Reposts are fine when a story hasn't had significant attention in the past year or so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

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 becomes dysfunctionally self-obsessive. Not sure what the right answer is, but I can probably deal with once per year, short time on front page, and small % of total content.

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.

Sounds like we already have exactly such a system, no?

People forget culture is the original technology.

Different form of "stickies" I guess. Except no one reads stickies.

Right. I'd imagine it working well on reddit where content is just reposted automatically and receives normal upvoting. Makes it more organic.

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.

An other neat one is "sand won't save you this time", from the delightful "Ignition!" via the Things I Won't Work With series (well worth reading in and of itself, even for non-chemists): http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...

Gotta "love" something that is highly reactive to test engineers...

The book also holds, iirc, a passage about a group of chemists sitting down for lunch when something on one of the shelves start getting uppity. They barely had time to dive under the table before the container started bouncing around the room.

Maybe the submitter is one of the ten thousand https://xkcd.com/1053/

Bet there are a few more that will find this submission too.

Ha, I'm one of the ten thousand for both the XKCD and this post. Lucky me!

You mean, for the whole XKCD? Not just this issue, but the whole thing? I envy you so hard right now. (Unless you were going to be productive today).

Productivity? Overrated. http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/

I learned about diet coke and mentos from that cartoon. It was wonderful.

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.

I wouldn't say subtle. Sociopathic perhaps...?

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.

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

The only significant discussion was almost five years ago. Or about the time the first iPads went on sale. And before either of us were members.

I missed it all the other times and am glad it was reposted.

I don't think this is a bad thing. It was either 1 or 2 years ago when I first read about this - newcomers to the community have to find out about things in one way or another.

/me is unsure whether this is condemnation or validation. anyway, let's ride the wave.