Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you mind linking the SR-71 story? Somehow I never saw that.
"The Ultimate Ground Speed Check": http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/favorite-sr-71-story-107912...
That was beautiful, thank you.
The 500-mile email (2002)
21–30 of 145 posts
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#221 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8176458 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296201 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802458 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114391 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 7 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489
Once a year is about the right frequency. Recurring stories is one way in which a community shares and perpetuates its culture with newcomers. Some of them are a delight to read on that yearly cadence, like the SR-71 story about a pilot and his copilot becoming a crew. That said, it's wise to consider the frequency with which such things appear, individually and in total. Too much repetition and focus on memes become…
This is an interesting idea. Have a system where a community can mark something as important, and to have it automatically reposted at preset intervals. Community members could be allowed to additionally repost, or the system can politely say it's already archived and will be shared again on such & such date. Use it as a way to reinforce community history.
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#231 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8176458 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296201 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802458 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3114391 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 7 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489
Wow, I must have bad timing. I've had an account here for almost all of those, and I think I was probably lurking for the 1 or 2 occurrences when I did not have an account, but don't remember seeing it before.
Or perhaps senility is setting in early. :-D
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once a year is about the right frequency. Recurring stories is one way in which a community shares and perpetuates its culture with newcomers. Some of them are a delight to read on that yearly cadence, like the SR-71 story about a pilot and his copilot becoming a crew. That said, it's wise to consider the frequency with which such things appear, individually and in total. Too much repetition and focus on memes become…
This is an interesting idea. Have a system where a community can mark something as important, and to have it automatically reposted at preset intervals. Community members could be allowed to additionally repost, or the system can politely say it's already archived and will be shared again on such & such date. Use it as a way to reinforce community history.
Different form of "stickies" I guess. Except no one reads stickies.
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the thing is, every time I see this story (I saw it years ago before I discovered HN), I read it in its entirety, and love the shit out of it. It really makes me sad the BOFH series of stories is over, I loved those too.
The Register still carries them[1]. I don't know their exact relation to the original but I think they're official. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/
The new stories are okay, but ... eh, its not the same thing. Its more brute force dickery between management and IT instead of the subtle interaction it used to be.
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the thing is, every time I see this story (I saw it years ago before I discovered HN), I read it in its entirety, and love the shit out of it. It really makes me sad the BOFH series of stories is over, I loved those too.
The Register still carries them[1]. I don't know their exact relation to the original but I think they're official. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/
I'm really confused about the order of these. The episodes are numbered but there's multiple sequences with no indication of what "series" is what.
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#27Who though it was going to be a TTL issue before finishing reading the story? :)
Not I, I don't know why but I was thinking IP version issue but that makes no sense.
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#28> And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf [...] Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy. > ... that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5 Good system administrators stick to conservative, portable subsets of configuration and…
> Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy.
The point moreover was that he had a custom version of the config file (not just default).
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#29Another of the 10,000 here - this is such a delightful story.
Also just discovered the "units" conversion program and disappointed that the default Mac library has only 586 units. And shockingly there don't seem to be compatible libraries out there.
Re: The 500-mile email (2002)
#30Why do I get:
> unknown unit 'millilightseconds'
Is this one of the embellishments that just makes the story more entertaining?