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April Fools and Hacker News

corecursive.com

The issue isn't clever jokes or pranks - like most people on HN, I know the history too of course it's all great.

The problem is that companies started doing it by rote as a way to promote themselves with teh hackerz. That's lame and boring. It had gotten lame and boring years before I made that post in 2014. How much lamer and boringer is it now? exercise for the reader.

The nicest thing about running HN is that we have only one thing to optimize for: curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Curiosity doesn't go well with predictability and repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Therefore we downweight predictable and repetitive things when we notice them. Simple, no? and by the same principle, genuinely unpredictable things are just as welcome as they ever were.

Same goes for jokes. The only problem with jokes is that people tend to overestimate how funny theirs are, as scott_s pointed out years ago in his classic statement on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.

Host here. I mean meant no offense by calling out your moderation policy. It just provided an exciting framing device for exploring the history of these jokes.

The Atlantic also had a interesting article on this topic at around the same time.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/how-t...

No worries and no offense taken! Sorry if I came across that way.

I think maybe y'all should just do an annual...

Who Wants to Be Pranked thread on April 1st like the Hiring threads where all top comments are links to the pranks going on... - so it all stays in one thread.

Better link (includes full transcript): https://corecursive.com/april-fools-is-cancelled/

(as of this writing, the link points to podcasts.google.com instead of CoRecursive's official website)

Thanks. Opened the link in OP and didn't understand anything.

@dang, I think this should be changed.

Changed!

Thanks for dropping the real link!

Host here. This April fools day episode is an exploration of great and not so great tech April fools jokes, starting with Dang's request to flag April Fools pranks in 2014[1] and going from there through a history of tech pranks. We cover Woz's many pranks, the April 1st RFCs and many jokes that flopped.

I also posted this myself, but it didn't get traction[2]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506793

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877372

Changed to that from https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9jb3JlY3Vyc2l2ZS5.... Thanks!

In the 2000s, Slashdot had it down to an artform, where they would also inject real but outlandish stories into a stream of fakes. Made for a fun day of speculating on which were gaffs and which were real, and all would be revealed on April 2.

they got me hard with an announcement that enlightenment 1.0 was released.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/04/01/1423252/enlightenme...

There's a name from the past. They're still on 0.25 but looking sharp!

My personal favorite Slashdot prank was much more private. I work in security, and this old workplace had a prank-friendly atmosphere at the time. Co-workers knew I hit up Slashdot often, and I'd made a recent, unrelated gaffe on a project.

I got a great startle when I hit up the home page, and the top story was all about my mistake! There was quite some effort put into looking exactly right, except that they'd missed using the logged-in view. It was also my prompt to learn all about arp-spoofing...

One of my favourite april fool's jokes in tech: https://arne-mertz.de/2018/04/raw-pointers-are-gone/

It actually made it to the HN front page and people had a hard time deciding whether this was a joke or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727441

That is a great one. I think the best jokes are hard to tell if they are real or not and have a sort of self-awareness about them.

This one seems to have that. It pokes fun at how the C++ standards committee is trying to make C++ something different than it was, at any cost.

I love April 1st.

You get to see, first hand, how much people can be UNCREATIVE in creative/marketing/PR departments.

If this is the April Fools meta thread, I'll share my participation in this awful day: I'm running a forum mafia, & using the start date of April first to defend a rather trollish setup: 8 cops, 2 cult leaders http://elementscommunity.org/forum/forum-games/elements-mafi...

Good; I hate April Fool's when trying to keep up with news, as my time is more limited than it used to be, and wasting time reading a fake article can be expensive

The male guest is the least fun person alive.

I'm waiting for HN to go meta and to ban post with discussions about the funniness of April Fools. :)

While that doesn't happen, I'd be interested in getting some opinions from people here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877005

There is a bit more to it than "a simple poll", given that the idea is to help people find co-workers/companies that share similar values.

Anyway, if you don't want to sign-up, you can simply comment on the HN link.

Jokes are banned? Meanwhile lichees is #1 post

Got immediately nuked (but it's here for those interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30877087 )

I do think it would be nice with a meta-post listing the various tech-related ones people find, though.

Literally 1984

Someone told me Google is Evil today and I almost believed him! Can't fool me.

Google is evil, today. They didn't even have to change their site.

And thank God(Dang?) for it.

Over on Reddit, couple of groan worthy "jokes". It's like a bunch of nerds with no sense of humor trying so hard to be "funny".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com