HN Explorer

Before you submit that April 1st link...

53 points by jemmons ↗ HN
...please review the submission guidelines definition of "on-topic" (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

  If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer 
  might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual    
  curiosity.

14 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 33.4 ms ] thread
joeythibault
I'm sick of April Fool's jokes on the web. I understand the allure, but it's energy mis-allocated. Gmail, autopilot is dumb. And thanks for the spam this morning SlideShare. Jerks.

I don't ever, and haven't ever, utilized April Fools to contact my users to make a joke (at their expense).

jgrahamc
I agree. I posted what I thought was a relevant article from my blog (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541628) only to see it drop off the new page under a tidal wave of jokes. I do appreciate some of the jokes, but does HN really need to be filled with them?
erlanger
To be fair, that's a really boring post.
DanielBMarkham
I don't know. It wasn't that bad. I didn't find it that novel, but it's good to recap things from time to time.

Just skim the bullet points. I like writers who use bullet points because if I'm getting bored I can skim more easily.

DanielBMarkham
I believe Cheese Weasel Day, due to the fact that it is an IT-oriented holiday and relatively unknown, is interesting for hackers (and not a spoof either)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541732

I believe it's still okay to submit things that are light-hearted as long as they are topical, right? Nobody wants a joke board, but an IT grass-roots holiday with a silly name is an example of a submission that can do double-duty. It doesn't have to be all Erlang innards.

jemmons
It's possible that, if you really wanted inform us of the merits of cheese weasel day, you shouldn't have linked to a badly maintained site circa 1995 that provides no information apart from:

  o there's cheese involved, 
  o it's on April 3rd,
  o it has a song, but...
  o the author doesn't know it
The quality of the link is often projected on to the quality of the submission.
DanielBMarkham
Yep. The submission sucked. Sorry about that. I should have taken the extra time and found a better Cheese Weasel page, perhaps like this one: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cheese+weasel or this one http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/04/03/happy-cheese-weasel-day... or this one http://www.bigwidelogic.com/index.php/2006/04/03/happy-chees...

Unfortunately, I was not happy with any of the few links I clicked on for Cheese Weasel Day. There is, regrettably, a paucity of Cheese Weasel celebratory material to share during this season of dairy and rodent festivities. So I just picked whatever came up first in Google.

My point was, however, that there is a place between Erlang innards and Defending IE6 where an article can be funny/enjoyable and yet also have an interesting side. If Cheese Weasel wasn't cutting it, apologies, but the point still stands.

jemmons
Why not create a wikipedia entry collecting available information, then request the hacker community's input? There's nothing about Cheese Weasel day that makes it inherently ungratifying to intellectual curiosity (unlike april 1st posts, pictures of kittens, stories on politics, crime, sports, etc.) But the burden of highlighting a subject's interest lies with the submitter.
DanielBMarkham
Since this is a hacker group, I did one better -- I registered the domain CheeseWeasel.net

I'll fill it out and submit the page as a link on Friday (which is officially CWD)

Who knows, I might make my $15 back in AdWords.

puzzle-out
The problem is that the april fool's web jokes/hoaxes have been overtaken by media wnkers (see the guardian newspaper's attempt). It used to be original in the early google days, but now its just another example of the redundant, thoughtless nonesense that only a pr executive can produce.
almost
Damn right, the Internet has really taken all the humor out of April Fools jokes. Pretty much everything has been done to death already and in most cases wasn't all that funny in the first place.

Never the less, they're a perfect example of the lowest common denominator problem with collaborative news sites. The barrier to entry is essentially zero so they have a much wider base of people to draw votes from.

nandemo
Agreed. However, though HN does have a certain cultural cohesion, when it comes to "what is intellectual gratifying" people seem to differ a lot.

Case in point: for me whatever TS Eliot has written -- even an old forgotten letter -- is bound to be more interesting than any Coding Horror post (and it's not like I'm particularly crazy about TS Eliot). But the Coding Horror posts not only appear regularly on the front page, they are voted up higher than posts like Eliot's.

jemmons
I think the point is that we're not talking about gratifying your intellectual curiosity or my intellectual curiosity, but one's intellectual curiosity. I literally groan out loud every time I see a Coding Horror story on the front page, but even I will admit it has a chance of satiating someone's needs vis a vis their own curiosity.

Note that joke and pranks, being fictitious by their very nature, are incapable of even a Coding Horror level of edification. Thus, it is my opinion they should be relegated to the bin of "off-topic" subjects.

wglb
Most of the billion or so AFJ on the net today do not satisfy that. The only one that made me chuckle was the gmail autopilot. omg pandas.