Ask HN: What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your favorite April Fools Joke today?

74 pointsjoshfinnie74 comments

I think we need to get a single source for all today's pratical jokes that are getting submitter to Hacker News. I thought we could use this post as a forum of sort. This will also allow for people to upvote their favorites and we can get a running tally of the best-of-the-best.

Thank you.

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My favorite so far is XKCDs Command Prompt. There are so many easter eggs to find, it is definitely a time killer!

Am I the only one that thought this, and then realized you could just look at the source code, and then realized that I'm too lazy?

Looking at the source isn't lazy that's just good thinking -- time is precious! :)

I went one step further after playing with it for 30 seconds and bypassed the source entirely: found a comment on reddit which listed all of the features and commands.

Meta-source-code-reading?

Type "i read the source code" into the prompt.

I laughed at the reply to "cat".

The problem is that the more you put apart things because of laziness, the more you become lazy.

Great. Just wish it had bash completion.

I agree with everyone saying XKCD is their favorite. The easter eggs are simply brilliant. Second on my list is Reddit, for making everyone a king for a day.

SSP (Shameless Self Promotion): My top 10 april fool's day pranks of 2010 - http://www.pallab.net/2010/04/01/top-april-fools-day-jokes-o...

You mean it's just a prank? I was kind of hoping it would stay.

Reddit has a "turn admin on" link next to your username. When admin is on, you can change headlines, vote multiple times, see user's IP addresses and likelihood of being a bot or a spammer, and ban users in three different ways. And the background on comments pages is from the Sistene Chapel.

The Sistine Chapel Background is only in the Science SubReddit, which also has a lower-case t for the reddit icon. It got a chuckle out of me. :)

I'll have to make this a shameless plug, but it's probably the only way any of you will get to know about this.

My startup, Qaym.com is a restaurant rating site in Arabic. We're located in Saudi Arabia. April fools isn't a big thing here or in the Arab world in general. But people know the concept. Today we announced that we're changing the site to become exclusively a camel rating site.

We even made a logo: http://blog.qaym.com/2010/04/blog-post.html

And a homepage to boost: http://www.qaym.com/

Most people got it off the bat. Many were confused. And a couple were actually upset, even after they've figured out it was a joke!

Youtube's textp. If you haven't seen it yet somehow, many of the videos where you normally pick the resolution of the video now has a textp option, kinda hoping they keep it past april 1st.

progressive text... so much better than interleaved text.

Wow, I'd love a linux command-line tool that does something like that!

mplayer!

I am pretty sure you are joking but here is how to do it with mplayer. See http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-single/en/MPlayer.html#aal... and below (on that page).

libcaca: mplayer -vo caca yourvideofile

aalib: mplayer -vo aa yourvideofile

I'm pretty partial to our own, which includes a working implementation: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/04/01/solving-the-javascr...

You got me! I read that late last night and thought it was real....

Google's new java annotations are rather funny: http://code.google.com/p/gag/

I was going to say this too. You can download the bits and play with them. Its impressive that its all actually implemented/documented.

Do a Google search for anything and look at the stats for the search.

Results 1 - 10 of about 397,000,000 for anything [definition]. (0.30 microfortnights)

You mean: "Do a Topeka search...." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/different-kind-of-com...

0.64 times the velocity of an unladen swallow. That's pretty good!

Only works for the english version, though. I had to go to google.co.uk, since google.com redirects me to google.cl

Personally I'm most excited about the paranormal romance "Unicorn School: The Sparkling". Start reading half-way down. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/psa-new-...

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/mobile/

As a runner-up...

http://www.cheapassgamer.com/

Can the Blizzard games please be real? I want to out-surf and out-shoot a megalodon! I can feel the Epic right through the Internets!

Let me Google that for you (lmgtfy.com) links point you to Bing search results.

I can honestly say Ars Technica's gets my vote. http://arstechnica.com/staff/nate/2010/04/tentacular-tentacu...

Not sure if you noticed it or not, but the new logo is a very nice touch!

I rather like Werner Vogel's 'AWS Import/Export for Legacy Storage Systems' joke -- once you read the text, it's very obviously a joke, but the title itself sounds rather plausible: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/04/aws_importexport...

The Independent's piece on the Circle Line (London Underground) being turned into the second Large Hadron Collider.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hadron-collider-ii...

I find them all annoying. April 1st is basically my break from the internet.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/equipmentpotenc...

Hilarious! It took me a few minutes to notice all the subtle puns everywhere.

Canned Unicorn Meat: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/unicorn-meat.shtml

I like Atlassian fourwalls. Bringing foursquare to the enterprise with developer checkins. The site is funny. "Devlopers: use our API to write your own APIs". http://atlassian.com/fourwalls

Hitler learns the truth about fourwalls: http://atlss.in/bMoCmm

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49305387,00.htm

...at least I hope it's an April Fools joke, or we're seriously fucked.

EDIT: Actually this wins: there's a vowel outage at gmail http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-vowel-outage.ht...

If you're a Settlers of Catan fan, check out the DealBase deal on the Isle of Catan: http://www.dealbase.com/Isle-of-Catan/Hotel-Catan-deals/Deal...

It's not an April Fool Joke per se, but http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/april-fool/ has to be the funniest thing I've seen in quite a few Aprils.

For any DJs out there, the "Enable Auto DJ" button in Mixxx changes to "Enable Pee Break Mode" on April 1st.

http://www.mixxx.org/

I don't know my favorite, but I do know my least favorite:

http://www.kernel.org/

Cisco IOS QoS configuration guide - flesh tone recognition to classify and monitor suspect pornographic images

http://packetlife.net/media/blog/attachments/413/nbar_flesh_...

http://www.freelunchproject.com/

if you've been following the starcraft 2 beta, and you know a little bit about professional starcraft 1, then you'll probably find teamliquid.net's SC2 promod (http://www.sc2promod.com/) hilarious

I humbly submit my own attempt at humor: http://blog.obsidianportal.com/?p=362

It might be funny to anyone who has to deal with user-generated content.

Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to be fined by FCC? http://zomg.yahoo.com/fcc-to-possibly-fine-yahoo-ceo-for-swe...

The article "Orthographic Correlations in Astrophysics" by Zuntz, Zlosnik, Zunckel, and Zwarf on the arXiv.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.6064

Shameless self promotion - http://tweetsworth.com/e

Submitted it here for testing a few days ago but few people realized it was a joke.

New Eclipse logo: http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20100401_newlogo.ph...

LHC used to discover the Neutrinosaurus

http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2010/100401.html

I always like trying to figure out which of the products http://www.thinkgeek.com made up for April Fools.

i wish the iCade was real

I made the IT guy find the 10 lirpa viruses my anti-virus software was picking up but wasn't able to remove. Funny thing; he never found em =/

Stack Overflow made everyone's profile pics into unicorns. It was the only one that got me today, 'cause I just noticed my own at first.

Picassa Lifesize isn't bad: http://picasa.google.com/lifesize.html

I rather liked the Y Permutator story - if for no other reason than it made me think whether it should have been C Combinator.

I like Tremulous Exclusively Going to Xbox Live: http://tremulous.net/

xkcd's command prompt for sure

liking this re justin bieber (beeber?) http://gruvr.com/blog/justin-bieber-to-change-spelling-of-su...

Am I the only one who hates April Fool's day on the web?

sorry, then this is not the thread for you :(

Maybe you just find it exhausting to have all these awesome things come out on this day only to have them rudely taken away only hours later.

Yes

you are not alone.

Yes, it's obnoxious.

Downvotes for the truth?

Kernel.org and their upsidedownternet. ¡unɟ sʎɐʍןɐ s,ʇı

Google Translate for Animals, this is just hilarious http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/

YouTube's TEXTp they should keep that in the labs projects, and the Google translate for animals was quite funny.

eBay buys back Skype http://skypejournal.com/2010/04/ebay-buys-back-skype.html

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