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Comment by rssems | Hacker News Reader

118 pointsrssems66 comments

As an (almost) 40 year old, it has recently occurred to me that younger people may not be aware that the Internet absolutely ruined April Fool's Day. There was a time not so long ago when you could pull a real-life prank on someone on April Fool's Day and actually have them fall for it because they hadn't been inundated by dozens of lame-ass corporate April Fool's Day jokes online the night before. No more!

On balance, the Internet has done far more good than bad, but IMO there's no doubt that it ruined April Fool's Day.

(As someone who lived through the 1999-2001 bubble as a developer I also remember a time when people were seriously pushing digital-smell technology as a real "coming soon" thing, to be a huge hit on the web and in games and such).

Somehow I knew the first comment would be a whine. You can still pull pranks on your friends even today. The internet did not ruin that. Perhaps just not good at pranks?

I do not find the linked article funny. I do appreciate the attempt. I do not appreciate the hand-wringing over every tiny thing that seems so common on HN.

Going back to April Fools memories, does anyone remember when Blizzard would release new neutral heroes for WC3 . . . but they actually turned out to be real and rolled out in the next patch? One such: http://classic.battle.net/war3/neutral/goblintinker.shtml Good times.

Personally, I like to pull my April's fools pranks on January fourth. When people ask why, I tell them it's how we celebrate April fools' outside the US.

> I do not appreciate the hand-wringing over every tiny thing that seems so common on HN.

This is so true, so much pedantry now to get cute little karma points. Hopefully someone does a joke involving Yahoo or PHP 5.8 to really get everyone going tomorrow.

On the subject of the bubble and April Fools, I have a great example of the Internet enabling great April Fools pranks.

At a .bomb startup in the late 90s, our own company ran a stock ticker website. On April fools, someone got together with IT and MITM'd the stock site, showing our share price plummeting.

This could have been particularly evil, but the joke was disclosed early on.

That's a prank, rather than this marketing drivel where companies announce clearly ridiculous features and products.

I pull pranks every April Fools day and, if imagined and executed properly, they always work.

I LOVE corporate April Fools day stunts and I hope they continue. I also hope every Hacker News thread doesn't continue to have to have at least one really, REALLY negative comment somewhere near the top of the comments section.

I feel like timezones have also done a number on April Fools' Day, because on this side of the IDL, it begins late on March 31.

I think we need a spoiler policy for the Internet. Perhaps we should limit April Fools jokes to 14:00-15:00 UTC. This will put all the densely inhabited locations between 7:00 and 24:00 local time.

And so begins the worst day on the internet.

Day? The entire week is shot to hell from everyone talking about the lame crap, created by boring marketing departments, at boring companies, that absolutely have to do something "funny".

I think the only good thing to come out of this week is that because I'll insulate myself off from the wider internet so much, I'll actually get a lot done.

You're boring.

Look, once upon a time you would see a few april fool's jokes, and they'd be funny, and you'd laugh, and good times were had.

These days, every single company absolutely has to send out a "press release" or "product announcement" or "feature enhancement" or other crap, and all of them have been designed by boring marketing departments at boring companies, and vetted to be as non-offensive and boring as possible, and still, people discuss them and send the links around.

Moderation. It's a virtue.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No. These are just the equivalent of "dick and fart" jokes.

Something only a 5 year old would find funny.

Well, today I googled for "success", just to make sure that I got the spelling right. And then I saw the sidebar with links to this.

I found it funny. Shoot me.

It's interesting that this joke comes the same day that The Verge declares "smell might be the next big thing in advertising" [1].

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/31/4166884/japanese-smelling-...

Truth, as usual, is even stranger than fiction: http://www.digital-olfaction.com/

What I like about this April fools gag is that someone actually built a (admittedly unviable) business around digital scent technology about 13 years ago. It also happened to have the worst name for a product I have ever, ever seen. iSmell.

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

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Say it out loud to someone nearby.

The only question left to ask is whether they will use bitmapped (.WIF) or compressed (NosePeg) files.

The problem with those lossy formats is that you get those ringing artifacts that smell like benzene.

I at least hope they open source the conversion software they are using.

And IE support will finally be added sometime in 2018.

If only this 20% time spent on building this crap could have been spent on keeping Reader alive.

I can't tell if this comment is serious or not, which makes me want to upvote it even more!

Who would want to use this?

It's just going to get shut down anyway.

Digiscents raised $10M in 2001 for the "iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer," was not April Fools joke.

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

This is something I've actually wanted on more than one occasion. Is there any artificial way to get a computer to "smell" things?

Noses and how we detect fragrances is actually done on an atomic level, basically by testing the reverberation of the bonds between molecules. So when two things smell the same they actually have the same bond strength, but can be completely different chemically. This is why creating artificial scents is so hit or miss.

The science and discovery of all this is really fascinating, I recommend The Secret of Scent by Turin: http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Scent-Adventures-Perfume-Scienc...

Noses are actually alarmingly complicated organs, and are also very poorly studied compared to other sensory organs. Progress on electronic noses has been slow to date, and existing devices tend to be fragile and expensive.

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

The Syft (1) Mass Spectrometer - the Voice 200 (2) - can sniff air and determine minute amounts of compounds present in real time, sending the output in standard form to a computer. It's the size of a big washing machine, and a lot heavier, and is portable only in vans. One application is food and flavour detection.(3) Others are sea container contamination testing (a very real problem - 20% of so are toxic when opened), ambient air testing for pollutants, medical breath testing and so on.

(1): http://www.syft.com (2): http://www.syft.com/products (3): http://www.syft.com/solutions/food-and-flavor-analysis

(disclosure - I have a very small investment in the company)

A gas chromatograph? I'd imagine it would need a decent database to compare to as well, and it certainly wouldn't be too trivial a task.

Google Nose everything about you.

Yeah, with all those freshly baked tracking cookies.

There will never be another April fool joke as good as Gmail.

I like it when actual products get released on 4/1.

http://www.webpronews.com/google-gmail-april-fools-hoax-2004...

http://googlepress.blogspot.ca/2004/04/google-gets-message-l...

Happy April fools day!

Lets see what this popular date turned into yet another corporate marketing bs has to offer this year.

Works better in IE. The smell of a dumpster is perfect there.

Ok. This is poorly made this time :( ... Last year (or a year before that) the double mouse thing was still a bit believable. Anyone with a little knowledge of computer devices would come to know this is a joke.

That gmail webcam gesture control was nice too.

Wow that was lame, they've had so much better april fools jokes in past years.

Really? I can't remember an April Fool's Day joke from Google that I found even remotely funny.

I liked the double mouse in Chrome joke that they made.

"You're only using 50% of your hands!"

This must be real, because it's not even 11pm in UTC yet.

.com.au != 'murica.

UTC != 'murica

The YouTube one was up around midnight NZ time.

Anyone remember Leisure Suit Larry 7 with the Rub'n'Sniff cards or whatever they were called? I wonder if mine (in the original box) still smells...

CYBERSNIFF TWOTHOUSAND ™ SNIFFFFF

And with this, Australia enters April 1st.

A software product with code smells that are by design. What could possibly go wrong?

out of all the things Google have done this year, I would think a competition for which the prize is to give them $1500 would be much more appropriate for April fools... oh wait

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Seriously, let it go. Shit closes down sometimes, stop crying about it whenever Google is even mentioned.

It's already 1st April in Australia it seems :)

Something about this doesn't smell right.

I rather have Google Tongue, just saying

Didn't work for me in Chrome :(

Metagenomics for VOCs

Humor by committee.

I just got my wife to smell my ipad screen. Pure gold, thanks Google!

okay, I fell for it. Kudos!

word play on google knows ?

April Fool

I heard that Google is releasing to each employee his or her full calibration score history, going back to start date, at 11:30 tomorrow.

Now that will be interesting.

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