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That would be the ‘past’ link, though it doesn’t turn anything up in this case as the title on this post is different. (The usual title is “The case of the 500-mile email,” but this copy is missing the subject line for some reason so the submitter used a representative phrase instead.)

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tempestn 2178 days ago

Ha, I was just thinking if one wanted to farm karma they could just set up a cron to post this monthly. Seems to be a perennial favorite!

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akeruu 2178 days ago

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/

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dredmorbius 2178 days ago

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.

People tell, and repeat, and embellish, stories. Sometimes because the young'uns and whippersnappers and new arrivals haven't heard them yet. Sometimes because they're just damned good stories and we enjoy the retelling.

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divbzero 2178 days ago

Yes, I’ll continue upvoting this classic when it pops up in the years ahead.

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ElFitz 2178 days ago

I did. And it was not only informative but also hilarious.

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frandroid 2178 days ago

One of the most endearing xkcd strips. A bit lightbulb moment when I figured this out in my life.

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grzm 2178 days ago

Generally people submit links to past submissions that have comments that maybe of interest.

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hombre_fatal 2178 days ago

The reason people share links from the past isn't some passive aggressive "UGH reposts amirite?!" like what you appear to be doing -- it's because past discussion on a fun read has lots of fun morsels of comments, and it's fun to revisit them alongside today's discussion.

HN doesn't have a rule that there should only be one canonical submission for every individual link or topic. That you thought your comment would contribute anything leads me to believe that you aren't aware of that.

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anamexis 2178 days ago

I am well aware of HN policy regarding reposts. I just found it amusing that this one has so many.

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hombre_fatal 2178 days ago

Maybe next time just link to the search query. Most people familiar with forums are well aware that some topics come up more often than others.

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keithnz 2178 days ago

its pretty common for previous threads to be posted in the current thread

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hombre_fatal 2178 days ago

Check again. We tend to enumerate previous threads that got traction and have past discussion. It's nice to go back to read those.

But most of what this person linked had 0 to 1 comments and like 2 points. I mean, yes, I would expect an interesting story from 2002 to have at least 30 failed submissions on HN that never got traction over 18 years.

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mattmanser 2178 days ago

I remember reading this one here in the 2000s, here's one from 2008:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068

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