All April Fools' Day Jokes on the Web Are Here (so they don't clutter HN) | Hacker News Reader

All April Fools' Day Jokes on the Web Are Here (so they don't clutter HN)

aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com

292 pointsUrgo57 comments

Every year some people complain about all the april fools jokes "cluttering" HN.

Sheesh people, it's one day a year. It's fun. If you don't like fun, don't visit HN for a day or two. Hell, it's the weekend. Go outside. Come back on Monday. You won't miss anything. And no one will miss you. Promise.

Plus, this year it's _Sunday_! I mean seriously, do we need to be super-productive every single day of the year? And for those that want to make a slippery slope argument, I'd just like to say that April's Fools holds a very special place in geek life - it's pretty much the only day of the year that being original and whacky actually gets us applause anther than condemnation. It's practically the Geek Nation national holiday, so let us have some fun!

This site actually works better than HN for this list, though.

Part of the fun is seeing the posts mixed in with serious news. Even more fun, for the subtle jokes, is when you're not sure if something is real or not.

But it's not fun. It's played out.

Perhaps the fact that such links trend well on aggregators like hacker news and reddit as well as micro-blogs like twitter is evidence to the contrary. You may not, but a lot of people still find it fun (myself included).

The same could be said for the endless memes that infest reddit. Popular is not always good.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Popular Reddit memes are "not always good"* because of their frequency and continuous presence. April Fools is once a year and [apparently] popular on HN, you can't seriously compare that to the sort of memes that "infest" Reddit.

* to some. I don't mind them, personally. And they're easy enough to avoid--as soon as I log in and I get my personal programming/comp.sci/math/netsec related subreddits, my personal Reddit frontpage is about as good as HN, with the exception that one of the two does not constantly shit on the other at every possible opportunity (seriously, and you say April Fools is "played out").

I agree with the sentiment, but this list helps so that you don't miss any good ones that may not make it to the frontpage

Yeah let's celebrate Fourth of July on HN too, because it's also once per year.

the 5th of July only happens once a year too!

Isn't that Erlang day?

http://www.reddit.com is setting a new standard.

They are basically crowdsourcing their April's fools day joke. Genius.

What is it that they're doing? I was there, I realize it's April first, but I couldn't figure out what the he'll was happening.

They're taking live submissions from the community and promoting selectively.

Try picking a different date from the "timeline".

My all time favorite is still the BBC story about the spaghetti harvest.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/new...

Joke is (mildly) on the BBC, growing up we would always have spaghetti squash growing in the garden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_squash

If this page didn't look like something out of geocities in 1998 I might consider using it. :P

I thought this too, but (seriously) wondered if that was part of the joke.

Also great: Adobe to charge developers per line of Actionscript code

http://www.8bitrocket.com/2012/03/31/adobe-to-charge-develop...

I like the Toshiba joke myself. I didn't imagine that Toshiba would join in on April Fool's Day, but I like the idea of an oblong tablet.

The trouble with the Toshiba video is a) you'd really have to check the date; and b) it'd probably sell more than most of the other tablets out there.

(That said, I looked at the Rhombus and thought to myself "hey, that corner makes it look really easy to hold comfortably", and I cried to myself a little inside.)

Isn't Toshiba a joke every day of the year?

I for one welcome the new gopher overlords of tuxfamily.org as announced on linuxfr.org (french slashdot like site)! Even better - I opened my own gopher server on guylhem.org as part of a "retro" project a few weeks ago ;-)

Quite fun to do, but good documentation to create a good looking gopher server is still lacking in 2012.

I love this: The littlest iPod Nano case http://www.padandquill.com/cases-for-iphone-ipod-touch/the-l...

This one is off-topic, but the first one that had me for a second: http://www.criterion.com/films/28373-kindergarten-cop

"Related Films" on that page might have been the first April Fools "joke" I actually laughed at today.

Ha! I didn't even pay attention to that until I read your comment.

http://google-au.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/google-street-roo-e...

Every April first I am afraid to go on the internet, because some people are so effective at making their April Fool's Day jokes subtle that I'm quite afraid I'll read some great or horrible story that's a joke and not understand it's a joke, or even worse that I'll read some great or horrible story and think it's a joke when it's actually reality.

It's good to have a laugh, but it's too mainstream/common for me to really be comfortable taking anything seriously.

Google Tap actually had me laughing. Especially "Todd Smith"'s wisdom. "You can tap in the morning. You can tap it at night."

This is just an example of how not to do an April fools day joke. These guys are posting the feedback they collected back to their server which I think is immoral.

http://www.embeddedmarket.com/Gift-For-Feedback.asp

Here's a fun one: Replace LESS and SASS with MORE.

http://morecss.org/

AdBlock Plus is showing me pictures of cats rather than ads. Not sure how you'd add that to the list.

It got me - I thought Squid had dropped the ball (because cat pics were turning up in the most unusual places and context) and restarted it :)

Don't forget new Google Cloud API which allows you to manage Clouds of course. http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/google-cloud-api...

I appreciate the link, love the concept, can you do me a favor and turn off table borders, and go to http://www.colourlovers.com/ & use it. Thanks again for the idea.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/multitask.html Really liked this one since we all try to multitask all the time(and fail context switching)

I really like the Google Maps gag. I hope it will still be an option after today.

Looks like geeks will make it rain before rappers do...

Today is a good day to promote any low-quality site, since everyone Clicks on everything expecting to get a quick laugh.

And then they find out there was no joke. But they still got FOOLED.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3782230

And please prepend 4/1: to any stories if you feel like submitting them.

If you search for japan in the 8-bit google maps, the trees are cherry blossoms instead of pine trees.

I was disappointed that they don't show the castles as actual castles, though :/

Wow, Google made at least 8 or 9 April Fools jokes this year. I know these are all just for fun, but doesn't this seem a bit excessive? It makes me feel like Google is focusing harder on portraying themselves as a place with a cool culture than focusing on making cool things (like they used to). It would be much cooler if Google really released half the things they facetiously made for today. I can only hope they have something earth-shattering up their sleeves with their autonomous car program.

I could certainly be wrong, but I took it as different departments doing their own thing rather than some organized effort by the company as a whole.

and now google gives you the power to control the weather http://goo.gl/EF8cM

Leave Stack Overflow open in the background for some time to get a special message from a Unicorn Clippy.

Enter hypertask mode...

http://i.imgur.com/UTvUH.png

Out of curiosity, why not link directly to the source rather than taking a screen shot?

And then there was one more April fool's day link

Adblock seems broken due to their cat nonsense.

8 out of 12 entries are from Google. Dont they have anything beter to work on?

One year they're going to come out and have the last X years of their pranks as real products. X years of pranks is actually a huge prank in itself.

For as big as Google is, I doubt these all came from the same singular department.

Just came to say I'm pretty pissed someone has done this, I don't want to click on your website. I'm not interested. I want them to appear on HN, so I can glimpse on the front-page.

Edit: just clicked the link and I'm even more annoyed! I don't care what the internet is doing on Apr 1st, I care what startups and other HN related entities are doing on Apr 1st. Something I cant do on that other site.

Might seem like a pointless rant, I just don't see the point of people fragmenting my experience.

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