Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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Past related threads (less than I expected given how often it has been reposted):

We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - July 2020 (135 comments) (<-- thanks ayewo for finding this!)

The case of the 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676835 - July 2017 (56 comments)

Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347058 - Jan 2017 (82 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10305377 - Sept 2015 (1 comment)

The 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708 - April 2015 (139 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 - April 2010 (24 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 - Dec 2008 (28 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 - Feb 2008 (7 comments)

An other story (don't know if there is a nice write up) is "OpenOffice can't print on Tuesdays": https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619

Edit: Here is one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

I know this gets posted quite often, but I still enjoy reading it every time.

Agree, I will always upvote it because it’s a good story for those who haven’t read it, and it begets really good comments and other war stories from seasoned devs.

What baffles me is that nobody seems to have called out the fact that the story is utter nonsense.

I posted a longer explanation in a lower level comment, but the biggest problem is that the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of both the speed of propagation, and how TCP works.

There is no way any of what he wrote actually happened, including "sendmail defaults to a few ms timeout."

All of this is addressed in the FAQ about the story: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

I can believe there was a bizarre bug setting the timeout to zero and that there was a small delay handling the timeout leading to only quite low latency connections working. I don't for a second believe that the author didn't intentionally dream up a large chunk of this story. The FAQ claims that it wasn't actually 3 milliseconds and that he came up with this time by calculating the "adjusted" time for a given distance. But then he also claims that he took the timeout and used units to confirm the 500 miles. This is a blatant tautology, the speed of light had very little to do with this, the "epiphany" moment was definitely made up. Then there's the handwaving away the problem that sendmail V5 wouldn't have worked at all with a V8 config file. "Oh Sun must have patched their version to run like that".

That whole FAQ reads very much as "I didn't lie, I just made up all the details". I'm less convinced of the veracity of the story after reading his explanations of all the holes in his story.

The original author offered additional explanations on HN when the article was re-posted in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TreyHarris

You somehow forgot this one that made a showing in 2020:

We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - July 2020 (136 comments)

Added above—thanks! No idea how that escaped my search (which was something like https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

I would enjoy seeing a "greatest hits" list of pages that are repeatedly submitted and discussed here.

I think I read about this for the first time on a dialup BBS in the 90s :)

I tried to read about it on that BBS, but it was more than 80 miles from my house and I couldn't afford the long distance phone charges.

You obviously didn’t have a Novation Apple Cat modem that could wardial random 5 digit calling card codes for 3rd party long distance carriers.

I really hope there are a few other people here who know what that sentence means or I’m officially ancient :(

I almost feel younger people will not understand what you are referencing :) I was SysOp of FidoNet node.

A classic and wonderful piece of internet lore. If I ever have kids this is one of the ones I'll be telling around the campfire. The one about the internet going down because the delivery truck blocked LoS is a good one too.

Could you please link to the truck story? I can’t find it.

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