These kind of posts are why I check HN pretty much every day for 15+ yrs now. Hard to believe I've missed this one. Glad I caught it this time! This posts reminds me to stay humble and avoid jumping to conclusions without analysis.

That story has been repeated in various places for decades now.

One of the lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/

I think I’ve been one of those 2 or 3 times for this story. Read it, forgot it, read it again and only remembered after some time :D

I was one of the lucky ones today

Such a refreshingly good attitude!

You guys beat me to it - I was working on the list!

Btw for those wondering about reposts: reposts on HN are just fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and reposts of classics every now and then are good because it's important for new users to learn the classics!

Can an email go 500 miles in 2025? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466030 - July 2025 (122 comments)

Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633 - Sept 2023 (198 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213064 - Nov 2021 (93 comments)

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

500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675375 - Dec 2018 (32 comments)

We can't send mail more than 500 miles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17602158 - July 2018 (1 comment)

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=2701063 - June 2011 (18 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)

I can say that a new user (me) did learn the classic (this).

Pallet from the shipping room is a different story, though this one is mentioned in the comments

> Btw for those wondering about reposts: reposts on HN are just fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and reposts of classics every now and then are good because it's important for new users to learn the classics!

It would be nice if HN would simply "float" to the front page the classics, a year or two after their submission. That would avoid duplication (specially of comments!), and allow people in the lucky 10,000 group know about it.

I hear you from a technical point of view (deduplication!) but I think the chaos and ferment have creative qualities too.

I wonder when we will see a timeless classic like this on HN, but for AI.

We can then poke some fun at what AI did, what went wrong, and our incredibly illogical "debug" of AI

AI bots on dead internet will bring them up and have an earnest metallic laughter together.

This gets posted just infrequently enough that I remember that I've read it before but forget why those emails weren't delivered, so I read it every time :-)

Every time see this story I think "oh, this is the story about the packet TTLs being set stupidly low or something but you wouldn't be able to narrow that exactly to 500 miles" and have to click and learn again the the first time it's about the connection timeout being set stupidly low.

I believe I'm up for submitting it in a couple of months.

And still a treat. I love that story.

I thought it sounded familiar. Still a good read.