
Ask HN: What does April 1 cost the tech industry? - jedberg
Between the amount of time people spend online talking about it, and interacting with the &quot;jokes&quot;, and the development time (hello Google), is there any way we can put an estimate on the cost to the industry?<p>I know that even when I was at reddit April 1 took at least a few days of planning and coding, and now they start planning well in advance.
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steven2012
What does going to the bathroom cost the tech industry? Why don't tech workers
wear diapers so that roughly 15-20 mins per day is saved, translating to
millions of dollars saved per year?

What does eating meals cost the tech industry? What if Google instead spent
money investing in Soylent, would the ROI be higher if they simply fed their
workers intravenously so that they could save 90 mins?

Not everything is measured in time and dollars and cents. That's the whole
reason why the prevailing attitude in Silicon Valley isn't how much time you
spend at the office, but that you get your work done. Asking stupid questions
like this propagate that same old mentality that spending time on fun tasks
"costs" the company.

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jedberg
> Asking stupid questions like this propagate that same old mentality that
> spending time on fun tasks "costs" the company.

Your own bias is showing here. I didn't say cost was a bad thing -- you just
assumed it is.

Lots of good things cost money -- server time, employees, marketing, etc.

I was just interesting in figuring out the cost, not trying to say it is bad.
If I wanted to say it was bad I would have used a word like "waste". I did not
use that word.

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wehadfun
Last year it cost the tech industry $456,345,234.23

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elie_CH
What did 2048 cost to the tech industry?

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vxNsr
Now this is a question we don't want an answer to.

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maximem
What does social life cost to Tech industry?

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kbar13
What does social life have to do with anything?

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Goronmon
I think it's just pointing out that focusing on any one thing and proclaiming
it wastes enormous amounts of resources when viewed at large scale can be a
bit silly most of the time. I mean, why stop at April Fool's?

As another person mentioned, what do bathroom breaks cost the industry? How
much does people working 40 hour weeks rather than 80 hour weeks cost the
industry? How much does a 5 day instead of a 7 day work week cost the
industry?

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jedberg
> proclaiming it wastes enormous amounts of resources

I never said that. It's interesting however that at least two people assumed I
did (the person you mention talking about bathroom breaks also assumed I meant
it was wasteful).

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thaumaturgy
I couldn't find any numbers for April Fools stuff, other than an off-hand
estimate of "a few hundred million", which seems about right.

But here's a list of a few other things which cost the U.S. in lost
productivity
([http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/06/h...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/06/here-
are-all-the-things-that-supposedly-cost-the-u-s-billions-in-lost-
productivity/)):

\- Heavy drinking, 220 billion/year;

\- Smoking, 92 billion/year;

\- Commuting, 90 billion/year;

\- Changing passwords, 16 billion/year;

\- Spam, 21 billion/year;

and my personal favorite,

\- Screwing around on the internet when you should be getting work done, of
which Reddit is a significant contributor, 134 billion/year.

If I were witty I could have a lot of fun with that last point.

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minimaxir
"Cost" is a bad way to put it since time expenditure on the internet is not a
zero-sum game.

For companies with good jokes (Google, Blizzard), April Fool's jokes can be an
effective marketing tool. Of course, very, very few internet
brands/personalities actually put effort behind jokes.

I'd imagine more productivity was lost on days with absurd news (e.g.
Facebook's WhatsApp acquisition)

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jedberg
> "Cost" is a bad way to put it since time expenditure on the internet is not
> a zero-sum game.

That's fair. However development time doesn't feel like it would be zero sum.

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minimaxir
Zero sum implies that the sum is zero. It's entirely possible for the benefits
of marketing publicity to outweigh the opportunity cost of development.

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glomph
I always thought it was an opportunity for cheap marketing..

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0xdeadbeefbabe
What does javascript cost the tech industry?

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JetSpiegel
Let's keep this thing lighthearted, I don't want to read about Lovecraftian
horrors at 5 o'clock.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
I have this strange recurring dream: I'm reading hacker news, and between the
headlines about 2048 I see a very disturbing headline that fills me with
dread. My heart races as I click, but before the browser can load the page I
wake up screaming. The awful headline that disturbs me beyond the worst
cyclopean nightmare is "Show HN: cthulhu_fhtagn.js" I can't imagine what
horrors it may conceal.

~~~
JetSpiegel
[https://github.com/MrJoy/cthulhu](https://github.com/MrJoy/cthulhu)

