Thanks to D-Coder, HN users (ok, a few, and now hopefully more) know that this joke originated in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263
https://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57114
It was traced in this 2002 article: https://web.archive.org/web/20050509113900/http://www.spelli...
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