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]
> No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
(https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...)
It's their aesthetic design which sold people on them. That's what Slashdot did not understand.
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...
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.
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.