Agree, I will always upvote it because it’s a good story for those who haven’t read it, and it begets really good comments and other war stories from seasoned devs.
What baffles me is that nobody seems to have called out the fact that the story is utter nonsense.
I posted a longer explanation in a lower level comment, but the biggest problem is that the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of both the speed of propagation, and how TCP works.
There is no way any of what he wrote actually happened, including "sendmail defaults to a few ms timeout."
Agree, I will always upvote it because it’s a good story for those who haven’t read it, and it begets really good comments and other war stories from seasoned devs.
What baffles me is that nobody seems to have called out the fact that the story is utter nonsense.
I posted a longer explanation in a lower level comment, but the biggest problem is that the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of both the speed of propagation, and how TCP works.
There is no way any of what he wrote actually happened, including "sendmail defaults to a few ms timeout."
All of this is addressed in the FAQ about the story: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
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The original author offered additional explanations on HN when the article was re-posted in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TreyHarris