Outhorse Your Email
visiticeland.comWeirdly I remember too many horse memes from old internet communities.
uk.misc had a years-long habit of shouting "HORSE" after someone turned up trying to trace some Canadians who "moved to Burton-on-Trent and stole my HORSE".
uk.music.folk would shout "HORSE" too, but for a different reason: whenever the old "ah but is this really folk music" argument was trotted out. It was a reference to Louis Armstrong's "all music is folk music - I ain't never heard no horse sing" (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/all-music-is-fol...).
And back in the early days of OpenStreetMap we had a running gag about horse=yes, after early finding-our-way attempts at the tagging folksonomy resulted in 70mph highways in Britain being tagged with "horse=yes" because, yes, legally you were allowed to ride a horse on them.
> 70mph highways in Britain being tagged with "horse=yes" because, yes, legally you were allowed to ride a horse on them.
To clarify: You aren't allowed to ride a horse on Britain's motorways (fast multi-lane roads mostly built in the latter half of the 20th century) but you would legally be allowed to ride a horse (and indeed to walk along as a pedestrian, although it's probably unwise) on the fastest possible non-motorways.
Most of Britains other roads are limited to 60mph or less. But a "dual carriageway" in which vehicles travelling in the opposite direction are separated from you by something rather more substantial than a line of paint (e.g. barriers or even a strip of ground with barriers either side) lifts that to 70mph the same as a motorway.
Jeez, I loved working in the tourism industry. One day I'll get back into it :).
It's incredible how visiteiceland/norway/etc have refined and eliminated a lot of cruft in their website while still keeping up the appearance of professionalism and non-corp design. There are a lot subtleties in this website s design.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
(X) D̵o̵g̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ Pony Show
approach to fixing email.
At least it's not a goat rodeo
Shoutout to the greatest album released in the 2010's, Yo Yo Ma and Chris Thile's Goat Rodeo Session:
Man, Yo Yo Ma's post-classical career is killer. Obrigado Brazil gets a lot of airtime in my playlist, now I have a new one to add.
This isn't the Goat Internet.
https://obviousplant.com/products/a-3-5-inch-floppy-disk-tha...
For that, you can look to Goat-2-Meeting:
Every once in a while I must succumb my natural aversion towards marketers and give a tip of the hat. This is definitely one of them. Absolutely brilliant and creative thinking!
Their previous spoof of Zuckerberg's Metaverse video was also great.
Only now learned that FB has videos about the ‘metaverse’. I'm five minutes into FB's video, and it feels like a recreation of both late-80s' explainer infomercials and early-90s' pop hallucinations about the computerized future. I bet FB regret that they can't sell awkwardness directly, because they have tons of it.
I'll have to take breaks to watch the Icelandverse vid every ten minutes, to get through 1h17m of Zuck and kitsch 3D. “You can bring things from the physical world: photos, videos, art, music, movies, books, games” ooof man.
Hahaha I had not seen that one either. Thanks a lot for sharing. That really made me laugh as well :)
the part of that where he gives up on opening the door had me cackle laughing. Thanks for sharing this, it’s absolutely perfect.
This is hilarious; bravo!
In case you thought they took the easy way, behind the scenes video: https://vimeo.com/710288765/5e14861065 (linked on site)
I can confirm that the keyboard was fully functional except for keys not producing character output. RaspberryPi with short-to-ground sensor under each key (so the keyboard would work as a mat with the keys removed if the horses didn't like them [as referenced in the BTS video]), running on batteries, making this the world's largest wireless keyboard. Measured 5 by 1.8m with the smallest keys being a beefy 29 x 28cm.
Source: Wife's uncle did the electronics and software for it.
Thanks! My first thought was, y'know, funny video, but "how did they build a working keyboard that a 600 pound animal could stand on on a tourism video budget" was second.
> In case you thought they took the easy way
Alright, fine, but where's the API?
Is the audio beyond fucked or is it just my machine?
That's what most people say the first time they hear it but if you give it time, Icelandic metal will grow on you, I promise :-D.
Icelandic audio always Bjorked.
It's probably just your machine. Mine seems fine.
I think it may have been a player bug. I heard everything echoed, but after closing the tab and reopening the link, it plays just fine.
[Generic question asking if the service is stable.]
Only if you pony up for the premium plan. It costs a reinsom, but it would be a bit foalish not to.
I'm laughing so much on these, that my voice is getting...hor...well you get what i mean. ;-)
Enough already, y'all are beating a dead horse.
Lol :-D
Are you actually a user, as well as an amateur comedian?
Neigh.
I would go for the same idea, but with cats in a shelter. Every time an email arrives, a treat is delivered to the cat horde and the resulting commotion is filmed and a linked delivered to the sender, with a caption like: "We want MOAR!!" etc.
With a few hundred dollars on hardware you can generate thousand of hours of quality video content, much more entertaining than a random keyboard press.
No offense, but horses are clearly less, shall we say, intellectually gifted to handle the subtleties of digital social interaction in the cat age. Horses are plain boring, yesteryear's thing, wouldn't want one in the apartment of my owner.
Typical. Here we are trying to outsource our work to foreign horses. It's all fun and games until the wheel stops spinning and we realize there are no typing jobs left for honest American horses, leaving our own ponies penniless.
They're doing jobs American horses don't want to do.
But, here in America, our horses only want to carry guns and drive big trucks...and, well, hang out with cowboys. Not so sure that they even want to work! /s :-)
Icelandic horses shows zero-shot task generalization on Icelandic natural language prompts, outperforming GPT-3 on many tasks, while being 16x faster on land and having beautiful manes. Very impressive work!
It's all those hidden layers of horse hair.
I wish my country would build outhorsing centers, but horses are confined to their stables. Bunch of social safety-net cheque grabbing lazy asses
Whooooah there! Ass is a slur that is offensive to many horses' donkey partners and mule children.
Let's be respectful, not negative neigh-sayers
Could be worse for the horses, I guess...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/16/iceland-...
Although the article's content is way more fun, when I initially saw the title I thought the article was going to be about a phishing email somebody had received with bad spelling/grammar.
The video is funny-ish but it doesn't do justice to how cool Iceland is. I really enjoyed my time there. Would highly recommend. Felt like you could aim your camera in a random direction outdoors and it would take a beautiful photo.
Yeah that's gonna be a neigh for me dawg
Love this sort of thing. Makes me think about visiting Iceland haha
Go in summer if you want to ride, though. Ask me how I know that October will freeze your fingers off
I'd 100% recommend visiting Iceland in October in general. It's a lot less busy around attractions and the sea climate makes it not that cold (the main challenge usually is breaking the wind). Walking/driving around is absolutely no problem, and outdoors swimming is also fine because the pools are heated geothermally. Heck, glacier hiking wasn't a cold experience at all with fairly regular winter clothing (keep an optional rain layer in your backpack for the unpredictable weather though). There has been only one activity where the icey wind got the better of me despite adequate clothing (I don't know what more I could have put on, the only solution I see is electric heating or walking parts of the way to warm up).
If you go, take at least a full week excluding travel days and 'cheap campervans' was by far the best deal that I found for a vehicle (seemed almost too good to be true but everything was as advertised and the people super friendly).
The experience taught me a thing or two about weather at home as well. I don't like raincoat material so I never had rainproof clothes. Now it was kind of essential to prepare for that and I found there are more plasticy pants and jackets as well that are no problem. Layering and wind breaking is how one stays warm beyond staying dry. In the future I'm going to be enjoying the outdoors more during winters at home :)
> There has been only one activity where the icey wind got the better of me despite adequate clothing
Don't leave us hanging, what was the activity?
Well, the horse riding! Sorry, I thought it would be clear from the first paragraph
Iceland is amazing, I highly recommend a visit.
If you can forgive the self-promotion, I wrote a "things I wish I'd known" post about visiting Iceland which might be of interest to anyone planning a trip there: https://blackshaw.substack.com/p/iceland
A correction to "Unless you have a 4x4 it’s illegal to drive on certain mountain roads":
Legally you can drive on whatever road you'd like in whatever vehicle you'd like, but coverage in case something goes wrong is probably not included in your rental company's coverage. The "4x4 only" signs you referred to are meant to discourage tourists who don't know any better.
Depending on the road, weather, your driving skills etc. you'll easily be able to traverse certain "4x4 only" roads even in a VW Golf. The trick is knowing which roads those are, and accounting for the tiny stream you passed on the way in potentially having turned into a river due to rains or snowmelt since you drove in.
It seems Iceland is also 4x4 heaven if this Kárahnjúkar Spillway is anything to go by: https://youtu.be/Lv-XcVFBwVY?t=214
I cant see the horses getting up there!
I stand corrected! Have changed the post to say "discouraged" instead of "illegal".
> We booked a hostel in Reykjavik for the whole trip. This was, without a doubt, the biggest mistake we made. It would have been a much better idea to drive around the whole island staying in a different place each night. (Iceland’s main highway goes around the edge of the country in a loop.)
This is what my wife and I did a couple of years ago and I highly recommend it. It took us 5 days to circumnavigate the country.
A side trip to the Westman Islands should also be on your must-see list. Book an overnight stay for at least one night.
Made me chuckle this morning.
Surprised these horses prefer QWERTY and not BOVINE layout
Horses are equine, cattle are bovine.
Speaking truth to horses.
An EQUINE layout sounds like taking Dvorak to an extreme. E is the most common letter in English? Let's give the keyboard two of them! I'm half-tempted to mock up up such a layout just for giggles. It'd be a handy layout for dolphin.town, especially.
I'm running this to its ridiculous extreme. I'm imagining a keyboard layout that has duplicate keys matching letter frequency. The keyboard has to have 56 Es just to be allowed a Q. About 35 or so Ts. Etc.
The odds favor you getting the key you want, so it's best to not even look.
That could certainly put a Quine in EQUINE. Mash the keyboard all at once to get a frequency chart that resembles the keyboard. That's your new keyboard.
> wFwhxsqjnzgmsrqaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Wow, I never knew Icelandic was such a beautiful language.
The aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa is silent and usually written as áá.
Horse as a Service (HaaS), sign me up!
I would pay for this if I could use it on LinkedIn.
Why outhorse if I already have a in-house cat?
For scale and cheaper cloud costs in iceland
I think you're better off with the cat, they seem to be lighter on the keys, while you can see in the video that the horses, small as they are, are doing a number on they keys.
This is a good option for Icelandic horses to connect with overseas cultures, given that foreign horses can’t visit and locals aren’t allowed to (return if they) travel overseas:
I have some time off coming up soon...
And HR is forever telling us we should "engage" with one another more.
This counts as engagement, right?
While technically true, I'm afraid HR might consider it as horsin' around.
Pretty sure this is how most Zendesk responses are generated anytime I email tech support.
That should be easy for me. My horses are terrible at email.
No one can talk to a horse, of course, unless...
A much better solution would be to buy your own horse, although personally I think I'd upgrade to an elephant.
I think in the tech world that is referred to as self-horsing! /s
This is hilarious, thanks for sharing! :)
It would be really cool if they also add a poop emoji if the horse takes a poop while replying to the email
Iceland - simply the HEST!
Is this real, or an April Fools Day joke that just got left online?
Missed opportunity to use email.horse
I have a few qualms with this app:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by streaming from /dev/urandom, mapping to cardinal directions and simulating a random walk on the keyboard.
2. It doesn't actually replace an email autoresponder. Most people I know will put things like their return date in the auto-response.
3. It does not seem very "scalable" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but it seems that down the road this may require a lot of horses.
Made me chuckle.
For those who don’t understand the reference this is satire coming from the comment on the Dropbox Launch post on HN in 2007 [0]
Thanks for explaining. I read the GP and thought "this person's way too serious".. but with the context I see the GP is actually a subtle treasure.
I'm amazed that you remembered that.
It might be the most famous Hacker News comment in existence.
Up there with slashdot's impression of the first iPods:
> No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
(https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...)
The first iPods were pretty crappy from a functional standpoint. There were other mp3 players which were more full-featured, and the early iPods crashed a lot.
It's their aesthetic design which sold people on them. That's what Slashdot did not understand.
I actually preferred MiniDisc through the portable music player era. I didn’t stop using my MiniDisc player until iPhone 4, as my phone storage was suddenly sufficient to carry a good portion of my library.
either that or the Putnam comment of cperciva's. [0]
Jeez, that guy was full of himself though. Looks like 14 years later he isn't the roaring startup success story he predicted.
How do you know that? Success can be measured in many ways, many of them not public.
You think he has a secret successful startup? Lol
I've looked through some of those comments, and I don't understand what is going on. Can you help, please?
Someone was trying to knock cperciva down a peg or two as he was boasting about something higher up in the thread. The comment being something to the effect of, “have you won a Putnam? If not, stop talking.” The Putnam is an undergraduate mathematics competition. It’s prestigious to win.
Colin was a Putnam fellow (top 5 scorers) in 1999.
All in all, it was a pretty funny exchange at the time and quickly stopped the argument. Don’t assume that the person you’re talking with here is an idiot. It really demonstrates how HN users are varied with significant expertise in many areas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathem...
News to me. TIL.
Thanks! My Poe’s Law-ometer was as a entangled as that famous cat for a moment.
The scalability depends on the typing speed of the horse, which of course is limited by how much they are carrying.
An unladen horse can clearly type faster than one weighed down with for example coconuts, and we must not forget the span between the shift key and the number row. This is a very large keyboard for native Icelandic horses, and while the European breed might make the span, the African variety can easily get those awkward two hoof symbols.
All in all it is clear that the Icelandic government must give immigration privileges to unladen African horses immediately to prevent this startup industry going under.
Write your Althing member now !
And this is a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail:)
I believe the appropriate response would have been "a hØrse once bit my sister..."
Your solution sounds good, but at which point do I integrate it with my FTP account? I have it mounted locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
Use SCCS it's way more fun!
The poster seems to be trying to draw a parallel between his comment and an infamous post that he made nearly 15 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), or maybe just to make him feel bad. I personally don’t think the tones of the two posts are comparable at all. His post has been quoted out of context for the last decade or so, though, so it’s not surprising to me. (Ask yourself, what did “app” mean in his comment?)
Several people seem to expect that he would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother him at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.
Anyway, he's pretty satisfied with where life has taken him. He's certainly not going to sweat someone combing through his post history in a vague attempt to dunk on him.
I am profoundly confused by the pronouns in this comment. You, gp and the author of the dropbox comment are all different people, aren't you?
Anyway, it's just a joke. I don't think anyone's trying to make anyone feel bad.
Oh my gosh. There are SOOOO many meta references in this thread. I'm clearly an outsider to the HN world.
Aaaaaah
Neighsayer.
Actual LOL. This deserves All The Upvotes.
Ah miserable downvoterz
>it seems that down the road this may require a lot of horses.
And you apparently need to train every horse to actually write emails, so it also requires humans to train the horses. How many horses can an Icelandic horse trainer train in a month?
And do we know if all horses can even learn to write emails? What if it requires very smart horses? How many horses are there in Iceland and how many of them are email-grade horses?
> And do we know if all horses can even learn to write emails? What if it requires very smart horses? How many horses are there in Iceland and how many of them are email-grade horses?
Well...
A horse is a horse - of course, of course - and no one can talk to a horse of course. That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed.
Unless you can train a horse to become a horse trainer.
The singularity
Almost 60 million horses ought to be enough for anybody.
It's almost like this was put together as a joke.
For linux user they should put penguins typing.
I can't tell if you're kidding, maybe trying to emulate the "dropbox comment".
I choose to think you are.
y u no call "Pony Expressed"?
Because those aren't ponies and they didn't have any around? Also, they sized the keyboards for horses, not ponies.
lawl
i created an account just to upvote
That's how it starts. Before you know it, you'll need noprocrast!