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.
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.
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.
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
(X) D̵o̵g̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ Pony Show
approach to fixing email.
https://obviousplant.com/products/a-3-5-inch-floppy-disk-tha...
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.
Source: Wife's uncle did the electronics and software for it.
Alright, fine, but where's the API?
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.
Let's be respectful, not negative neigh-sayers
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/16/iceland-...
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 :)
Don't leave us hanging, what was the activity?
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
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.
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.
Wow, I never knew Icelandic was such a beautiful language.
And HR is forever telling us we should "engage" with one another more.
This counts as engagement, right?
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.
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]
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 !
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.
Anyway, it's just a joke. I don't think anyone's trying to make anyone feel bad.
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?
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.
I choose to think you are.
