Does anyone know of stories similar to this? I would like to read more.
Here’s a collection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23005140
We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
61–70 of 141 posts
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#62[deleted]
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#63Best part of reading this is coming away having learned the existence of units the CLI. How did I spend 20 years on the shell and not have needed or discovered this?
Me too! so awesome
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#64Best part of reading this is coming away having learned the existence of units the CLI. How did I spend 20 years on the shell and not have needed or discovered this?
Be aware that currencies are stuck with rates from several years ago and don’t update.
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#65This is wild!
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#66The one thing that throws a wrench in this story for me: Lattes. Latte's in 1994? In North Carolina? No way. Maybe on the West Coast, but I moved to Cali in 1989 and they were a rarity until the mid-late 90's. There were only 425 starbucks in the US in 1994 (from their site). The "fancy coffee" craze was just a blip on the radar in the mid 90's but gaining momentum. ;-)
> The "fancy coffee" craze was just a blip on the radar in the mid 90's but gaining momentum.
Friends premiered in 1994, with The Central Perk being a major set piece of the show. I mean, yeah, its New York City and not North Carolina, but college towns anywhere are going to be early in trends.
A latte in 1994 seems plausible to me. I remember getting them from a Gloria Jeans in my local suburban mall around 1990 or so.
You're not wrong about the shape of the trajectory, but all throughout the 80s the coffee shop/latte trend was slowly building steam (heh) before it went hockey stick in the mid-90s.
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#67Best part of reading this is coming away having learned the existence of units the CLI. How did I spend 20 years on the shell and not have needed or discovered this?
units
You have: mph
You want: kph
* 1.609344
/ 0.62137119Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#68The ending of this makes it sound super clean. 3 ms * speed of light => ~560 miles. "It all makes sense!" But ... isn't the speed of light through fiber actually like 2/3 of the speed of light in a vacuum? And that fiber isn't going to be laid out in a straight line exactly to the destination. So I think really there must have been a fair bit of uncertainty around that ~3ms to abort a connection.
I am surprised that signals travel faster in copper (3c/4) than in fiber (2c/3), anyone has an explanation?
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12778904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21578606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16384158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16285093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12997568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3802458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701063…
It's better to link to just the past submissions with interesting discussions. Those appear to be: 2008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 2008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701063 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676835
I love that after all these years there are still people discovering this classic for the first time.
Re: We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this story gets posted a lot, and many of us might know it, but at the same time, I like to think about the ones that didn't. They will learn something new today. XKCD said it better than I could: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Genuine perennial favs are worth repeating every so often --- a year or two's interval seems reasonable, and is vouched by HN. A marker of aging for me was seeing, a decade or two after I'd first read them in the local paper as a callow youth, repeats of previous features, by topic if not the actual text. Eventually the thought occurred to me that perhaps the versions I'd remembered were themselves not original. Peop…
Yes, I’ll continue upvoting this classic when it pops up in the years ahead.