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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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