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Comment by sambeau | Hacker News Reader

Am I alone in being slightly disappointed to discover that Horse_ebooks is not a robot?

I've had to conduct a mini-self analysis on this news, as I find myself disappointed. Why?

All I can come up with is that I found joy in the befuddlement caused by my brain trying to make sense of the non-sensicle almost-marketing speak. The fact that it was (supposedly) accidental somehow added to the joy. But I can't think of a good reason why. Was it that I thought some spammer was wasting clock-cycles making me laugh rather than selling me viagra?

It reminded me of Steven Frank's "Spamusement!" (which I also found very funny back in the days of email.)

http://spamusement.com

And Panic's love of Horse_ebooks is where I first learned of it.

EDIT: I've just been back to spamusement.com and, yes, it is still really funny. DO NOT start looking unless you have half an hour to waste!

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I'm relieved. It never occurred to me that horse_ebooks was a spam bot until I started reading other people stating with certainty that it is a spambot. It always struck me as a human posing as a spambot because it was too clever and poetic.

It also surprises me that so many people think we're more likely to encounter a legitimately clever spam bot than a clever human impersonating a spambot.

> It always struck me as a human posing as a spambot because it was too clever and poetic

I dunno, I've seen some pretty clever and poetic quotes from my own markov-chain powered IRC bot:

http://quotes.shishnet.org/quotes?search=MrCuddlemews

(#cuddles on darkmyst to poke him yourself; hilight by name or by starting a line with "@")

And the inspiration: http://www.jibble.org/montyquotes.php

I agree. The phrases consistently end in a way that is never completely resolved. See:

"In less than three weeks you can be looking at things differently, more creatively, if you"

"Why many people achieve very little despite spending most of their time"

"The interviews can be shorter since you would have many"

I only ever saw retweeted or starred tweets from it (as I quit direct twitter a while back, deciding instead to view it only through Stellar).

I had assumed that what I saw was a tiny proportion of tweets — those that were funny and/or poetic. If I'd know they all were than I'm sure I would have never thought it was a bot.

I didn't expect it to be a spambot per se, but I did expect it to be some sort of automated scraping of the site. Because "human posts semi-random words" is more or less trivial, but "human teaches neural net to perform broken poetry while scraping an ebooks site" is much more exciting.

I wanted it to be something like http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/No,_We_Need_a_Neural_Network...

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