The case of the 500-mile email | Hacker News Reader

The case of the 500-mile email

ibiblio.org

169 pointskachnuv_ocasek18 comments

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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

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.)

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.

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

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

Nice, except there are less than 365.25 days in a year.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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