 4 minutes for chocolate does not.

We used a two stroke atv. My father would go to the store (2km) and come back, no problem. I would go to get water from a spring (7km) and the engine would just die after about 4km. It turns out that the gas mixture was too light and the engine was overheating, but only after 4km of continuous run.

Ok how about: had the car detailed, cleaned and new floor mats. Filters and fluids replaced. Tires rotated. In a super-service place. Paid and went to the parking lot - car wouldn't start. Not even a click. Just nothing.

What could it be? Nothing that was done was related to ignition or electrical systems at all. Yet it wouldn't start.

<spoiler> the new floor mats were too thick. Couldn't push the clutch down far enough, and this manual car you had to have the clutch in to enable the ignition. Just nudged the new mat back, problem solved.

Yeah, I doubted the veractiy as well. Fortunately this is a story that still works even if taken non-literally.

Pretty sure it's just meant to be a parable.

In addition to that, there's no way the engineer waited until subsequent nights to try other flavors.

What? You wouldn't want to get paid to eat ice cream?

I would. But why not today?

That's really missing the point of the s/story/parable.

"Moral of the story: even insane-looking problems are sometimes real."

Isn't it relevant to note that this problem was not real? It seems to kind of undermine the point if the author did not know of any insane-looking problem that was actually real, and had to make one up...

No, it really doesn't.

If you're hung up on the fact that the story isn't real, it means you aren't thinking about the moral of the story. You're focusing on the wrong thing despite the fact that the insight is being spoon-fed to you...

Incidentally (though respectfully... really!), this is a textbook example of pedantry, and it's the bane of our profession.

More to the point, fiction often points to truth in ways non-fiction cannot.

Like most urban legends it's not only bullshit it has a evil side.

Re read the story, it has a lot of darkness to it.

It also teaches a bad idea. No, more often than not things have simple solutions. Not the highly complicated version here of sending out an employee.

Just get the car serviced.

It's not insightful if insane problems never actually happen!

It's fine if the author uses a fictional story because it flows better. It not fine if the author uses a fictional story because they can't source a single real one.

see emails not going out more than 500 miles story

Link for the lazy: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

I call them misplaced pattern diagnosis. They are real and I see them frequently.

There's no reason to make things up. Just listen to the old car talk shows - you hear one almost every episode.

So koans, proverbs and parables are not insightful by nature. Fiction is insight-free entertainment.

Got it.

You have to be deliberately misreading me to get that interpretation. I said fiction could be fine.

Stories can be insightful or not-insightful based on what they teach.

Some kinds of thought patterns are useful to consider even if there is no basis in reality. Some aren't.

This story is in the latter group. If insane problems never happened, then this story would not be insightful.

I love you.

Same thing with the bible...

I've seen and read lots of parables that end with the phrase "moral of the story" when distilling down the core lesson behind the tail for the convenience of the audience. Moreover, the term "story" doesn't necessitate factual content - it's generally used more to convey an entertainment piece of which the content could either be factual or entirely fictional.

Eh, that's just your assumption. It's a guy in a fine neighborhood going to the store after dinner. For all we know the store is (excuse the pun) deserted at that point.

Also, he's not always getting only Ice Cream I'm sure, he's going to be grabbing other stuff, which depending on what he needs to get is going to create variable times (not to mention the length of the queue).

Driving to the store every night for Ice Cream seems like a waste of time, unless he really needs to get out of the house.

The only urban legend here is the fact that Snopes is somehow running Active Server Pages.

the OP is a page from an ice cream fan site, not a journalism organization

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/smann/IceCream/

This isn't an incorrect comment, but I'm not sure it's a good one.

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