[HN Gopher] Outhorse Your Email
___________________________________________________________________
Outhorse Your Email
Author : eorri
Score : 686 points
Date : 2022-05-19 09:52 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.visiticeland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.visiticeland.com)
| icecreamrodeo wrote:
| i created an account just to upvote
| Aachen wrote:
| That's how it starts. Before you know it, you'll need
| noprocrast!
| zamalek wrote:
| I would pay for this if I could use it on LinkedIn.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| In case you thought they took the easy way, behind the scenes
| video: https://vimeo.com/710288765/5e14861065 (linked on site)
| nwiswell wrote:
| > In case you thought they took the easy way
|
| Alright, fine, but where's the API?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Is the audio beyond fucked or is it just my machine?
| memorable wrote:
| It's probably just your machine. Mine seems fine.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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.
| alxlaz wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Icelandic audio always Bjorked.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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.
| Adlopa wrote:
| Could be worse for the horses, I guess...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/16/iceland-...
| wfme wrote:
| Love this sort of thing. Makes me think about visiting Iceland
| haha
| Aachen wrote:
| 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 :)
| avar wrote:
| > 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?
| Aachen wrote:
| Well, the horse riding! Sorry, I thought it would be clear
| from the first paragraph
| [deleted]
| blackshaw wrote:
| 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
| thedanbob wrote:
| > 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.
| brewdad wrote:
| A side trip to the Westman Islands should also be on your
| must-see list. Book an overnight stay for at least one
| night.
| avar wrote:
| 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.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| It seems Iceland is also 4x4 heaven if this Karahnjukar
| Spillway is anything to go by: https://youtu.be/Lv-
| XcVFBwVY?t=214
|
| I cant see the horses getting up there!
| blackshaw wrote:
| I stand corrected! Have changed the post to say
| "discouraged" instead of "illegal".
| thorum wrote:
| 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!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It's all those hidden layers of horse hair.
| [deleted]
| lobocinza wrote:
| Why outhorse if I already have a in-house cat?
| codegladiator wrote:
| For scale and cheaper cloud costs in iceland
| q-base wrote:
| 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!
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Their previous spoof of Zuckerberg's Metaverse video was also
| great.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enMwwQy_noI
| aasasd wrote:
| 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.
| q-base wrote:
| Hahaha I had not seen that one either. Thanks a lot for
| sharing. That really made me laugh as well :)
| shakezula wrote:
| the part of that where he gives up on opening the door had me
| cackle laughing. Thanks for sharing this, it's absolutely
| perfect.
| mxuribe wrote:
| This is hilarious; bravo!
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| It would be really cool if they also add a poop emoji if the
| horse takes a poop while replying to the email
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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.
| shmageggy wrote:
| 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.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Almost 60 million horses ought to be enough for anybody.
| spoils19 wrote:
| 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.
| omnicognate wrote:
| 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.
| spoils19 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29465505
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Oh my gosh. There are SOOOO many meta references in this
| thread. I'm _clearly_ an outsider to the HN world.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Aaaaaah
| tux3 wrote:
| 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
| kator wrote:
| Use SCCS it's way more fun!
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _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?
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > 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.
| icemelt8 wrote:
| acoomans wrote:
| Unless you can train a horse to become a horse trainer.
| jmmcd wrote:
| The singularity
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| lisper wrote:
| I'm amazed that you remembered that.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It might be the most famous Hacker News comment in
| existence.
| dspillett wrote:
| 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...)
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| News to me. TIL.
| serf wrote:
| either that or the Putnam comment of cperciva's. [0]
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| Jeez, that guy was full of himself though. Looks like 14
| years later he isn't the roaring startup success story he
| predicted.
| jhugo wrote:
| How do you know that? Success can be measured in many
| ways, many of them not public.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I've looked through some of those comments, and I don't
| understand what is going on. Can you help, please?
| mbreese wrote:
| 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_Mat
| hem...
| the_other wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Thanks! My Poe's Law-ometer was as a entangled as that famous
| cat for a moment.
| tdrgabi wrote:
| I can't tell if you're kidding, maybe trying to emulate the
| "dropbox comment".
|
| I choose to think you are.
| [deleted]
| robga wrote:
| Neighsayer.
| dmje wrote:
| Actual LOL. This deserves All The Upvotes.
| dmje wrote:
| Ah miserable downvoterz
| major505 wrote:
| For linux user they should put penguins typing.
| IncRnd wrote:
| It's almost like this was put together as a joke.
| [deleted]
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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 !
| drKarl wrote:
| And this is a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail:)
| technothrasher wrote:
| I believe the appropriate response would have been "a hOrse
| once bit my sister..."
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chronolitus wrote:
| 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.
| Finnucane wrote:
| They're doing jobs American horses don't want to do.
| [deleted]
| mxuribe wrote:
| 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 :-)
| manholio wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > wFwhxsqjnzgmsrqaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
|
| Wow, I never knew Icelandic was such a beautiful language.
| SahAssar wrote:
| The aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa is silent and usually
| written as aa.
| moron4hire wrote:
| That should be easy for me. My horses are terrible at email.
| Yhippa wrote:
| 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.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| No one can talk to a horse, of course, unless...
|
| https://youtu.be/91LRPk8x14s
| [deleted]
| lala26in wrote:
| lawl
| johnchristopher wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| y u no call "Pony Expressed"?
| cryptonector wrote:
| Because those aren't ponies and they didn't have any around?
| Also, they sized the keyboards for horses, not ponies.
| amelius wrote:
| charles_f wrote:
| I wish my country would build outhorsing centers, but horses are
| confined to their stables. Bunch of social safety-net cheque
| grabbing lazy asses
| Msw242 wrote:
| 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
| dten wrote:
| Missed opportunity to use email.horse
| troymc wrote:
| A much better solution would be to buy your own horse, although
| personally I think I'd upgrade to an elephant.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I think in the tech world that is referred to as self-horsing!
| /s
| bradgessler wrote:
| Pretty sure this is how most Zendesk responses are generated
| anytime I email tech support.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah that's gonna be a neigh for me dawg
| whalesalad wrote:
| Surprised these horses prefer QWERTY and not BOVINE layout
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Horses are equine, cattle are bovine.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Speaking truth to horses.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.
| Tao332 wrote:
| 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Is this real, or an April Fools Day joke that just got left
| online?
| rhplus wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_horse
| maxbaines wrote:
| Made me chuckle this morning.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Weirdly 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.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > 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.
| petecooper wrote:
| [Generic question asking if the service is stable.]
| Symbiote wrote:
| Only if you pony up for the premium plan. It costs a reinsom,
| but it would be a bit foalish not to.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Are you actually a user, as well as an amateur comedian?
| mxuribe wrote:
| I'm laughing so much on these, that my voice is
| getting...hor...well you get what i mean. ;-)
| Tao332 wrote:
| Enough already, y'all are beating a dead horse.
| keitmo wrote:
| Neigh.
| keraf wrote:
| Horse as a Service (HaaS), sign me up!
| hestefisk wrote:
| Iceland - simply the HEST!
| grammers wrote:
| This is hilarious, thanks for sharing! :)
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Your post advocates a
|
| ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
|
| (X) Dog and Pony Show
|
| approach to fixing email.
| zdragnar wrote:
| At least it's not a goat rodeo
| Tao332 wrote:
| This isn't the Goat Internet.
|
| https://obviousplant.com/products/a-3-5-inch-floppy-disk-
| tha...
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Shoutout to the greatest album released in the 2010's, Yo Yo
| Ma and Chris Thile's Goat Rodeo Session:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-31e8Nlujw
| deltarholamda wrote:
| 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.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| For that, you can look to Goat-2-Meeting:
|
| https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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?
| maxwelldone wrote:
| While technically true, I'm afraid HR might consider it as
| horsin' around.
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(page generated 2022-05-19 23:02 UTC)