List of April Fools' Day Announcements | Hacker News Reader

List of April Fools' Day Announcements

592 pointsconroy538 comments

Instead of cluttering the front page with fake product announcements, let's just post them in here instead. One thread where each top-level comment is just a title and a link.

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MSDOS is the new mobile OS from Microsoft

Announcement: http://lumiaconversations.microsoft.com/2015/04/01/microsoft...

Product page: http://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/ms-dos/

Edit: Even an app http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/ms-dos-mobile/85...

Wow, the app is really well done. SPOILERS: Can cd into a programs folder, and launch programs like sms.exe, where I get a blue DOS-style window asking for input. Can use "phone <nr>" to call someone, send e-mails. If i launch "internet" it plays an old modem sound before launching the stock OS browser.

CDing into C:\GAMES\RPS and launching RPS.exe first gives you a question about using "PC Speaker" or "Sound Blaster", and then how many colors you would like. Then the game crashes with "Error! Not enough memory, RPS needs 641KB conventional memory (...)" and then a quote "---Cortana: That's odd, 640 K ought to be enough for anyone", haha. After that, it guides you through using mem and loadhigh to get the game to run. And of course, RPS is Rock-Paper-Scissors in 8-bit glory.

The camera is an ASCII-camera, using letters with only a few colors, or CGA mode. Here are two selfies I took http://imgur.com/a/deajM

The command help gives all useable command: CD, CLS, COLOR, DATE, DIR, ECHO, EDIT (edit autoxec.bat for instance), EXIT, FORMAT, HELP, LOADHIGH, MEM, PATH, TIME, TYPE, VER.

That's beautiful, and probably an improvement on most smartphone OSes.

Haha, love it this is a briljant joke! :)

I'd love to have something like that if it ran bash or even Powershell.

Android has shells, and you can put arbitrary distributions in a chroot, if it's rooted.

But this gives access to regular phone functions, including contacts, calling, text messages, photos and other stuff.

Or a fakechroot[1] if it is not rooted.

  [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/fakechroot

    SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T2

Ah, the memories...

Of course if it was on IRQ 12 half of the games wouldn't work (long story, and yes, due to another x86 quirk)

Oh man, those IRQ nightmares! Please don't mention those extended memory settings or I will go into my basement to look for my MEMMAKER notes on how to (maybe) get a game going...

Just boot one in your browser! https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games Yes these are real copies of MS-DOS games running in MS-DOS in a JS emulator in your browser. Some of them have crack screens, but some of them are running from magnetic maps of the disk, with original copy protection schemes intact.

I once accidentally set the same IRQ for my Serial mouse and modem...The modem would only respond to commands while moving the mouse...good times.

Elaborate on said quirk?

did you load himem.sys? how about emm386.exe? does your sound card have an OPL3 or the OPL4 MIDI chip? Does your trident VESA card on the ISA slot have 1MB VRAM? stacker, drivespace or doublespace? choices! I just bought me a Seagate medalist 1-Gigabyte hard drive. Should I make it a master or a slave on the ATA bus? Make sure the Turbo button is pressed, if Doom is slow to load!

1 Gigabyte? Try 20 Megs...if that.

QEMM! Protected Mode! Unreal Mode! TSR! Ralph Brown's Interrupt List! Oh man!

Had so much with my friends while in high-school trying to figure out what kind of weird graphics mode this cool game called "Scorched Earth" used... It wasn't 320x200 :)

"From Hell's heart I stab at thee..."

That's "Ralf"!

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ralf/

Mode X and related: programming VGA registers to do what int 10h mode 13h didn't offer. Bonus points for flipping video pages or cycling the palette as to not cause tearing.

Oh man, my fondest early memories with computers was modifying the autoexec.bat and config.sys files so I could play DOS games. I can only describe the feeling of finally figuring it out and getting a certain game to work as pure joy.

Conversely, the feeling when I changed something incorrectly (without backups of the original file, of course) and the system error'd out during boot - sheer panic.

dos4gw.exe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/4G

univbe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE

oh my!

Awesome! Would this have happened under Balmer ? Nadella is truly changing Microsoft into a "cool" company.

Yes, of course it would have. It's not like this required executive approval to do. It was probably some WP team that wanted to have a little fun.

Most likely. Balmer was known for his shenanigans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-8IufkbuD0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-l1iGKvcog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2Zd3HYKCRE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgSJxZZfIA4

  cd games
  cd rps
  rps.exe

and you'll find that it can't be run, but Cortana will guide you to "fix" it. After fixing it, Rock-Paper-Scissor game will run.

Apparently WIN works too.

  wolf3d -goobers

If that works, I'm sold.

The interface is a significant improvement compared to Windows 8.

So would be Microsoft Bob!

Does it do EDLIN and DEBUG ?

Is it a full DOS emulator that could run other games, or just a simple shell?

Needs BASIC or GWBASIC

neither, I want BASICA and QBASIC. Do you have the 5 1/4" floppy drive. Will it read the 1.2MB disks or just the 360KB disk?

But will it run Lotus 1-2-3? The saying was always "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run..."

Has anyone tried format c: ?

TIL there are people on HN that use windows phone! :)

Double bluff in today's New Zealand Herald:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

The "April Fools' Day special" promised a new BMW to the first person who took their car and the front-page coupon to the dealership.

Ms Marsh was first at the Newmarket car dealership this morning, arriving in her 15-year-old Nissan Avenir.

She was swiftly rewarded with a new BMW 1 Series worth almost $50,000 in exchange for the old station wagon.

That's fantastic!

That is a perfect April Fools' day joke.

The image of the newspaper front page in this article is completely unreadable (specifically the BMW coupon): is a legible version available somewhere?

How is that April Fools? The offer was serious and they honored it. It's not like e.g. offering all of YouTube on DVDs.

It was literally titled the April Fools Day Special and on a day where the pranks vary from annoying programs that mess with my keyboard input to annoying news articles that mess with my sanity. I wouldn't have driven down to that dealership it they were giving away junkers or Bugatti Veyrons not to mention a BMW.

The joke is on all the people who thought it wasn't serious.

CERN researchers confirm the existence of the Force

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/04/cern-researche...

"...Kenobi's seminal paper "May the Force be with EU" – a strong argument that his experiment should be built in Europe – persuaded the CERN Council to finance..."

For being the people who created the internet their website is rather slow...

You mean, "created the World Wide Web".

This is my favorite today so far

> With the research ongoing, many at CERN are already predicting that the Force will awaken later this year.

https://com.google - Google showing off their new gTLD in a silly manner.

Is it me or does everyone and their mother have a gTLD these days? I would not take any company that uses a gTLD serious at all.

what's wrong with having gTLD? Seeing lots of this new TLD hate, I want to understand the reasoning.

Adding random things at the root of a hierarchy subverts the entire idea of having a hierarchy in the first place.

This battle was lost the second people started using .net and .org for things that wheren't related network technologies and non-profit orgranizations respectively. The nail was driven into the coffin when people started using country tld's for sites that had nothing to do with that country.

If anything this might be step back in the right direction. Whereas I cannot tell anything about the nature or origin of a site based on the fact that it has a .net or .ly tld, I will be able to tell something about nature and origin of a site if it has a .google or .apple tld.

Misusing the hierarchy is different than subverting it entirely. Also, your last statement isn't true.

Or .Sony, except there is no guarantee Sony corp actually registered that TLD.

Hey, I remember the .sony floppy driver bug on '90s Macs!

Wow. Such nostalgia.

Sony does own the .sony gTLD: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/request-2014081-...

More generally, as part of ICANN's gTLD approval process, if the gTLD being applied for is a trademark, then it can't go to anyone else besides the trademark holder. So there's actually a lot more assurances that you are dealing with who you expect to be dealing with with gTLDs versus random domain names on .com.

Honest question, trademarked according to who? The Internet is a global thing now, so who wins if there's two entities that happen to both have valid claims to a trademark?

First one to pay icann money obviously.

The TLD system is arguably broken, because it never turned out as hierarchical as it was supposed to. All the new TLDs do is force people to shell out more money to squat on pointless domains to avoid them being used for fraud (or, worse, by the competition).

Or it makes them finally realize how silly the "we must have them all" is.

Who are you to call millions of pokemon fans silly?

Not happening in my experience. As long as everyone in the industry is earning their share from this madness they'll happily "suggest optimizations to the domain portfolio" of their vict^Wcustomers.

http://try.everyone/ http://and.theirmother/

I was so hoping for that to be a thing.

Yes, let's not take Google serious.

You wouldn't take Google seriously? I'm sure they didn't fork out just for today, they will be using it for their products at some point.

In a few years, it will probably the standard domain for big corps. iphone.apple, macbook.apple, etc. It looks weird now (or an intranet address at best), but once people get used to it, it will be recognisable as a domain just as any.com is now.

Not to mention, an explosion of TLDs for reselling (.futbol .enterprise etc) means people will just equate . on billboards etc with a domain.

The fact that a company needs their own gTLD is silly. Sites like google have a perfectly good domain. Why use iphone.apple if apple can already do iphone.apple.com or apple.com/iphone? At the end of the day the consumer will not start guessing what domain he/she has to use to get what they want. The average consumer uses a search engine and types in "apple iphone". They don't care about iphone.apple they just want to go to the product page.

Well, it's not about need. It's about a story that goes like this:

    ICANN: Hey, has anyone noticed that our wallets aren't
           very heavy?
    Google: We have a bucketload of money just laying around
           that will fill your wallets, and wouldn't mind
           our own gTLD. It'd be cute.
    ICANN: You had us at 'bucketload of money'

We needed more gTLDs anyway. So what if a few mega-companies get their own versions?

Because ICANN set this up, and companies have to protect their trademarks.

Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.

> Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.

Good thing icann just increased the available domain-space from "limited" to "unlimited" then. That sounds good for almost everyone, or at least icann.

Basically, "" is now a TLD, and ICANN is the registrar, so it can extract the rents.

moc.elgoog would have been much better social commentary on the gTLD explosion.

It would have been pretty impressive if they created a whole gTLD just for an April Fools joke.

indeed because "The evaluation fee is US$185,000."

http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faq...

I wouldn't be so sure they wouldn't do that, after all:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/02/us-dealtalk-nortel...

"At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.

Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.

...

'It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,' the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.

'Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.'"

Motivation for changing the low order digits is different from the high order digits.

Not to nitpick but the lower order digits in those bids are orders of magnitude higher than the US$185,000 evaluation fee.

> 'Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.'

Those usually go hand in hand.

> ICANN GTLD APPLICATION FORM

> 1. Purpose of TLD

> It would be funny.

For or against gTLDs Google should not be able to squat .dev is too generic to give to one company. Infact any one company squatting any gtld that isn't their registered trademark leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

It's just a game of "we have money therefor shut up." combined with "The world revolves around the USA"

How is "squatting" .dev meaningfully different from having .dev.com?

People here give way too much importance to TLDs.

I know a lot of folks using .dev for locally running "development" instances of websites/apps. Maybe .local is now a better choice.

.local was already the standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

.local reserved for special mDNS functionality http://files.multicastdns.org/draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicas...

or .test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.test

Microsoft documents even dictate using .local, but if you have mDNS on your network you immediately start to run into problems.

I used to use .foo, Google acquired that one last year:

http://icannwiki.com/.foo

.local is reserved for mDNS. I'm not sure why you can't just use the host's real FQDN.

Because you might want to have multiple vhosts running on localhost, separated by hostname.

If you host is, say "zeus.barrera.io" you can use:

test-service-1.zeus.barrera.io dummy-server.zeus.barrera.i

Etc. No need to create new (possible conflicting, definitely not future proof) TLDs.

It's not about shared hosts (at least if I'm understanding the topic correctly) but about /etc/hosts entries on your local machine for your local machine. As in:

    my-test-thing-a.dev 127.0.0.1
    my-test-thing-b.dev 127.0.0.1
    my-test-thing-c.dev 127.0.0.1

Buying an actual registered domain for that sounds like it would be even more confusing than using an unregistered TLD because it makes it hard to tell which hostnames are expected to work across machines and which are strictly "works on my machine".

I use .lan

Thought ICANN auctioned all the gTLDs.

Also, The USA invented the Internet.

I hope you're joking about that second part....

He's right though. You may be too young.

Except he's not right. ARPANET was one aspect of what would become the Internet. The public Internet as we know it is an amalgamation of technologies which were developed by the U.S., Great Britain, and France. You really can't claim that the U.S. invented the Internet.

Hasnt' Louis Pouzin invented the Internet?

I always thought "do a barrel roll" was kind of stupid, but it's cool that it still works on com.google.

Strangely "tilt" sets it back to normal but keeps the domain, then when you change the search query it flicks back to backwards mode.

tilt css probably overrides the mirror css

Zerg Rush is broken though; Zerglings attack the air, dealing damage to DOM elements on the other side of the screen.

Makes sense, it's an old animation, probably a gif or something. It even uses the old 'o'.

It's not an animation, you can kill Zerglings by clicking on them.

That actually reminded me of a bug I submitted a while ago. It appears to be fixed now, but I was pretty surprised at the answer they provided at the time. When instant search first came out, anything that auto-completed to "do a barrel roll" would initiate the animation. It's such a popular term that simply typing "Do a" was enough to trigger it as it was the first result.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/R5A...

One thing I noticed is that the search doesn't modify the URL as it does on google.com. Wondering why?

it's in an iframe

I get that. But still wondering why implement it like this?

I had already set up our computer to mirror-reverse all websites for today, so ironically com.google looks normal.

Type "WTF?" in the search box and go to image search ;)

Correction. All images are reversed.

April fools I wanted the most:

- NSA announcing they were dropping all illegal activities,

- Water allowed on board of planes,

- ISIS converting to Christianity,

- Apple patenting the patent,

- Snapchat releasing a payment system

Note that April Fools is on December 28th in Spannish culture. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day#Comparable...

https://support.snapchat.com/ca/snapcash

This is real though!

Well... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ

I love how ridiculous it is!

waterboarding allowed on planes maybe?

(though with a 100ml limit)

Snapchat payment system doesn't look like a good idea, unless you want the payment to disappear after a certain time

Well it's working out for Bitcoin.

Wait... snapchat did release a payment system.

That's the joke.

Actually, couldn't you do this now by snapchatting a bitcoin wallet QR code?

Water isn't allowed on board planes? I usually bring an empty nalgene through security and then fill it in one of the many water fountains in the terminals. Works well!

Psst, he's talking about waterboarding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding

Its actually a very smart topic :D

Even metal Sigg bottles go through security fine, so long as you've shaken all the water out and keep the caps in your pocket.

Doesn't seem to matter if the bottles are visible or inside your bag.

Tested in: Canada, Ireland, USA, UK, mainland Europe.

Water is allowed on planes. Obviously, since water (and many other refreshments) are served on planes. Liquids are not allowed going through security, but as you say, it's easy to refill your water bottle once you get through security.

Cathay Pacific does a water check at the gate for flights going from HK to the US.

> NSA announcing they were dropping all illegal activities

I was thinking of something more along the lines of "NSA brings suit against NSA after it learns that tailored operations group was secretly spying on other divisions of the NSA".

> Wired has learned that the NSA has filed a confidential request for records from the NSA due to suspected illegal activities.

@JoblessWonder and @Thriptic, you deserve upvotes ;)

Keep in mind that this has changed a lot during the last decade.

December 28th traditionally received little to no attention in Argentina, and April 1st is gradually picking up.

You may need to depend upon the Yes Men to fulfill some of those wishes, if you desire legitimate press conferences.

"Apple patenting the patent" -> hahaha, that would be a great idea, coming from any major tech company hold thousands of patents :)

Google Actual Cloud platform

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp10_PygJ4o

https://cloud.google.com/actual-cloud/

This comment looks even better with cloud-to-butt installed.

:) You have to be alert with the my butt extension installed though. Only a few days ago I answered a stack overflow question where I added a link with the word cloud in it. Unfortunately the extension changed the URL when I edited the raw text. Luckily I realised quickly when I double checked if the link worked and it 404ed...

You don't say...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137909

One has to be careful with editing HN comments as well. ;).

I answered a question with the word cloud in it, and when I posted I saw 'butt' and thought I had accidentally copy/pasted wrong, so I Went back to edit, BUT THEN I SAW IT AGAIN and edited 3 more times before realizing that it just 'wasnt saving' because it was saving, I just had the extension on.

I felt dumb.

"ButtDrops™" Oh yes, I definitely don't regret installing this extension.

They even have a form to apply for a free trial!

Where does the joke end?

That's gotta be the real Cloud Platform Trial signup.

It wouldn't let me see it because I'm actually already on the trial.

It is.

Fluffy [tick]

Gentoo website makeover. https://www.gentoo.org/

That's actually pretty cool

ANSI art adds 5hp

Right, I actually like it and wouldn't mind if that stayed up for a while.

Looks slick! Are there any templates/libraries available to build such site? The initial loading of text looks pretty nice.

Check this bootstrap theme: https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386

1090+ clicks from that one comment alone ... the internet is a pretty wild place.

Damn, I love this. Best I've seen so far today.

And the gopher mirror, too! I don't have a good reason, but I really like the gopher protocol. Cool to see someone go to the (minimal) effort it takes to make a gopher mirror.

I am just now writing a static site generator that generates a directory based website from a folder hierarchy. It is heavily inspired by gopher. No bling, no js (well, unintrusive js to make the directory listing sortable) and a focus on getting shit online. The pages are either plain text or generated through some templates using markdown.

I am in dire need to clean the code up, but I will put it on github sooner or later. It grew top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top without meeting in the middle :(

That sounds like Apache's default directory index

Well, I could smash my head bloody against mod_autoindex to make it present things the way I want.

Or I can spend 3 hours writing something that I don't have to think about ever again.

Disappointed. More than 4 colours.

I love it, want to know where the got the DOS font.

"The second phase of the project to get Gentoo Linux to a wider user base will involve the creation of floppy disk sets containing a compact version of the operating system and a selection of software essentials. It is estimated that sets could be created using less than 700 disks each and sponsorship is currently being sought."

Having very recently had the, uhm, pleasure of installing MS DOS 6.22 on an old PC using floppy disks (3.5" disks, actually, which aren't all that floppy), and thus having a clear memory of how hard it was to find just three freaking disks at our company, I recoil in horror at the thought of having to juggle hundreds of disks. Or finding a recent computer with a floppy drive.

The idea is hilarious, though.

Clippy is open source on Github - http://thebeebs.github.io/OfficeAssistant/

It's 12.5% Objective-C - who'd have thunk?

Hahaha, that's a nice touch, I hadn't noticed that. :)

<!-- Thanks for being one of the people that read the source. This is a very basic stunt, I thought of it on a train back from an event last week. I saved my GitHub page using a browser and then made a few modifications to make it look more realistic as a Microsoft project. I then hijacked the A href clicks and used them to show the wonderfully awesome clippyjs by smore.

    https://www.smore.com/clippy-js

    I then uploaded the result to the gh-pages branch of a Git Repo
    as I felt this would trick the average user into thinking that
    the code was a genuine GitHub Project.

    Happy April the 1st :)

 -->

The "Clone in desktop" button gave it away as fake - I'm assuming it's a windows plugin for browsers or something, but I'd never seen that on github before.

Its seems to be a native Github feature visible for those browsing on a Windows device. The button simply links to https://windows.github.com/

It's there for Github for Mac users too.

No, that is a real button on the real GitHub. If you have it installed it opens the GitHub client and clones the repo

It is present for those using Github for Window/Mac whereby you can clone a repo by clicking that button.

This one got me bad, you could have even phished me into entering my GitHub password.

I was thinking GitHub and Microsoft did a collaboration in their April Fools prank because how else could Clippy popup when you click a link.

That's mean. I'd love to have the source code to Microsoft Agent. :(

At least there's floppy.js

Also, spoofing GitHub.com might piss them off.

floppy.js? I meant clippy.js

Actual source: https://github.com/thebeebs/OfficeAssistant.

Nice trick. And is showed me how we are all sensible to phishing attempts.

Smartbox by Inbox: the mailbox of tomorrow, today

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/smartbox-by-inbox-mai...

This's gotta be the most well produced April Fools video I've seen.

I love the video so much. Very convincing and surreal

Reminds me of one of the jokes they did in 2007: Gmail Paper. Loved this one!

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/04/gmail-paper-print-y... https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/paper/

Was that Kelsey Grammer narrating?!

Do you know whee the song in the end is from - "Let's do something new"?

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

It actually took some time before I realized this was a mockery of Islamic jihadist hackers.

Well done!

A fitting riposte, given that the site was hacked by Islamic jihadists earlier this year http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/32248/hacking/notepad-si...

Support for negative number of CPUs is implemented in the Linux kernel.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/3/31/994

Don't tempt physicists. Remember how it turned out last time with the semi-dead cat.

I looked at that patch, it still divides by 0 when you have 0 CPUs, I hope Linus rejects it

Since LKML seems to be overloaded right now: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=142784405100723&w=2

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/01/jeremy-clarkson...

Jeremy Clarkson joins campaign for fossil fuel divestment

Don't know if april fools but the banner at the top: http://www.topgear.com/uk/

More than 1.5 million Britons signed an online petition calling for Clarkson to be reinstated and for a relaxation of the laws against assault in cases that could be demonstrated to involve banter.

Practically true.

Systemd is forking the Linux kernel: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20150330#community

This was simply a case of someone getting the systemdaemon name on github. It's not the systemd project.

The article is a fairly amusing April Fool's joke. Real quote from LP (on his blog from months ago) mixed in with quotes from a fictional developer. Googling the fictional developer's family name comes up with mysteriously few results...

And the fictional dev has "Gotya" in his name ;)

Funny how something that hits so close to the truth is more scary than funny.

Motorola Selfie Stick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=584qPWzfhHY

Beautiful. Anyone know what music is playing in the background?

Darude Sandstorm by Darude

That's only if you use the HTML 5 player and click on the music note.

The german newspaper FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) claims that there is an inititiative to block cat images from the web due to excessive bandwidth consumption (article in german):

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-d...

The other content to be blocked are 'theses concerning the future of journalism' ...

There's a campaign to keep California restaurants from bringing out water to drink because of excessive consumption.

Not April Fools though :-/

Bashing Haskell: Reimplementing Haskell's Parsec library within the unix shell

SIGBOVIK2015 paper: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/parsed/raw/master/sigbovik201...

github repo: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/parsed

Minecraft snapshot 15w14a – The Love and Hugs Update

https://mojang.com/2015/04/minecraft-snapshot-15w14a-the-lov...

"We’ve thought long and hard about this, but we finally feel happy to announce that we are now changing the general direction of the game Minecraft. Starting from the next update we will be focusing on the things that make life worth living, promoting healthy relationships with the environment and its inhabitants."

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned

Today eeryone's comments are being auto-edited to include conspiracy theory claptrap (added to end of whatever they wrote), and they've got an illuminati theme

Ah, the wonders of CSS. I bet they're choosing "random" phrases by trailing post ID characters.

Yep! https://a.thumbs.redditmedia.com/mvUjuBTLugN70a4mTrXqmEK937F...

Year ago on April Fools' Day /r/europe added "thanks to Putin" to the end of every submission title and it fitted perfectly.

http://www.reddit.com/r/subredditdrama

SRD is "banned".

TeslaMotors: No more parking tickets for Model S owners. Today we’re introducing: ticket-avoidance-mode. Here’s how it works: https://amp.twimg.com/v/cdad704b-5167-42bd-9fd7-a5c39fabf1f9

The CSS working group has published a draft of proposed extensions to the CSS specification, which include dedicated units for denoting lengths on astronomical scales (lightseconds, attoparsecs, etc.) as well as extending the CSS gradient syntax to grant first-class support to the generation of double rainbows.

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-egg/

This is gold

> Note: This specification does not address relativistic effects of scrolling or animations and transitions at (or beyond) the speed of light.

I presume these would only show up if using relative paths or positions in your CSS.

Tinder for Uber*

http://tinderforuber.com/

*I'm praying this is a joke

I wonder how many crazy entrepreneurs use april days for validating ideas they had without loosing they're credibility :)

Amazon Dash?

To assist with you're credibility:

"their"

And 'losing', 'April', missing 'fools' (or 'first of').

"your"

win!

I concede that succinct satire doesn't really work on the Net.

You're the man.

That one actually made me laugh out loud

And there's also Uber for Tinder! http://uberfortinder.com/

uber for tinder for uber! for tinder!

I may be accused of being a curmudgeon, but most of these aren't funny anymore. Companies are rarely funny, not sure why they keep doing this. /rant

>not sure why they keep doing this

Because it gets them attention.

Personally I find it irritating.

/Buzz Killington

Humor by committee. What could go wrong?

I agree. The Essenes of s good April Fool's is something that is mostly believable. None of this fools anyone, it is just silly.

I probably shouldn't post via audio. Looks like I am drunk.

Ah, I don't enjoy them either, but let them have fun. This is probably more for their employees morale than for the customers.

You can play Pac-Man in Google Maps right now

http://www.sciencealert.com/you-can-play-pac-man-in-google-m...

Is it an April Fool if you can actualy do it? More like an early Easter Egg?

Blogspam url?

zoom in to the map select the Pacman overlay. If it can't create a playfield it offers a 'I'm feeling lucky'. I ended up at https://www.google.com/maps/@-22.975078,-43.1923318,18z/data...

Ingress (the game by Google's Niantic Labs) also replaced some of its graphics with those of Pacman https://plus.google.com/+Ingress/posts/8TQAYXzvQpB

Popcorn Time, Now part of Netflix https://blog.popcorntime.io/popcorn-time-now-part-of-netflix...

also on torrentfreak: http://torrentfreak.com/netflix-plans-free-tier-after-absorb...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/5200...

An Australian and UK study has reported that increasing temperatures will result in an explosion of fire-breathing dragons around the world.

QANTAS to become QUANTAS, to end decades of orthographic confusion.

http://www.ausbt.com.au/australia-s-best-april-fools-day-avi...

Crypto pranks:

The winner of the Password Hashing Contest was announced to be, LM Hash!

https://twitter.com/veorq/status/583175725206892544

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.phc/2658

libsodium added ROT13, fast, keyless, powerful cipher

https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium/commit/23f1c90c682484f...

> libsodium added ROT13, fast, keyless, powerful cipher

And made resistent to timming attacks!

http://www.reddit.com/r/android and http://www.reddit.com/r/apple swapped their CSS.

As did /r/guitar and /r/bass, and /r/AncientGreek and /r/latin.

This surely has some of the acolytes going insane.

Retro amazon, http://www.amazon.com/

Amazon Dash Button https://www.amazon.com/oc/dash-button

Not sure if you were being cheeky or not, but that's not an April Fool's joke.

Dash is real.

No it's not.

They've certainly gone to a lot of trouble writing support docs if it's not real: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_b...

Did you read those docs?

> Note: You may need to increase your iPhone volume, since Dash Button uses ultrasonic tones to sync with your iPhone during setup. If prompted, drag the volume slider to the recommended level, at or above where it says Best.

Ultrasonic tone sync?

I actually wrote a library that does this, FSK to WAV and back is just a few lines of code, and fairly reliable. There are even Javascript libraries that can do it.

I think it probably is real, it just shouldn't be. :-/

Ultrasonic communication is also used by some of the 2nd screen tv apps.

Doesn't the Chromecast have that capability?

Isn't that what Clinkle was supposed to be using? It was supposed to be the hot new tech that could replace NFC. Or something or other...

[1] http://www.thewire.com/technology/2013/07/what-is-clinkle/66...

That's actually pretty established technology nowadays. I'm not surprised they're using it.

Dash is 100% real: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-amazon-dash-button-....

No reason it shouldn't be. Brilliant idea: put a "reorder consumable product" right where you will be the moment you realize you need to reorder a particular consumable product. Running low on laundry detergent? TP? fabric softener? trash bags? push button. You walk away from that location, you'll immediately forget you needed to order (which means drive to store or fiddle with browser). Devices can be built dirt cheap now: button, minimal wifi, ease setup via (yes) nigh-unto-free microphone. App gathers requests, confirms them (my first thought was "great, kids sit there pushing button and order 137 bottles of Tide"), done, product arrives in 24/48 hours.

Sign me up.

Hey, I actually thought it was an April Fools joke as well, but then realized that we've gotten to the point where it is crucial to have 1 day delivery for toilet paper...Honestly, it's cool, but from a sense of self-pride...no. This is how civilizations collapse...let's be honest.

> This is how civilizations collapse...let's be honest.

You're right, it's a little known fact that the cause for downfall of the Roman empire was the ability to order personal hygiene products using a button placed in people's home!

That's a real product, and was actually announced March 31st.

Wow, that must be costing them a fortune. This is the biggest example of conspicuous consumption I have ever seen.

I think it's likely they are partnering with P&G at least on promoting this.

The be vendors that offer the buttons for their products are probably financing the whole thing. They'll also be the ones paying for the buttons, as opposed to customers. Imagine how great it would be for a paper towel company to make buying its towels a single button press (with high coolness factor) whereas any other brand would require a trip to the store, or at least 2 minutes to order on amazon.

They could just automatically include the device in some shipments.

This is embarrassing: if they are too afraid to actually re-style it for a day (with all potential losses), then they shouldn't bother with a static image. Sometimes you get too big to be cool.

I completely disagree. They run a system that is arguably very complex. I would not want to restyle my entire app (for a day) (so people like you would approve of it). They took something that was low risk, made it happen across the board, reliably. Site still works. It drums up chatter around offices. Makes people visit. Enjoy your misery.

Wow, no need to overreact. I remember VK offered Soviet and Pre-revolutionary versions of their web-site as an easter egg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_%28social_networking_website...

"Russian-speaking users can choose between the standard Russian version and two extras: a Soviet version and a Pre-Revolutionary version. Other than language tweaks (e.g. telegrams for messages and comrades for friends) these versions contain other easter eggs. For example, all private messages in the Soviet version have a stamp saying 'passed server censorship'. The pre-revolutionary version uses old-style Russian orthography. Both extra versions are also ad-free."

Amazon is naturally much bigger, but VK is not a small fry either.

It wasn't an overreaction, it was merely defending their decision and implementation. It was far from "embarrassing".

Would probably result in millions of lost revenue because of the UI.. Although that number would be interesting to see.

It's probably much higher than we can guess.

Amazon has been pretty conservative with their UI changes over the years, which could be because their users react poorly to them.

WOW, just wow. Will they not be losing money this way?

Short term, long term.

"Hey, have you seen the Amazon.com homepage today?" - someone in every office everywhere today.

Possibly overrating the green field Amazon has left. I can't imagine any less than a savage disregard for Amazon's half-assed retro April fool's joke around my office. YMMV.

It's bad enough having a full-page single-image image map (I'd almost forgotten image maps were a thing), but to use a jpeg is just offensive.

KSP now stands for Kerbal Submarine Program

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/310j26/...

Instapainting no longer uses children to paint your photos: https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/04/01/no-chi...

DigitalOcean opens new underwater datacenter in Atlantis

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-atlanti...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP8sofAN4xc

google japan's new keyboard

https://www.google.co.jp/ime/___o/

Pay attention to the URL as you scroll down the page. ;)

I don't know much about html/js, how is it done without #? Why doesn't it trigger a page change

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/824349/modify-the-url-wit... Google is your friend

it's a new html5 feature

http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html

Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard

The "executive suite - productivity edition"

http://executivesuite2016.tumblr.com/post/115074577715/tumbl...

Also Coppy (Clippy clone): http://i.imgur.com/iDSUNhi.png

They had even translated it to other languages. Color me impressed.

http://i.imgur.com/4KI0vRT.png

I love this: http://i.imgur.com/7qRyFBN.png

David Beazley releases Meẗal, a python decorator library powered by umlauts.

https://github.com/dabeaz/me-al

Haha, I love this bit of the README:

> If the above command fails with an ImportError, you're probably using a Mac. That's an unfortunate choice as you can't really expect a toy machine like that to be used for serious tasks.

> Meẗal only works with Python 3. If you love Python and you're still coding in Python 2, well, then fuck you.

Glad I already switched to Python 3 for new projects, so I could evade that one!

- Sent from my toy machine

xkcloud: http://xkcd.com/1506/

I do not believe that the University of Leicester is renaming itself the King Richard University.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/richard-iii-t...

Amazon announces the Fire HD Seven, Fire HD-7, Fire HD Sven, Fire HD VII and Fire HD 7' as successors to the Fire HD 7 and Fire HD 7". Each launches with it's own range of mutualy incompatible accessories.

Reddit releasing a crowd game at /r/thebutton

http://www.redditblog.com/2015/04/the-button.html

Amazon India

LucID : Lucid dream analyser wrist band http://www.amazon.in/b/ref=amb_link_187322727_2/278-8747141-...

Silicon Styler : Electronic Moustache Styler http://www.amazon.in/b/ref=amb_link_187323127_2?ie=UTF8&node...

Biovap Mark III : Bio-waste disintegrator. Processes kitchen waste to scented vapour as air-freshner http://www.amazon.in/b/ref=amb_link_187322547_2?ie=UTF8&node...

QuickClean : Electronic dry cleaner for 'dry-clean only' fabric http://www.amazon.in/b/ref=amb_link_187322867_2?ie=UTF8&node...

Exotic Amazon : Exotic pets from Madagascar/wildlife. Pair of two species wit heach purchase. http://www.amazon.in/b/ref=amb_link_187322987_2?ie=UTF8&node...

Spark 2.0: Rearchitecting Spark for Mobile Platforms

https://databricks.com/blog/2015/04/01/spark-2-rearchitectin...

This is probably among the most technical, nerdy April fool's.

It's actually one of the few that one day might not be a joke...

MS-DOS for Lumia smartphones: http://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/ms-dos/

Duluth Magnetic Pants: https://www.duluthtrading.com/features/magnetic-work-pants-a...

Got me thinking: "wait, what if two guys bought these on the same work-site?" (admittedly i was pre-caffeine at the time)

Banish the Hamburger Menu, Adopt Pizza Menus

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menu-vs-pizza/

https://github.com/mrThe/to_nil - to_nil gem

this made my day. bravo!

The best thing about it is, it is documented, tested and everything. The CoC is cool, too :)

ReactOS Foundation renounce claims to the logo ReactJS in exchange for investments by Facebook

http://habrahabr.ru/company/reactos/blog/254579/

As the saying goes, there would be a blessing ...

Some time ago, in the ReactOS Foundation, it was decided to exercise their right to protect their means of individualization, namely the registered trademark, trademark and logo (the wording depends on the jurisdiction of law enforcement). We were inspired by the successful experience of the project Gnome, which is to protect their brand from the encroachments of Groupon.

Recently, the lawyers hired by the Fund, sent to Facebook Ireland Limited warning about trademark infringement ReactOS. The fact that Facebook is developing a project ReactJS, whose logo resembles the logo ReactOS confusingly. Since over the long term has not followed any response letter, nor any appropriate action on the part of Facebook, lawyers fund full steam preparing a lawsuit against the social network. Suddenly came very late response to the complaint letter ... and what!

Facebook ReactOS Foundation offered to give up claims to ReactJS out of court in exchange for investments in the project of our operating system.

The volume and the specific conditions of the investment currently being discussed in the negotiations, but it is already clear that it is a sum equivalent to several million euros. For their part, representatives of Facebook made demands on what exactly should go money.

Is expected to develop client and server distributions based on ReactOS, a graphical shell which will be based on React.JS, then while all calculations and data processing will be carried out thanks to Node.js. It is obvious that Facebook is preparing to attack Google and Microsoft in the operating system market for tablets and handheld gadgets. It is worth noting that the social giant has long been known for its contribution to the opensource-motion: Apache Cassandra, Apache Hive, Apache Thrift, FQL, Hack, HipHop for PHP, Scribe, Open Compute Project.

Stay tuned for details of this epochal event will follow soon!

Is this news verified and true?

The C languages merge http://isocpp.org/blog/2015/04/the-c-languages-merge

AngularJS + React Merger

http://moduscreate.com/reangular-angular-react-merger/

How did they not call it Rectangular??

"That's way better than what I had"

New inbox by Google

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hydLZJXG3Tk

A drone from OnePlus https://oneplus.net/gamechanger (although they pitch it as an April Fools', they actually sell a limited quantity)

Seems to be a rebranded Cheerson CX-10.

I liked that in their graph on the 3rd from last page their drone had the tallest bar which at first sight looks like it would indicate it is the best, when actually it just has the highest portability, with terrible agility and control.

The New Audi A8

http://www.audi.jp/gohan/

In Japan, you never know..

lol, in japan, a new car comes with a branded spankpaddle

Gee, thanks for that. Next time I'm scooping cooked rice out for dinner I would hope that the other occupants of the house have not used it as a spank paddle.

I have never seen anything like that used for scooping rice...

Cyanogenmod 12 nightlies April 1st build:

http://imgur.com/l6PV5x5

http://imgur.com/M9fRJpf

Winner from the Password Hashing Competition http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.phc/2658

Sacha Greif's "Discover Meteor" announces a print edition with "Component-Oriented Architecture", "three-way binding" and integrated package management system to "remove" and "add" new pages: https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/discover-meteor-print-ed...

So like the AD&D Monster Manual then?

On reddit /r/andoid and /r/apple both show each other's posts (mixed together)

http://imgur.com/play - interactive Imgur experience with input commands

http://imgur.com/collab - collaborative post creation

Google Reader re-launched:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/04/01/google-reader-rises-...

x86: Drop 32-bit support in Linux Kernel:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/4/1/118

https://stormpath.com/blog/why-http-is-sometimes-better-than...

Compelling argument why your app should use HTTP instead of HTTPS

Fast to the Future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLazRt8s8Wc

A major ebook announcement. Science Fiction writer Charlie Stross releases an reader app to counter Clean App.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/a-major-...

https://www.nutmeg.com/electro-save - electric shock therapy to make you think twice about withdrawing your savings

lobste.rs sports a full terminal interface with working chat and slowly updating lines.

http://lobste.rs

Username/password to log in? Or is this a real service that put up this site just for today and requires an actual account?

try user: guest

also admin/letmein

I am able to login there with my account.

Use https://lobste.rs/hypertext to sign up :).

Most users are too young to remember what this is emulating!

This is cool. How do I do this on my site?

Introducing the new face of Search — Google Panda

http://googleasiapacific.blogspot.com/2015/04/introducing-ne...

This gets my early vote for most likely to become a reality.

Not sure if this is a joke or not. HackTonight from HotelTonight

https://www.hoteltonight.com/2015/04/join-beta-hacktonight/

Metasploit Framework rolls out new banners: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework/pull/5047

My Little Pwny: Exploits are Magic!

Hilarious!

Youtube has a new 'Add Music' button to the player (left to the 'Watch Later' button) which spices the experience I suppose! :) Oh and it's action based of course, some kind of a storm inducing experience.

Searching for a song on YouTube will suggest Sandstorm by Darude.

April Fool's Day: 10 stories that look like pranks but aren't: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32144005

There's many of those things I'm desperately hoping are simply April Fool's jokes.

Humble Bundle proposes the Humble Indie Ballyhoo:

https://www.humblebundle.com/ballyhoo

http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/115193038361/step-on-up-fo...

Looks like it will really take your money, but it all goes to the charity, no humble tip. I like it.

imgix launched the Chester Face feature, which we're providing to our customers as an AFaaS (April Fools as a Service) option:

http://blog.imgix.com/post/115195342369/new-imgix-feature-ch...

Chester Face is a tool that will automatically detect any faces in your imagery and replace those faces with that of Chester.

(Chester is an engineer's cat, who happens to be photogenic and comes out of the box in the correct shade of orange for our branding)

Humble bundle

https://www.humblebundle.com/ballyhoo

You can actually buy it. They are instructions on how to play those games.

That's actually kind of cool though no joke.

Study led by senior Google dev reveals direct correlation between tech conference food and blacking out in sessions.

https://www.voxxed.com/blog/2015/04/chet-haase-forking-disru...

Slashdot has a few stories that will blow your mind, like the tatooine youth suspected in a terrorist attack, or the discovery of alien life by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. http://slashdot.org/

Unfortunately, the comments section is still not an April Fools joke.

Here's one we did targeted to our (customer support) audience:

"Please type your reply above this line" (http://blog.reamaze.com/2015/04/01/please-type-your-reply-ab...)

The Play Framework folks will be offering the "Certified Reactive Application Programmer" - in short: CRAP certification https://twitter.com/playframework/status/583131097396989952

https://playframework.com/certification

I just love the checkbox for "Yes! I want my organization to be full of CRAP™ developers!"

Pipedrive-Tinder Integration.

Being serious about dating requires having the ability to never drop the ball.

http://blog.pipedrive.com/2015/04/manage-your-dating-pipelin...

Google purchases Dubai's world of islands to reconfigure into Google-shaped floating cities.

http://inhabitat.com/google-purchases-dubais-world-of-island...

Raspberry pi model C launches

http://raspi.tv/2015/raspberry-pi-model-c http://www.recantha.co.uk/blog/?p=12281

http://espresso.economist.com/3525bb43cce253e2e8f04e7b62f1ba...

Economist reports that Poroshenko has suggested a winner takes all judo match with Putin to end the fighting in the Donbas.

Vail Resorts buys Jackson Hole Mountain Resort

http://www.tetongravity.com/story/ski/breaking-vail-resorts-...

http://blog.sunrise.am/post/115135988899/introducing-clippy-...

Sunrise joining Microsoft, they just added Clippy to their calendar

SAS SPACE TRAVEL by Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) http://www.sas.se/

Neocities raises $400m at a $14b valuation https://neocities.org/blog/neocities-raises-400-million

Space Rock - Build computer things that are nice to use, faster than you could before https://space-rock.meteor.com/

The effort to fork Debian (Devuan) capitulates: starting here: https://devuan.org/ follow "BREAKING NEWS: Ultimately, we give up. Read here in detail" to here: https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150401.095603.4a3a1e... at least i think it's an April fools joke (not a super funny one at least)

Run to get offers by flipkart:

https://twitter.com/Flipkart/status/583145516218720256

and another one https://twitter.com/91bilal/status/583177078238945280

https://www.ifixit.com announces iFAXit! On-demand repair guide delivery (to your fax machines! For free!)

Introducing PlayStation Flow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bPUaLpNcMY

Google Fiber dial-up mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTTtkisylQw

Redact.js for ultimate web performance:

https://codepo8.github.io/redact.js/

Quantum music on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.09045

Container Solutions is proud to release today its own container technology, Rocker. Rocker is an amalgamation of ideas and sources from both the Docker and Rocket projects.

http://container-solutions.com/2015/04/container-solutions-i...

H1Z1 and PlanetSide 2 switched reddit banners: http://www.reddit.com/r/H1Z1 http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/

That's because PS2 says they get cheaters from H1Z1, and viceversa.

- Game of Thrones clue

- Power Wheels Desert Drifters

- Steam-powered Gaming Cabinet

- Voltron Cat Condo

- and more...

http://www.thinkgeek.com/

My favourite Think Geek April Fools was the 2001: A Space Odyssey Monolith Action Figure:

http://www.wired.com/2010/10/2001-a-space-odyssey-monolith-a...

(which they did end up selling due to demand)

"It's Full of Stars!"

"Zero Points of Articulation"

Fake Job Ad: MyAppConverter is seeking a new senior developer to open up their new San Francisco office in their expansion plans.

https://www.myappconverter.com/blog/senior-developer-wanted-...

$250,000 - $300,000 per annum + bonus + benefits

Join our new San Francisco office!

We’re looking for a Senior Developer to bring their talents to our brand new team. This opportunity is simply unmissable! Join the innovators in app conversion, and take your career to new heights.

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Senior Developer to join our expanding team.

MyAppConverter is seeking a talented Senior Developer to sit back, relax and have all of their work done for them. A lazy mindset is essential, and someone with a passion for the latest revolution in app conversion is a must.

Developer skill / responsibilities:

- No previous experience necessary.

- Excellent Java skills (drinking coffee from a mug/cup/thermos).

- Thumb twiddling expertise.

- A passion for the latest revolution in app conversion.

- Watching in silent awe.

- Enjoys boredom.

Not sure if UberLIONS is an April's fools joke or not, but it probably belongs here. Use promo code LIONCUBS and lion cubs (and a trainer) will come right to you ready to play. They'll also donate $1 toward the Big Cats Initiative.

https://blog.uber.com/nyc-uberlions-2015

My bet is that the donation is real, but the lions are not.

Dachshund-Powered Delivery Service

https://docsend.com/dachshund

Looks like iFixit has multiple A1 jokes today:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+Watch+Teardown/38659

https://www.ifixit.com/ifaxit

Samsung announces the world's first IoT smart knife, Galaxy BLADE edge, made for the modern chef with cutting-edge technology.

http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/galaxy-blade-edge-chefs-ed...

They had to include a warning about it is being aprils fool

This is coming from the company who brings you the "IoT" clothes washing machine...

Also whats with curved phones?

Now that is what I call cutting edge! :D

blink-dev: Intent to deprecate and remove: JavaScript

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/bli...

Online.net has a "Selfie" option when ordering. Pretty fun way to order a server to be honest!

https://console.online.net/en/server/selfie/Al5dpTp6Awp3

Code School is Now Customizable: https://www.codeschool.com/geocities#?bg=1&cr=1&ff=1&g1=0&g2...

Dirk Nowitzki announces he is retiring

http://www.mavsmoneyball.com/2015/4/1/8320117/dirk-nowitzki-...

Today, we're pivoting. Major League Hacking is now Major League Packing: http://news.mlh.io/major-league-hacking-now-major-league-pac...

Eagle Optics introduces a way to attract more birds to your feeder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6mlw3165fo&feature=youtu.be

FlipTheWeb Chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fliptheweb/jfdmnek...

(inspired by com.google)

Phew, this fixed com.google. Now I can search again!

Uber Car Shop

Pick up a Car Shop catalog on your next Uber trip and discover world class products from the comfort of the backseat.

http://issuu.com/ubermo/docs/ubercarshop

Flippa is selling itself on itself: https://flippa.com/4334300-premium-pr-5-online-marketplace-w...

Compilations of Pranks from TechCrunch, CNN and TheVerge

http://techcrunch.com/gallery/april-fools-2015-the-mega-roun...

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/01/world/april-fools-day-pranks/

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/1/8327379/april-fools-roundup

SOLVING AN UNTIMELY SYSTEM ERROR ON OUR SITE http://blog.airbnb.com/solving-an-untimely-system-error-on-o...

Bob Loblaw hired by Applause:

http://blog.applause.com/2015/04/01/bob-loblaws-applause-blo...

Funny - "Applause AppleWatch Watch – Where we watch for updates on what people are watching for from the Apple Watch"

Ministry of Supply sells The Armstrong, a space suit for the modern man - http://ministryofsupply.com/pages/the-armstrong

Selfie Shoes

http://miz-mooz.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw72zFX2rsk

Education.com announces it will become a cat-based learning platform Announcement: http://www.education.com/cat-based-learning/ "Science" article: http://www.education.com/magazine/article/cat-co-learning/ Homepage (they added cats): http://www.education.com/

Spotify CEO to launch rap career

http://www.thenordicweb.com/blog/spotify-ceo-to-launch-rap-c...

"Functor is now a superclass of Monad in GHC HEAD"

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3121lh/functor_is_n...

Same as last year:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1bfojn/functor_is_n...

And I fell for it again... Hmpf.

Isn't it now? Or is it only Applicative?

Coldfusion is making a huge comeback in the London Tech-Scene. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9302185

It should make a comeback -- in the pure open source form of Lucee. It's like the PHP of Java.

it very well could:

CFWheels.org - https://github.com/cfwheels/cfwheels

and no, this isn't a joke. Full disclosure: I worked on and LOVE this project.

Parse Pigeon - add on-demand delivery to your app with a few lines of code: http://parse.com/products/pigeon

Plus, a Parse coupon for joining the waitlist!

Dato targets MS-DOS as the next Big Data platform, processes terabytes of data in 640KB of RAM

http://blog.dato.com/dato-on-ms-dos

Facebook to acquire Meteor Announcement: http://joshowens.me/facebook-to-acquire-meteor/

/tmpShark https://appliance.cloudshark.org/tmpshark/ Cloud Storage for your temp files.

Microsoft Announces Its Own Linux OS: http://itsfoss.com/microsoft-announces-linux-os/

That is one thirsty fucking site. Something popping up every five seconds saying "Subscribe! Retweet! Look at meeeeee!!"

Mithril.js website in elvish

http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/archive/v0.1.34/

Uber-like on demand cab service in India launches an on demand helicopter service https://www.olacabs.com/air

It's 404ing.

https://www.olacabs.com/ola-air

Latvia to get Mistral warship instead of Russia: https://euobserver.com/news/128217

It was picked up as fact by several Rusian media outlets: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KJbT4Xw...

https://github.com/npm-ruby/npm-ruby - Bringing npm functionality to Ruby applications

Kim Jong Un chooses an Italian education provider to have a course about freedom of the press

https://youtu.be/d_vit8ZRHx8

Glide to be acquired by Apple for $430 million, will open an R&D center in Jerusalem

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Angular and React have merged

http://moduscreate.com/reangular-angular-react-merger/

Digital agency launches division to make tiny websites for the Apple Watch

Page: http://www.applewatchdesign.co/

InternetIsBeatiful went retro

http://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/

Instacart: Self-driving Carbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzjkFiv6CPs

Disney announces X-Wings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ3n_D1zBrg

Houzz releases HouzzLenz VR Goggles to visualize home remodeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYIKDcMwreY

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/46342399/list/houzzlenz-the-n...

"If you can swipe your face, you can update your place."

Dumbstone.com http://www.dumbstone.com We Bedazzle Wearables and trade them as virtual currency!

T-Mobile Pets Unleashed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kj-4F8pWfk

We added new mentors, including rms for iOS, Elon Musk, etc.

http://www.thinkful.com/mentors

Hailo Piggy Back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw49oK9bMLM

When they mentioned rebranding the mount as a Hailo lift I was hoping they'd take it a step further and invent the Uber Hailo Lyft

Keanu - Download the New You by Nootrobox https://nootrobox.com/keanu

Blinkist announces Blink-ku, poetic summaries of nonfiction books.

https://www.blinkist.com/page19/introducing-blink-ku-the-wor...

The summary of Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek is hilarious:

So Much Depends Upon a 40-Hour Lie

So much depends upon

a forty hour lie when

all you need is an out of office responder

and a bunch of virtual assistants

Lunar Impulse http://www.lunarimpulse.com/

A plane that use lunar energy.

How Avocarrot Replaced Targeting Algorithms With 742 Real People

http://www.avocarrot.com/blog/how-avocarrot-replaced-targeti...

Announcing HERO, the Human-Enabled Relevancy Optimizer, to address one of the hardest challenges we faced yet.

Jobs4Pets: http://www.indeed.com/jobs4pets

Hodor Lang by Hummingbird Tech

http://www.hodor-lang.org/

"Send 15$ to this account and let's fight SPAM together!" Memeoirs launches the Spam Book! Make your own!

http://blog.memeoirs.com/2015/04/making-spam-matter-memeoirs...

Micromonitor reaping huge rewards as nearForm moves all developers to four inch screens!

Announcement: http://www.nearform.com/nodecrunch/micromonitor-reaping-huge...

One of my favorite April 1 things is Wikipedia's bizarre frontpage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The featured article, picture, and various highlights on the frontpage are always delightful. And true and educational! Check it out.

The cake is a pie!

Also whoa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_cake

There also is Tinder for Stupid things: http://getstd.us

Elance-oDesk announcing new name and the shift to online dating. Elove-oDate, double click on love.

https://www.odesk.com/blog/2015/04/announcing-new-name-new-s...

Uber Shop

Uber's trademark innovation and convenience have revolutionized the way you move. Starting today, we're revolutionizing the way you shop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bECYvHkDrMo&feature=youtu.be

Here's one from 2011, "Stetson hat to be new Army standard headgear":

http://www.army.mil/article/54202/Stetson_hat_to_be_new_Army...

Nokia HERE's first wearable tech - geo-intelligent kitty collar: http://360.here.com/2015/04/01/unveils-first-wearable-tech/

Blizzard joins in on the fun: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/18486737/new-garrison-featu...

Embrace Pet Insurance Proud to Say Direwolf Coverage Is Coming

http://www.embracepetinsurance.com/about-us/press/direwolf-c...

Disclaimer: I work there.

Popular DIY blog "The Crafted Life" is acquired by Kraft Cheese, rebrands to The Krafted Life, focuses solely on DIY tutorials that utilize Kraft cheese products: http://thecraftedlife.com

Google: Moon optimize mobile pages https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile...

Introducing Tumult Hype Edition

http://blog.tumult.com/2015/04/01/introducing-tumult-hype-ed...

Light theme, Dark theme, and now the Gold theme!

KINDLR, the New Goodreads Dating App https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/498-announcing-kindlr-th...

Glitter resin launched by Formlabs:

http://formlabs.com/company/blog/2015/04/01/introducing-glit...

Adopt A Pothole: http://www.adoptapothole.co.ke/

Created by OkHi, a tech startup in Kenya that has a mission to give a physical address to the 4B people in the world who don't have one.

New teeth jewelry line: http://www.loveandpieces.com/blogs/online-jewelry-boutique-b...

Government to sell-off playgrounds - kids don't play outside anyway. Proceeds to be used to build digital parks inside Minecraft.

http://daily.koalasafe.com/

Got picked up by a few places in Australia.

Transform your work world with holograms!

Tempo Vision is hardware that enhances the way teams experience their environment in Tempo and JIRA.

http://www.tempoplugin.com/tempo-vision/

Hillary Declares 2016 Run, Files For Divorce http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/hillary-declares-2016-run-f...

Dominos driverless delivery vehicle https://www.dominos.co.uk/blog/dominos-rolls-out-driverless-...

HubSpot Goes #DeskFree, Pioneering the Next Frontier of Workspace Collaboration http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/hubspot-desk-free

New York Code + Design Academy has a web development class for your furry friends now!

http://nycda.com/classes/web-development-for-dogs/

Removing support for credit cards in Kill Bill: http://killbill.io/blog/deprecating-support-debit-credit-car...

Hailo Piggyback

http://www.techdigest.tv/2015/04/hailo-introduces-the-piggyb...

Now fly using Ola App – Introducing Ola Air! http://www.tdgmag.com/2015/04/ola-air-fly-using-ola-app/

Furious 7 got banned in Pakistan: http://www.shareonfb.com/n4nqp0/film-censor-board-bans-furio...

NordVPN - Internet unlocked... on Mars https://nordvpn.com/blog/how-did-we-unblock-the-internet-of-...

Petbox, from the people who brought you Redbox. http://www.redbox.com/petbox/?CID=EM:37311&et_rid=79397907

http://www.wiffi.co.uk - The Scent of Connection

Scented Wi-Fi that lets you know if a connection is secure or not. If it smells bad, don't connect.

The best thing is... It's not an April Fools!

I suppose the SailfishOS for console games is a joke: https://twitter.com/JollaHQ/status/583176660821913600

This is a good list of games, which can be used in SailfishOS's console: http://www.tuxarena.com/2014/02/several-great-linux-terminal... :)

Chrome Android App - Introducing #ChromeSelfie

http://chrome.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/introducing-chromeselfi...

This is awesome. I've been thinking about a meta-youtube-channel, where you can watch people watch youtube (if anyone has the time, please pull it off!).

Bacon Flavored Asthma Peak Flow Meter to improve asthma adherence.

https://twitter.com/AsthmaMD/status/583333806469337088

Dragon Drop for Asana

Accouncement: https://blog.asana.com/2015/04/breathe-some-fire-into-your-t...

Coffeevault - http://blog.hemavault.com/2015/04/01/introducing-coffeevault...

Google acquires XDA : http://www.xda-developers.com/google-to-acquire-xda-dev-rewa...

Miscellaneous Month at Travaasa Experiential Resorts – http://travaasa.com/newsletter/2015/april/

Coca-Cola in a new 10 ml sip size pack https://twitter.com/CocaCola/status/583303638090694656

Share a Reaction

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2015/03/chrome-selfie-share...

A new Startup Vitamins product

http://www.startupvitamins.com/products/startup-condoms-trip...

Language translation company Translated releases a klingon version of its website: http://www.translated.net/tlh/

Introducing Prezi Retro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxOgnaEc5hg&feature=youtu.be

Not on the Highstreet. Happy Hatchery - hatch at home eggs ordered online.

http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/happyhatchery

http://www.shopclues.com/laggayi90percent-offsale.html?icid=...

Share underwear with the world - MeUndies introduces the #ReUndies program.

https://www.meundies.com/videos/reundies

Indiegogo Heat: The world's first hot sauce crowdfunding platform. https://learn.indiegogo.com/heat/

http://visual-seo.com/SEO-Blog/Case-Study-CR-increased-neuro...

Sync physical post-it board with trello using magnetism, pencil and a Raspberry Pi. https://vimeo.com/123835399

The future of programming languages, a long jumbled series of HODOR to create functional scripts. http://hodor-lang.org

#CHAMPRANK Your Friends

http://blog.tablelist.com/tablelist-april-fools-2015-champra...

First Raspberry Pi in Space http://www.raspberrypi.org/first-pi-in-space/

https://instagram.com/p/078SdFQ3hJ/?taken-by=marutaro

Razer - Project McFly Hovering Mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlCx5gjAmqI

Moz is offering support to all users through Snapchat.

http://moz.com/blog/snapchat-support

Terminal interface for omgubuntu: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/bash/

The latest in eSignatures: carrier pigeons. http://info.hellosign.com/avian

Grouber from Groupon: http://www.groupon.com/pages/grouber

Prysm announces headband control for collaborative display walls

https://vimeo.com/123800794

Google Panda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI9Qb4PuiOU

We are launching our MMO Gangs of Space on Game Boy!

https://www.gangsofspace.com/en

https://meh.com/ applies one of several vertigo-inducing CSS transforms

SpeedRunners (a game on Steam) is running with graphics like 320x200 & 16 colors, and 8 bits music.

You have to restore an old version of some files to play ...

Apparently HealthLoop was attacked by zombies: http://ow.ly/L42S9

I published my Work-in-Progress maze game in Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinjas

After a minute or two (after tapping Start), it will jump-scare you with your friend's photo. You can then jump-scare your friends with your own photo.

It uses Facebook, but doesn't post anything (other than Game Request, which is user-initiated).

The game itself is still largely unfinished, but playable. Feedbacks welcome!

Complete rewrite of HAProxy in Lua http://www.haproxy.org/

Hubski, clicking a hubwheel plays "thoughtful" audio clip.

https://hubski.com

Too bad I get redirected to an auth page after 50ms of audio.

Microsoft to buy Mozilla: http://imgur.com/oF0S74Y

The Today Program (news) on BBC Radio 4 had a suggestion by FIFA in the sports section to make football (soccer) goals 6 inches wider.

The XQD - Quantum Entanglement Camera

https://vimeo.com/123649095

Joylent Green - a powdered food replacement made from people

http://joylent.eu

#NSFW

Haha wow, I did not see that coming.

The Hurr Durr Archives

https://www.kernel.org/

Pipedot is now in Esperanto.

https://pipedot.org/

black out whole country was good idea. and Turkey did it for 10 hours

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/nationwide-blackout-...

Checkout our newest product - an online medical reference. The main feature would be our new creative UI that would let users navigate the site easily and comfortably with a nostalgic feeling. http://www.explainmedicine.com/

http://olaair.com

From the Hungarian iPhone site szifon.com comes the news that Apple buys Yosemite Park :)

http://szifon.com/2015/04/01/felvasarolja-az-apple-a-yosemit...

+1, thanks for creating this.

yoloimport: Python package that eliminates ImportErrors.

https://github.com/codysoyland/yoloimport

slowpath data appliances for buzzword dense storage: http://scalableinformatics.com/tortoise

Apple is releasing iPhone-7 on a price below than Galaxy s7

superfeedr rebrandes as Batfeedr

http://blog.superfeedr.com/

http://www.ebuyer.com/k9-audio-hf-hifi-canine-hifi-unit

BuzzKill - http://offers.freecharge.com/buzzkill/

Michael Bay will be doing a reboot of Casa Blanca.

Changed my HN title bar from gray to blue

https://phplist.nova-wings.com/lists/lt.php?id=fk4BAwkaUFMZU...

Flying 365 days per year!

Austrian paragliding manufacturers NOVA plan to convert a reservoir into an indoor paragliding centre

During a press conference in Terfens, Tyrol, local paragliding manufacturer NOVA has announced their intention to open an indoor flying centre. They plan to convert a reservoir into a so-called Para-Hall, in order to offer pilots from all over the world the opportunity to fly regardless of the weather conditions. At present they are in intense negotiations with hydroelectric companies and the state governments of the Tyrol and Salzburg. The project focuses on sustainability and will contribute to the long-term future of the Austrian tourism industry.

“Climate change cannot be ignored” says NOVA CEO Wolfgang Lechner, “glaciers in the Alps will melt sooner or later. Therefore, it is inevitable that some reservoirs and their hydroelectric plants will no longer be profitable. Our Para-Hall is a ground-breaking alternative.“

NOVA intends to empty, dredge, clean and cover a reservoir. Lechner explains that from a technical point of view, a reservoir with a hydroelectric plant is ideal for converting into a flying centre: “the turbines can be reversed and used to blow air into the Para-Hall. Add a few filaments and indoor thermals are possible. Our test pilots have already tried this in the indoor ski centre in Dubai. It worked fine!”

A highlight of the NOVA Para-Hall will be the Open Air Access, which is a huge retractable roof. With strong indoor thermals, it will be possible to take off inside and go through the roof. Alternatively, it can launch outside, for example in the Outdoor Hike & Fly Area in the mountains above the centre, and then land inside.

The Spectator Area will be situated at the front of the Para-Hall – with glazed viewing areas facing into the centre and down to the valley. Several levels will offer visitors the chance to have a variety of gastro-experiences: Tyrolean Stubn (inns) will offer locally produced local organic produce, an Ayurveda restaurant staffed by genuine Indian chefs, Schnitzel-World (a self-service restaurant with good cost-benefit ratio), on level three it is possible to fast, while next to the landing zone, pilots can avail themselves of the obligatory landing field beer. “The absolute highlight", according to Wolfi Lechner, "is the Silent Zone. This is situated in the Fresh Air Zone and offers complete relaxation. Here everyone can discover their inner apricot.”

NOVA plans to convert the current engine room into an Outdoor Experience Centre. Lechner explains: “We hope to install eco hotels with straw beds and Tyrolean pinewood interiors, a climbing wall, wellness centre, a spacious spa area with attached salt cave, an ice climbing wall, yoga retreat and a children's crèche with a mountain pasture experience - featuring real cows. Part of the drainage channel will be converted to a night club. Finally, there will be conferencing facilities. We’re thinking big and are focussing on the family - and all very sustainable!“ In co-operation with the ZAMG (Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Innsbruck) NOVA has commissioned research, which will pinpoint the optimal moment to start the building work. The project should commence no later than the 1st April 2020, probably earlier.

“At first glance, the concept may sound a bit crazy”, explains Lechner, “but the planning is in the advanced stages.” Currently the reservoir at the Moserboden in the Tauern area is favourite. The site offers the advantage of two dams. On one side the topography will enable soaring flights, the other will be developed as a thermalling paradise.

Lechner is convinced that the power generation companies will be enthusiastic about the concept and he is anticipating investment from ski resort operators. “Sooner or later they will no longer have a viable business. With our long-term sustainable concept we will be able to save the day. The Para-Hall we will mean we are all ready for the future. It will allow tourists to experience all facets of nature – without having to step outside!”

Find out more at www.nova.eu

Why do you want to ruin the fun? :P

MS Definitely win here.

Thanks downvoter, I love you

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