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Tell HN: Your april 1st link is not really funny...

111 points by evgen ↗ HN
It is that time of the year again. People who are not really as funny as they think they are will be flooding the net with "prank" sites, stupid fake rumors, and similar dumb links.

Can you please post the gag link to reddit, digg, or some other site and spare us all?

48 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 91.4 ms ] thread
muhamm
Title: Are monkeys taking over the job market?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=programmer%2C+monkey&r...

muhamm
I can't believe you guys don't like the monkeys thing. Monkeys are always funny.
palish
I did, no worries. There's just some confusion currently as to whether we should be silly or not. It seems like hacker-related silliness in the comments of this submission should be ok.
muhamm
Of course we should be silly. As if the question even needs to be asked.
muhamm
I said the wrong thing again? There's a serious commitment to seriousness around here.
palish
Algorithm for dealing with unhappiness related to your comment scores:

  if not self.curious or not self.spent_at_least_10_minutes_writing_comment( your_comment ):
    self.dont_care()
  else:
    self.wait_until_score_is_less_than( your_comment, -2 )
    self.ask_politely_why_comment_is_bad( your_comment )
    self.sleep()
muhamm
Sure. But is that Python? You know in Ruby you wouldn't need the parens? It would work nicely for the sleep and dont_care methods since you're not passing any arguments.
palish
I personally like the visual distinction between properties and methods. But it's purely a stylistic choice.

Having an implicit "self" parameter for functions defined within "class Foo:" would be nice though.

muhamm
To be honest, at first I also didn't like the lack of visual distinction between properties and methods but now I just like the fact that I don't have to type the extra characters. The implicit self is nice too.
jjs
Really, if you're not passing functions more often than you call them, you're missing out. :)
tjr
In Soviet Russia, seriousness commits to you!
chaosmachine
Perhaps Conficker will go active and nobody will be able to post anything, anywhere.
agotterer
Its going to be massive mayhem like the Y2K bug!
ashleyw
There's a 1 in 365 chance the first time-travelers, aliens or some other cool event will happen on April 1st, so it's your loss if you miss it! :P
sdp
That's assuming an even distribution of such events. I'd like to suggest they are much more seasonal.
palish
Now I want to write a program to compute the monthly variance of historical events. I wonder how you'd build a list of historical events... Maybe it's a job for Wolfram Alpha.
jjs
Historical events being events that people thought significant enough to write down?

Because I'd posit that the vast majority of the human world we experience today was shaped by chance events that nobody noticed.

palish
Well, it would be better to be able to brag that you determined, mathematically, that disasters are most likely to occur in February, rather than being able to say "I determined that most events that people may or may not notice occur in August!"
nazgulnarsil
this would simply lead to me having plausible reasons not to leave the house everyday....except on the day with the greatest proportion of in home deaths.
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kleevr
You could look where Ray Kurzweil gets some of his data points for "The Singularity is Near". If you serious you could check around for a similar academically compiled list of "significant" historical events. (I think Ray mentioned doing something just like this...)

Further more, I'll mention there is some crazy Russian who thinks our modern calendars (Gregorian) are an elaborate hoax. But, as I understand it, he had someway of applying algorithms to historically "significant" data points. (If you're actually interested, reply and I try and find his name again.)

...FWIW

harpastum
Agreed. Just because time (arguably) falls evenly between the 365 days of the year, that only suggests a weakly even distribution. See [1].

I also think it's rather unlikely that true time-travelers would use April 1st, unless they were trying to be funny. And if I discovered cold fusion and it was April 1st, I'd take an extra day to iron the bugs out :-P

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalisation

Kirby
Yeah, no kidding. I think the only funny April Fools tech joke was the original announcement of Parrot.

Which is even funnier since Parrot 1.0 was just actually released. :)

palish
Eh, a little fun won't hurt the site as long as we only post them in the comments of this submission -- we could share April Fools' Day stuff that might be amusing to hackers (not necessarily from this year, either). It's up to you all. To me, April Fools' Day is a chance to express your creativity. Anyone planning anything interesting?

Here are a couple past ones that might be worth a chuckle: http://www.zug.com/static_pages/pranks/harvard-vs-mit/index0... http://www.nmsr.org/alabama.htm

Has anyone heard of any really creative pranks?

sketerpot
There was a funny April Fools Day joke once. It was when Google announced a truly preposterous new service: free email with a whole gigabyte of storage for everybody. It was ridiculous; nobody would offer that for free, and it was completely unrelated to Google's search business.

The punch line is that it wasn't a joke. Gmail is real, and it really did come with that much storage space. Ha ha ha!

Fake news stories on discussion forums just can't compete with that.

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nostrademons
There was another funny joke where Larry, Guido, et al announced they were going to write a virtual machine called "Parrot" to run Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.

It'd be funnier if they'd Ship The Damn Project already.

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Dobbs
Parrot has shipped, didn't you hear?

Currently its only a mostly api-freeze. It still has some optimization issues and what not but hey its getting there.

jrockway
Parrot 1.0 was released a while ago. It's ready for production, now people just need to target their favorite language to it.

(Why you would ship something like this with no complete languages is beyond me. How do you know if your design "works" until is is running real code?)

windsurfer
I suppose if it walks like a parrot, talks like a parrot, and looks like a parrot, it must be 1.0, so they shipped.
jballanc
Oh come on...there's some humor to be found. Don't rain on everybody's parade just because some people can't tell the difference between funny and not. Besides, there's a whole host of funny-to-hackers type stuff that goes on too! For example, one of last year's from the Ruby community: http://www.coboloncogs.org/
MoeDrippins
> because some people can't tell the difference between funny and not.

If you can't tell, it's not.

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danteembermage
The best April fool's joke of all time happened right here on this site, so remember before you post yours that to be HN worthy people must be debating whether or not it really is an April fool's joke well in to April 2nd.
donaq
Is there a link to what you're referring to, or is this some sort of meta April Fool's joke?
nazgulnarsil
I dunno. something in the vein of Slashdot's OMG PONIES prank would probably be funny depending on the subject. Logging into hacker news one day and seeing nothing but discount tropical fish supply links would throw me.
mikeytown2
OMG PONIES was one of the best web april fools ever.
dangrover
Crap! I was going to finish doing PR for a release I did today and totally forgot it was April Fool's! What should I do? Do it anyway or wait 'till Thursday?
jmorin007
Wait til Thursday. April Fools on the web is a complete mess and your release won't get the attention that it probably deserves.
sutro
Tell evgen: Skipping over a few links one day a year won't kill you. I'd rather read an April Fool's joke than a post like this complaining about as-yet-untold April Fool's jokes. Lighten up.
screwperman
Didn't pg once write:

It is greatly to America's advantage that it is a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness—that it is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks. And hackers are invariably smart-alecks. If we had a national holiday, it would be April 1st.

So wouldn't posting a "gag link" epitomize the hacker spirit (or something like that)?

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