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Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

(flak.tedunangst.com)
303 points zdw | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 16:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.706s | source
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robin_reala ◴[08 Jul 25 14:02 UTC] No.44500076[source]▶
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)

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hahahacorn ◴[08 Jul 25 14:13 UTC] No.44500186[source]▶
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.

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vghaisas ◴[08 Jul 25 15:12 UTC] No.44500786[source]▶
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/

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1. anton-c ◴[08 Jul 25 17:13 UTC] No.44501984[source]▶
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.

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2. jwrallie ◴[08 Jul 25 22:36 UTC] No.44504666[source]▶
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.

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3. Dylan16807 ◴[09 Jul 25 01:07 UTC] No.44505425[source]▶
I don't know about that conclusion. Windows will occasionally break itself worse than that.