

Ask HN: What's your favorite April Fools Joke today? - joshfinnie

I think we need to get a single source for all today's pratical jokes that are getting submitter to Hacker News.  I thought we could use this post as a forum of sort.  This will also allow for people to upvote their favorites and we can get a running tally of the best-of-the-best.<p>Thank you.
======
joshfinnie
My favorite so far is XKCDs Command Prompt. There are so many easter eggs to
find, it is definitely a time killer!

~~~
pavel_lishin
Am I the only one that thought this, and then realized you could just look at
the source code, and then realized that I'm too lazy?

~~~
Torn
Looking at the source isn't lazy that's just good thinking -- time is
precious! :)

I went one step further after playing with it for 30 seconds and bypassed the
source entirely: found a comment on reddit which listed all of the features
and commands.

~~~
Groxx
Meta-source-code-reading?

------
mtinkerhess
Reddit has a "turn admin on" link next to your username. When admin is on, you
can change headlines, vote multiple times, see user's IP addresses and
likelihood of being a bot or a spammer, and ban users in three different ways.
And the background on comments pages is from the Sistene Chapel.

~~~
O3d
The Sistine Chapel Background is only in the Science SubReddit, which also has
a lower-case t for the reddit icon. It got a chuckle out of me. :)

------
jalammar
I'll have to make this a shameless plug, but it's probably the only way any of
you will get to know about this.

My startup, Qaym.com is a restaurant rating site in Arabic. We're located in
Saudi Arabia. April fools isn't a big thing here or in the Arab world in
general. But people know the concept. Today we announced that we're changing
the site to become exclusively a camel rating site.

We even made a logo: <http://blog.qaym.com/2010/04/blog-post.html>

And a homepage to boost: <http://www.qaym.com/>

Most people got it off the bat. Many were confused. And a couple were actually
upset, even after they've figured out it was a joke!

------
runevault
Youtube's textp. If you haven't seen it yet somehow, many of the videos where
you normally pick the resolution of the video now has a textp option, kinda
hoping they keep it past april 1st.

~~~
rev087
Wow, I'd love a linux command-line tool that does something like that!

~~~
aw3c2
I am pretty sure you are joking but here is how to do it with mplayer. See
[http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-
single/en/MPlayer.html#aal...](http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-
single/en/MPlayer.html#aalib) and below (on that page).

libcaca: mplayer -vo caca yourvideofile

aalib: mplayer -vo aa yourvideofile

------
tlrobinson
I'm pretty partial to our own, which includes a working implementation:
[http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/04/01/solving-the-
javascr...](http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/04/01/solving-the-javascript-
memory-management-problem/)

~~~
tibbon
You got me! I read that late last night and thought it was real....

------
msluyter
Google's new java annotations are rather funny:
<http://code.google.com/p/gag/>

~~~
hairsupply
I was going to say this too. You can download the bits and play with them. Its
impressive that its all actually implemented/documented.

------
henrikschroder
Do a Google search for anything and look at the stats for the search.

 _Results 1 - 10 of about 397,000,000 for anything [definition]. (0.30
microfortnights)_

~~~
huherto
You mean: "Do a Topeka search...."
[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/different-kind-of-
com...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/different-kind-of-company-
name.html)

------
Cornify
Personally I'm most excited about the paranormal romance "Unicorn School: The
Sparkling". Start reading half-way down.
[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/psa-
new-...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/psa-new-book-
deal.html)

------
Goronmon
<http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/mobile/>

As a runner-up...

<http://www.cheapassgamer.com/>

~~~
Groxx
Can the Blizzard games _please_ be real? I want to out-surf and out-shoot a
megalodon! I can feel the Epic right through the Internets!

------
aneesh
Let me Google that for you (lmgtfy.com) links point you to Bing search
results.

------
zaphar
I can honestly say Ars Technica's gets my vote.
[http://arstechnica.com/staff/nate/2010/04/tentacular-
tentacu...](http://arstechnica.com/staff/nate/2010/04/tentacular-
tentacular.ars)

~~~
joshfinnie
Not sure if you noticed it or not, but the new logo is a very nice touch!

------
cperciva
I rather like Werner Vogel's 'AWS Import/Export for Legacy Storage Systems'
joke -- once you read the text, it's very obviously a joke, but the title
itself sounds rather plausible:
[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/04/aws_importexport...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/04/aws_importexport_punch_cards.html)

------
kez
The Independent's piece on the Circle Line (London Underground) being turned
into the second Large Hadron Collider.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hadron-collider-
ii...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hadron-collider-ii-planned-
for-circle-line-1932744.html)

------
marknutter
I find them all annoying. April 1st is basically my break from the internet.

------
hubb
[http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/equipmentpotenc...](http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/equipmentpotency.xml)

~~~
andywood
Hilarious! It took me a few minutes to notice all the subtle puns everywhere.

------
compay
Canned Unicorn Meat: <http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/unicorn-meat.shtml>

------
halv0112
I like Atlassian fourwalls. Bringing foursquare to the enterprise with
developer checkins. The site is funny. "Devlopers: use our API to write your
own APIs". <http://atlassian.com/fourwalls>

~~~
halv01122
Hitler learns the truth about fourwalls: <http://atlss.in/bMoCmm>

------
m0th87
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future:
<http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49305387,00.htm>

...at least I hope it's an April Fools joke, or we're seriously fucked.

EDIT: Actually this wins: there's a vowel outage at gmail
[http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-vowel-
outage.ht...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/todays-vowel-outage.html)

------
crbailey
If you're a Settlers of Catan fan, check out the DealBase deal on the Isle of
Catan: [http://www.dealbase.com/Isle-of-Catan/Hotel-Catan-
deals/Deal...](http://www.dealbase.com/Isle-of-Catan/Hotel-Catan-
deals/DealBase-Exclusive-Upgrade-Largest-248691)

------
cgranade
It's not an April Fool Joke per se, but
<http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/april-fool/> has to be the funniest
thing I've seen in quite a few Aprils.

------
turnersauce
For any DJs out there, the "Enable Auto DJ" button in Mixxx changes to "Enable
Pee Break Mode" on April 1st.

<http://www.mixxx.org/>

------
chasingsparks
I don't know my favorite, but I do know my least favorite:

<http://www.kernel.org/>

------
shivam14
Cisco IOS QoS configuration guide - flesh tone recognition to classify and
monitor suspect pornographic images

[http://packetlife.net/media/blog/attachments/413/nbar_flesh_...](http://packetlife.net/media/blog/attachments/413/nbar_flesh_tone.html)

------
dfranke
<http://www.freelunchproject.com/>

------
hubb
if you've been following the starcraft 2 beta, and you know a little bit about
professional starcraft 1, then you'll probably find teamliquid.net's SC2
promod (<http://www.sc2promod.com/>) hilarious

------
MicahWedemeyer
I humbly submit my own attempt at humor:
<http://blog.obsidianportal.com/?p=362>

It might be funny to anyone who has to deal with user-generated content.

------
mookster
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to be fined by FCC? [http://zomg.yahoo.com/fcc-to-
possibly-fine-yahoo-ceo-for-swe...](http://zomg.yahoo.com/fcc-to-possibly-
fine-yahoo-ceo-for-swearing-on-tv)

------
splat
The article "Orthographic Correlations in Astrophysics" by Zuntz, Zlosnik,
Zunckel, and Zwarf on the arXiv.

<http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.6064>

------
adriand
Shameless self promotion - <http://tweetsworth.com/e>

Submitted it here for testing a few days ago but few people realized it was a
joke.

------
peter_severin
New Eclipse logo: [http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-
release/20100401_newlogo.ph...](http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-
release/20100401_newlogo.php)

------
scdlbx
LHC used to discover the Neutrinosaurus

<http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2010/100401.html>

------
dpcan
I always like trying to figure out which of the products
<http://www.thinkgeek.com> made up for April Fools.

~~~
thehigherlife
i wish the iCade was real

------
dbz
I made the IT guy find the 10 lirpa viruses my anti-virus software was picking
up but wasn't able to remove. Funny thing; he never found em =/

------
dazmax
Stack Overflow made everyone's profile pics into unicorns. It was the only one
that got me today, 'cause I just noticed my own at first.

------
btilly
Picassa Lifesize isn't bad: <http://picasa.google.com/lifesize.html>

------
arethuza
I rather liked the Y Permutator story - if for no other reason than it made me
think whether it should have been C Combinator.

------
jolie
I like Tremulous Exclusively Going to Xbox Live: <http://tremulous.net/>

------
felideon
xkcd's command prompt for sure

------
beeber
liking this re justin bieber (beeber?) [http://gruvr.com/blog/justin-bieber-
to-change-spelling-of-su...](http://gruvr.com/blog/justin-bieber-to-change-
spelling-of-surname/)

------
reynolds
Am I the only one who hates April Fool's day on the web?

~~~
bokchoi
Yes, it's obnoxious.

~~~
bokchoi
Downvotes for the truth?

------
Malk0lm
Kernel.org and their upsidedownternet. ¡unɟ sʎɐʍןɐ s,ʇı

------
pWneD
Google Translate for Animals, this is just hilarious
<http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/>

------
yanw
YouTube's TEXTp they should keep that in the labs projects, and the Google
translate for animals was quite funny.

------
borism
eBay buys back Skype <http://skypejournal.com/2010/04/ebay-buys-back-
skype.html>

