Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

If you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 and haven’t heard the original 500-mile email story, you can read it at https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles.

(discussed previously on HN 5 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 – and 10 years ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708)

Even after reading the 2025 updated version, reading the original made me absolutely giddy at the end.

I can only imagine the euphoria of reconciling the inputs of “the things I know to be true of computers and email” and “my emails won’t send further than 500 miles”. What a great story - thanks for posting the original.

I got curious what Trey Harris (the original 500 mile story teller) was up to these days, but Google mostly finds me a football player born around that time (2002).

Presumably this is the author given their UNC and SysAdmin background: https://www.linkedin.com/in/treyharris

I found it via a "trey harris sage.org" search on Google.

First time I'm hearing about this actually, thank you.

Thanks for letting me be one of the lucky ones.

Obligatory xkcd 10,000 lucky people explainer: https://xkcd.com/1053/

And if you're one of today's lucky 10,000 and haven't heard of the concept of "lucky 10,000", you can read the relevant XKCD here: https://xkcd.com/1053/

   > units
   751 units, 62 prefixes
   You have: 10 miles
   You want: meters
    * 16093.44
    / 6.2137119e-05

Huh. Never knew that was a thing!

I have a tough time deciding a favorite between this story and “the ultimate in garbage collection”: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...

9,999 remaining.

I always want to reach for `units`, but I'm perennially baffled by the output! What's up with the * and /?

Does this system release all the memory it allocates?

Yes, it releases it at about 200 meters per second.

The * value is the result of converting 10 miles to meters, as requested.

The / value is the inverse of that in case you wanted that, ie 0.1 meters in miles.

It's explained in `man 1 units`

the * is denoting the conversion from your first unit to your second, the / denotes the other way.

You have: 1 miles You want: feet * 5280 / 0.00018939394

In the above example, 1 mile is 5280 feet, and 1 foot is 0.00018939394 miles

If I do 2 miles to feet, the values are doubled (or halved for the reverse conversion)

You have: 2 miles You want: feet * 10560 / 9.469697e-05

I collected a list of fun stories of this form a while ago!

- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt

- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

- The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining: https://predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-works-when-its-raining/

Thank you for linking this - I need to save this locally because I reference this all the time. This is one of my favorite internet stories - it's just a great arc!

Oh, I know it's explained in the man page. I read it every time and promptly forget because I can't internalize the choice of notation.

* multiply

/ divide

It's one of my most used utilities, as someone who can't help but nerd-snipe myself on the regular. Example questions that I've used it for, just in the last week:

If I work 42 hours/week, how many minutes is that per year?

I've downloaded 4.91GB in the last minute, what's that in Mbps? How long will it take to download a 76GB game?

This AWS feature costs $0.045/hour, how much is that per month?

This guy I read about traveled 58,000km in 27 years, what's his average speed in m/s?

How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?

If a 36 inch pipeline can deliver 25580 acre-feet of water in a year, how fast is the water flowing in m/s?

If you find the output a bit hard to parse at times (as I do), you might want to try qalc instead, I use it all the time from the terminal to do conversions:

    $ qalc 
    > 3 millilightseconds to miles

      3 milliLightSeconds ≈ 558 mi + 1491 yd + 0.1692913386 ft

I'm not sure if it has all the same units as `units` does, but it replaced my use of it entirely as it can do other useful operations as well

I usually call it non-interactively:

  $ units 1500DKK USD
      * 236.76653
      / 0.00422357

in which case it's always the first line I want.

(The second line is telling me 1USD is 0.00422357 of 1500DKK.)

Note if you use the currency conversions,

  systemctl enable units-currency-update.timer

is needed to keep them up-to-date.

“WiFi doesn’t work in the summer” is one of the first anecdotes I learned about WiFi when it was still brand new. You set up WiFi between two buildings in the winter, spring comes and the water in the leaves blocks the signal.

Monitor switches off when I sit down deserves to be on that list (even if it's hardware, not software): https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2rsivw/monitor...

This also happens with satellite TV.

It's not quite in the same league as any of this, but when I was a child, we sent our Commodore 64 in for repairs several times because it started "writing" by itself. Gibberish would slowly appear as if someone was randomly hitting the keyboard.

Each time it took several days before they repair centre got to it, and they then contacted us to tell us there was nothing wrong with the computer at all.

After we picked it up, eventually, when it started happening again for the third or fourth time, we realised the problem:

The "large" (a whopping 26") CRT TV we'd recently started placing it under when not in use caused it... A few days away from the TV to dishcharge it, and it was fine - hence why the repair technician didn't find anything.

- A Story About ‘Magic' http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

This site has a collection of them: https://500mile.email/

I once had a desktop computer that had great uptime, but started to consistently crash when I got up and left the room to get a drink of water.

Turns out it was old building with loose floorboards. The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply. As long as I sat my desk, it was fine.

But I had a co-worker who had a worse problem with getting up to get a drink of water. Once while she was kitchen, an eight foot steel lighting ballast came loose from the ceiling and felt right onto her chair.That what-if memory still haunts me.

> How much would a 10cm sphere of gold be worth in GBP?

Is there some trick to this? Or do you have to input it like:

You have: 4/3pi(10 cm)^319320 kg/m^345000 GBP/kg

(What ChatGPT gave me)

> The vibrational force of standing up was enough to short out a failing power supply

Or, was it?

https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-...

(not disclaiming that it wasn't, but that "chair piston causes EM surge" had me driven crazy for the longest time til I was able to pinpoint the cause)

units has (I assume room temp/pressure) densities for all elements, as well as some precious metal prices and currency exchange rates (you need to run the units_cur program regularly to update the database for these). It also has tab completion to make discovering these a bit easier.

The invocation is

You have: goldprice * golddensity * spherevol(10cm/2)

You want: GBP

I wonder if the feeling is excitement or horror when you encounter one of these weird problems that seems like it has to be the user.

Not computer related really, but I'm reminded of when my Mom was helping set up macs in the lab at my middle school. I, a 4th grader, tagged along and hung out in the other lab across the hall. I got very incredulous looks when i claimed that there was a lizard in there. It was the Midwest over summer break! I was obviously a kid seeing things. There's no lizards here.

Then I produced it, caught under a bin. It was a brown anole that had come back in a plant sent from Florida. I wasn't crazy that day.

Neat! Thank you!

I had one of these myself. WiFi wouldn’t work when my wife was using her laptop in bed. As soon as she gave it to me, it started working again. She thought it was the magic touch of the engineer, but it turned out that when she was in bed, she pulled her knees up and set the computer on her lap, while I would lay down completely and let the computer rest on my chest. Her knees blocked the WiFi signal enough to be quite noticeable.

And if you're one of today's lucky 10,000 who haven't heard of XKCD: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/xkcd

I saw this in an office while working on an embedded project where our dev boards had no EM shielding.

Standing up from the chair was enough to cause it to crash.

You can just save a step and ask ChatGPT the answer. It can google the current spot price of gold.

Sure, but then I need to do all the math to verify the answer it gives me isn’t gibberish anyway.

there's also the story that wiggling the mouse in Win95 when installing something really does make it go faster. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...

"...even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics."

Perfection.

TIL -- thank you, brother!

I’ve seen some weird technical glitches in my career. One that i will always remember is that a customer was very happy with his new big computer, but could not work for multiple hours on it, because his office would get colder and colder when he kept using it. After some mailing and talking over the phone i suggested a visit to his office where i quickly found the cause of the problem: The big computer fan was aimed directly at the thermostat knob of the radiator, so it assumed the entire office was well heated and closed.

There also is the (somewhat) famous caps lock gamble in XCOM 2 [1].

Quote: "Hitting the key, through a rube-goldberg-esque series of events, forces all outstanding load requests to be filled immediately in a single frame. This causes a massive hitch, and potentially could crash the game. If you don't care about those adverse effects the synchronous load is faster."

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/a-single-button-press-skips-loadin...

At one point, my scanner only worked when my daughter was awake - never when she was asleep (nighttime or napping).

reminds me of the magic/more magic switch story

Easily my favorite story on the internet

Since you mentioned your mom, mine is not as tech savvy. At one point she needed a computer to type something and print it, a simple use case so I came up with this idea of setting up a computer that would give me no tech support trouble, since I was living in another state. I installed CentOS, libre office and made sure the printer was supported.

I told my mom to keep the system up to date and set up an ssh connection for remote access just in case.

A few months go by and one day I receive a phone call that she cannot find the system updater shortcut anymore. I started to think how I could get Gnome to load over ssh, I was sure she moved the icon accidentally or something but decided to google it just in case.

Lo and behold and there is a bug report that due to some bug in package management dependency resolution the graphic software updater GUI could remove… itself… if the user performed a routine system update. It seemed to even affect RHEL at the time if I’m not mistaken.

A yum install command away over ssh and it was solved but that was the day I realized that no matter how stable a distro is famed to be or how much support it has from a company, there was still lots of work to be done until Linux could be seen as friendly enough for the end user.

Most of these are good, but "can't log in while standing up" is just too implausible. I can't possibly be led to believe that every single one of a whole group of technically-literate touch typers failed to notice that keys were swapped.

I am familiar.

This was the highest-voted submission, posted two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633

As seen on HN:

Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584399 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347852

The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371

What if its wrong

It seems pretty easy to overlook. Especially because the correct position is alphabetically backwards.

I don't know about that conclusion. Windows will occasionally break itself worse than that.

Also check out Kragen's examples from a thread a couple of years ago!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988917

I know this story is a bit unrelated, but your story brought it to mind (probably the keywords child, repaired several times, etc): When I was a kid my father had a Nokia 3310. Any early Nokia owner would remember how you could configure your own 'welcome message', which would flash up on the phone's monochrome screen for a second while it boots. My Dad was an engineer, and would get totally hung up on the minutiae of anything technical. Picture him spending a totally inappropriate amount of time adjusting the TV's audio settings, for instance. One day I thought I'd play a prank on him, and changed the welcome message on his phone to say 'SIM CARD ERROR'. It sent him completely bananas, and triggered this huge quest to remedy the problem. He ended up taking it back to the local Vodafone store where he bought it multiple times, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong either. Maybe they got the joke and thought it was too funny, who knows. The store ended up escalating the case to Nokia and authorised an RMA. At which point I figured the joke had gone too far, and I reset the welcome message to 'Dad's Phone'. For some reason, he was happy just to leave it at that. I never confessed what I'd done! It caused way too much fuss, and I'd have been absolutely in for it if anyone figured it out!

That reminds me of one. I had a PC that would fail to boot the first time every day. Second and subsequent times were fine, until the next day.

When it stopped happening in the spring, and started again in the fall, it became obvious -- my apartment was too cold. The heat from the first failed boot sufficiently heated up the system to boot the second time.

Canadian winter for you, I guess.

You can just save a step of double-checking everything by using WolframAlpha

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2810cm+sphere+of+gold+...

>25580 acre-feet of water

This is why we can't have nice things.

Wow, that’s an awesome resource actually. Thanks!

If you only need the first line you can invoke units with --terse.

  $ units --terse 2.4kWh megajoules
  8.64

The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't: https://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-s...

Discussed also here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709438

How to swap the keys? Asking for a friend… jk. Are we talking about wired switches?