skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Enough April fools?
There are quite a few on the home page now :)

Any chance we could limit new submissions to intellectually curious or particularly good ones (e.g. XKCD was pretty good, as was Kernel.org).

Alternatively maybe tag submissions with "April Fool" or something so we know ;)

(feel free to disagree if I'm just being kill joy)
I can only quote a tweet from Miguel de Icaza:

"Your consistent denouncement of Apr 1. always marks the real spring for me"
That's a nice find. Looks like the concept is similar to cloudkick but for human workers.

They also list their "worker channels" should you want to go straight to the source.
The thing that sort of pisses me off about this too, is that Slava is a proponent of Common Lisp (weblocks, cl-cont, various essays). Plus, there's no reason that Common Lisp couldn't be used for a high end database product--AllegroGraph is written in Lisp.
4 Tips To Fast and Easy Weight Loss
They've also made it relatively impossible to figure out how to abandon a pre-order...
As someone who taught his grandmother to use a PC, I'm personally unconvinced that an iPad is a good option for older people.

The first issue is whether it is significantly less confusing than a PC. Sure, it is simpler (no multitasking), but when I was teaching my grandmother, multitasking was a 10% problem. She was mostly confused by the concept of hyperlinks, urls (when they weren't correctly formatted in emails, esp.), how to print, how to adjust font sizes, copy/paste, etc. The iPad certainly makes the concept of multiple windows easier to understand (by not allowing them), but there are still tons of issues with learning a computer.

On the negative side, it doesn't seem to be that good for an elderly person who may have some mobility issues. A desktop allows someone to position their head and hands in a reasonably comfortable way (head upright, hands below heart); I'm still not sure how the iPad is supposed to be used in a comfortable way. The iPad also has a significantly smaller screen and moving hands across the device might be a lot harder than using a mouse.
Speed up Windows Vista and increase performance | Windows Tricks
It seems that MSNBC has some sort of redirect in place for sites that refer a lot of people. I clicked on the link on their main page and got the exact link posted here, but was able to read it.
Interesting. Everything you say runs directly counter to my experience. However I've also never worked at the kind of large company that you're talking about.

With one exception. My first job involved consulting at Bristol-Myers Squibb. The result of that was that for some time I was unable to enjoy Dilbert cartoons because the wounds were too raw. They were true.

Based on that experience I wouldn't want to work for that kind of large corporation. Luckily tech tends to be filled with young companies that grew up with very different cultures, so I've never again had to suffer through that kind of dysfunctional culture.
But he doesn't know even what conversion rates he could achieve because he chose to totally ignore non-US billing addresses. He's just assumed that it's not worth his effort.

He's talking about a web-based product. There is no reason to require a properly formatted address. When people are trying to give you money you should make things as simple as you can.
Scientists maybe able now to speak their mind in the uk
Distributed Storage Across Four Storage Nodes With GlusterFS On CentOS 5.4
JavaScript is my hated-needed
Microsoft to release "Other OS" dashboard update in summer
It's a form of tough love. I only mock things (and people) I care about. Just ask my girlfriend. Or my cofounder.
To clarify that point...

Believing in something doesn't mean you're closed minded. It means you have an opinion, a point of view. My beliefs come from keeping an open mind, questioning assumptions, experimenting with new ideas. I wouldn't believe what I believe without approaching life this way. My mind remains open, but I haven't found better answers yet so I'm comfortable with what I believe: Avoid organizational complexity, product complexity, and political complexity as best you can. Things are pretty simple and easy until you make them hard and complicated.

My 6th grade science teacher told me: "Never believe yourself to be completely certain of anything." I think that's good advice.

Hope that clarifies things. It was a great question from Andrew.
I'm proud of the joke I got my brother to fall for. I redirected all traffic from his computer to this page: http://i.imgur.com/IUSuQ.png
Couple things to consider. First, this was written up in 2003, and expanded on in 2004. I don't know if text messaging is as big then as it is now. Secondly, we weren't sending them a text message. While asking them might not hurt, we didn't want a cell phone. Asking for a phone number "just as for SMS messaging" might be more confusing. I'd rather just ask for the phone number, and fix it myself.

At least, that were my thoughts at the time.
Scheme Bricks
Modular Innovation, Interoperability, Redundancy & Backupify
<c-z> enters passthrough mode.
"So why not make two forms".

Exactly. Have a US form. If the customer selects a non-US country then switch out the state for a freeform "state/territory" field and skip the US-centric validation. All up you might need 10 lines of HTML and server side code.

This applies to US-only services too. When trying to book accomodation and flights for a US trip I have heaps of websites refuse my money because I couldn't provide a US billing address. For example it didn't occur to the brain-dead developers of the Disneyland website that tourists be from outsite the US.

The problem is developers who seem to think they know what the customer wants. I know because I've done the same thing. If you're relying on your intuition then you are almost certainly wrong.
Sadly doesn't work in Chrome, Textmate or Papers.
But how does it compare with AJAX?
Notable quote:

"Will you perhaps leave Apple on this high, a fitting end to your career here?" "I don't think of my life as a career," he says. "I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career — it's a life!"
This was my thought given the browser trust model, the server would just have to deliver a payload to the client and let the client send the encrypted data back to it.
BBC's spaghetti-crop story - http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/new...
Yahoo latest victim of Chinese hackers
So lets weigh up the options:

A) Let non-US customers enter whatever billing information they want. Accept that a small percentage will fail when we try and charge the credit card. Everyone else is happy and we make more money.

B) Explicitly block non-US citzens who are trying to give us money.

Oh! Let's choose B.
This is sufficiently crazy that I had to Google the case to be absolutely sure that it wasn't a subtle April Fool's joke. It is not. It is completely real.

The scientist was sued for libel for making statements of fact about chiropractors. (Remember that in the UK the fact that you're saying something true is not a defense against libel. This is one reason why people seeking to sue for libel try to sue in England.) But that was overturned because it was ruled that the scientist was making a statement of opinion, not fact, and therefore could be held to a more generous standard.

So scientists are allowed to comment about pseudoscience so long as they are clear that they are making statements of (supported) personal opinion rather than statements of fact. As messed up as the USA can be, I'm suddenly glad I don't live in England.
Ask HN: What to do with underutilized VPS?
Hey HN: I've got a pretty decent VPS sitting here and I barely use it each month. What should I do with it?
What the iPad Really Means to Developers
Interview with Binny Bansal of flipkart.com (Audio Interview)
Private Company Valuations: 41st Parameter, Inc.
The normal page is still there: http://www.kernel.org/index-normal.shtml
Or click "Normalize Page".
You mean something like I Love Sketch?

http://vimeo.com/1669862?pg=embed&sec=1669862

It looks cool, and would be suited to the ipad.
Indie Game SteamBirds: By the Numbers (Revenue Report)
This day always makes me respect The Onion a whole lot more. It takes a lot of talent to what they do as well as they do it.
They're also meant to be kinda funny.
Looks like they are testing an anti-iPad mode. On a regular laptop or netbook, you could just turn the screen upside down. No go on the iPad.
I was in the audience when this talk was presented. They really didn't say much about the actual way they were generating or mutating their inputs, just the system they hacked together to distribute the fuzzing runs, and from a security point of view, that's way less interesting.

Charlie's talk on fuzzing was much better, imho. (Charlie's slides: http://bit.ly/dt3dkb (10meg PowerPoint file.)
The Steps in Learning How to Make French Press Coffee
Eating chocolate isn't a form of interactive communication. Kind of irrelevant here.
This is just three brief sentences, barely more than a half-formed HN comment, inexplicably whining about the use of single snippet of clear, concise and standard business English. In other words, a complete waste of pixels. I wish someone would do a rant about people who add links to random words in a sentence.
This is what I meant. It is more the intranet and the systems that we use over that intranet that works with IE6 and it costs money to make sure it works with IE7/IE8/IE9/Firefox/Opera/Chrome... And that money isn't available anytime soon.
The iPad now has a screen rotation lock switch.
You could donate some bandwidth to the Tor network.
http://www.torproject.org/
Worth reading for the anecdotes and Stephen's wonderful writing style alone, but here's a key point I sometimes need reminding of (apologies for the long quote):

What Ive and his team understand is that if you have an object in your pocket or hand for hours every day, then your relationship with it is profound, human and emotional. Apple's success has been founded on consumer products that address this side of us: their products make users smile as they reach forward to manipulate, touch, fondle, slide, tweak, pinch, prod and stroke.

If you are immune to that kind of thing, or you think it somehow weak, pretentious, artsy-fartsy or unbusinesslike, then there are enough functional objects in the market for you. But you might consider this: from the starting point of delight, detail, finish, polish and design come not, it seems, shallow high-end toys for the affluent but increasingly products that are ... well, awesomely functional.
I hope this is a permanent feature, not just for April Fools day.
It seems that this is no joke. Which brings me to an interesting question: why would you release anything true on April 1st?

It just lends itself to be second guessed and it could miss a critical uptake period of the first day of release...
I guess my point is, the ZIP code should be a pretty good indication of the state that the person resides in. No, it is not perfect, but I think it lends itself to be somethng that can help with the OPs concerns.
Before I'd read the article, I thought it was plausible, since one of the rethink guys also runs defmacro.org.

With the iPad-alooza in the air, a better joke would have been that they're switching all their dev work to the iPad/iPhone SDK.
The judges have also adopted the US ruling over a libel action over a scientific controversy :-

We would respectfully adopt what Judge Easterbrook, now Chief Judge of the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, said in a libel action over a scientific controversy, Underwager v Salter 22 Fed. 3d 730 (1994):
“[Plaintiffs] cannot, by simply filing suit and crying ‘character assassination!’, silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how adverse those views may be to plaintiffs’ interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation. … More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models – not larger awards of damages – mark the path towards superior understanding of the world around us.”

From http://www.5rb.co.uk/docs/BCA%20v%20Singh%20[2010]%20EWCA%20...
The real question is why would anyone edit shell scripts under Windows?
joe and nano may be your friends.

If one is afraid of Vim, I would not recommend Emacs.
The truth is an absolute defence against libel in the UK - the difficulty is that the defendent must prove the truth.
Yeah, I think someone will do the obvious thing with this law: find some obviously-political thing on the blacklist and ask the courts to apply the test from Lange/Coleman v Power (which build on the early-90s cases you mention).

So yeah, here's hoping their argument gets up.
Choose-your-own-adventure game at Ars Technica
It is sad that in the 21st century there would even be a question in a first world country about whether the scientific method should be allowed to proceed unimpeded.
He makes it sound so dirty.
'Trivially easy' to buy SSL certificate for domain you don't own
It's April Fools Day. Trust no one.
I must confess I never faced this problem. What annoys me no end is windows end-line CRLF pairs.

That insanity must end.

Oh.. And a simple solution to this problem is simply to ban Windows. It also solves a whole lot of other problems and creates an incentive for keeping sane corporate networks (with interoperable applications and so on).
Ooh - if I click that up-arrow icon, do I get to upload a version of the kernel?
At first I wondered what Vim had to do with Asynchronous Javascript and XML, but then it hit me.
I was scanning the headlines for April Fools jokes, and it was immediately obvious that this was NOT one of them... Kind of sad...
What is Lymphoma | Large Cell Lymphoma
Not if your product has a too good to be true factor. For instance, the gmail release worked out really beautifully.
http://google.com seems to have the new logo.. but any resulting search page is branded normally.
Where exactly in the article did I mention blocking non-US "citizens"? (I think you mean users; most websites don't require citizenship verification.)
Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger.net Bought and Acquired by Google
I can't tell you how overjoyed I was when I found Google Voice brought back the beep. I had spent years railing on the phone reps "No one has ever paged me!! Just beep! that's it."

I love it that Google recognizes my frustration and sympathizes.
Thank you for the correction.

My understanding of UK libel law was based on comments made by Greg Palast some years ago about the difficulties he'd encountered in England, and then noticing reports in the BBC and elsewhere over the years about libel tourism. However a quick check of Wikipedia verifies that I was mistaken, the truth is a defense. Though one that seems too hard to apply in practice in the UK.
Quite funny, could make more bearable some mundane tasks... at least for a while.
Bup - git based (git inspired) backup tool
Code I wrote a year ago makes me cringe, but maybe that's a good thing.
it's the opposite for me; they asked for full price although I did preorder
What is truth?
Backwards-compatibility efforts like these are great. Some CVS/SVN users are (un?)surprisingly stubborn about trying new things, and they can halt upgrade efforts with their complaints. My company is converting our repositories from CVS to git as we speak, and the number within our ranks who prefer CVS is surprising. Without support for older programs like CVS, we wouldn't have the momentum to upgrade

Kudos to Github for providing one less excuse to holdouts!
Malicious PDF file doesn't need a software vulnerability
That seems to be exactly the case. This is the full passage from the email:

The next batch of units will ship no later July 30th, 2010. Based on your pre-order date (11/24/2009), you should expect your WakeMate no later than 07/30/2010, but probably significantly sooner. This is a conservative estimate; we want to provide you with a firm date. We are confident we can deliver many orders sooner and will continue working day and night to ship yours as soon as possible.
Interesting, I thought that was perhaps the weakest paragraph in the otherwise excellent article (I was amazed at how good a writer Fry has become.)

I don't think it's about a profound, human and emotional bond with an iPad or any electronic device. It should be like the bond you have with a good book: it should allow for perfect immersion.

When immersed in a book time flies by, you don't even remember flipping pages or finishing chapters... there's a direct stream of consciousness from the book to your brain. I think that is what a good computing device should also offer, and every time your computer gets in the way that bubble bursts and you're violently thrown back into reality.

It takes a lot of computer experience before you can deftly sidestep every error message the computer throws at you, so you can continue on your work without missing a beat. We (programmers/enthusiasts) have been able to do that for ages, but most people don't even know it's even possible to work with a computer without getting frustrated.

Immersion is the name of the game, and the iPad might just get that right.
I know I'm not in the majority here, but as a person who commutes to work via a 40 minute train ride each way, the iPad would be very attractive in addition to a laptop. I'm pretty much glued to my iPhone during the entire ride. The small screen size can often be a problem, especially if I want to do something like post a comment here. Even though I have a 15" Macbook Pro, the ergonomics are all wrong to comfortably work on it. I have to work with the keyboard slid partially up my stomach with my arms in an awkward position because the screen angle isn't sufficient otherwise. It's also not connected to the network (thanks to no tethering from AT&T). The iPad would have near perfect ergonomics and connectivity that is way cheaper than what I would have to pay for an AT&T data plan and laptop dongle.
Venture-Backed Exit Activity Is Picking Up Again
Makes sense to me, in light of the difficulty of navigating to many pages on Facebook. Links are about the only way to get around quickly.
They should really use some kind of analytical tool to measure what effect this joke is having on CTR and conversions.
guest@xkcd:/$ man next

Request confirmed; you will be reincarnated as a man next.
Hunting for Easter eggs on a CLI with no "help" command? Grab a dictionary, and start trying all 1, 2, and 3 word combinations, and let me know what you find. I can wait.
How to Register a Startup
You don't need a low-level language like C for the query planner and SQL parser.

Linspire is doing OS development in Haskell http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1506 and SQLite, with it's 45MLoC of test code for its 67 KLoC of source code, tests a lot of memory allocation bugs. http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

The bigger question is, even though these guys are selling a software package that's probably never going open-source, how long until we use compiled high-level-languages instead of C, just like C replaced assembler?
April Fool? Or am i just too cynical?
Yeah, I agree... especially since almost all of them are lame this year except for XKCD.
Waterfall Alliance
Announcing APDB: The World's Fastest Database
i totally reblogged the first sentence of that quote. It's totally spot on and a great usability insight.
rm -rf works for the directories listed and will actually remove the link until you reload.
Not entirely bad. Yesterday they tweeted the following:

@marsrovers: Spirit, as expected from recent power-supply forecasts, has probably entered low-power hibernation mode: http://bit.ly/9xl4Px

The link: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20100331.html
it will now just be known as "Hub"
Let us collect up all the april fools jokes we find:

And Tech Crunch Definitive April 1 2010 list:
http://techcrunch.com/april-fools-shenanigans/
The unknown marketing databases that know everything about you
I assumed it was an April Fool's joke with the premise that MSFT surreptitiously used Windows PCs as bots. Ah well...
Mathematically Correct Breakfast, Knotted Bagel
USPS saves $10M per Saturday by Switching to Rackspace (April Fools?)
Am I the only one to find April fools boring?
C'mon, is it really that hard to pass stories like "Exclusive: Google To Go Nuclear" through your internal April Fool's filter to figure out if it sounds legit or like a geek joke?
I didn't have any credit card forms to write, so it's OK, I had the time.
I second this - would also like to hear people's thoughts about this product. Do you actually feel a noticeable gain in the level of energy in the morning?
I read this as "NASA loses contract with Sprint"
Didn't you guys do this as an actual April Fools joke the year you launched?
Watch - that's an English case. The relevant law in Scotland is quite different.
He didn't actually win the case - he merely won the 'right to rely on the defence of fair comment in a libel action'.

It is a sad comment on our society that even a minor victory for common sense (such as this) makes me bubble over in happiness.
Dr Singh described the ruling as "brilliant", but added that the action had cost £200,000 "just to define the meaning of a few words"

"These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession, where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and emolument of the practitioners of the law." (Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers)
This sounds distinctly dangerous.

Edit: And very unpythonic, however amusing it may be.
Gmail.

Gmail's ridiculous "endless" storage space.

Both were launched on an April 1.
As soon as you use the words "netbook" or "giant iPod", your review is missing the point entirely.
See the normal page in webkit browsers ;)

javascript:document.body.style.webkitTransform="rotate(180deg)";
What is APA Research Paper Format
A research paper should be well-documented so that the readers are able to access the sources, used by the writers in preparing their presentation. Accordingly, APA research paper format is an essential part of any term paper writing project.
Ask HN: let's do a startup website link party
Let's share our favorite links about startups ! I start with one that I use very usefull : http://answers.onstartups.com/
Not to be rude, but I think you're having a bit of a reading comprehension problem. Nowhere did I say to block non-US users, as you've repeatedly asserted I did.

What I am saying is don't worry too much about getting it right, especially if you plan on targeting US-based users first. If people have to pick a random state because the validation library you used always validates states, but only 5% of your users hit that problem, big deal. You should have a decent analytics package installed, and if you do you'll know what the bounce rates are for your international users, so you can decide if and when there is a business case for doing full i18n and l10n.
Mobile Phone Mind Control
Time Lords discovered in California
The non-English text is not Chinese. Something from the Middle East, perhaps?
Ask HN:  Please don't submit April Fools stories.  Please don't vote them up.
Submitting April Fools stories is just not the Hacker News Way. They're not funny, and they're a waste of everybody's time.

Thanks in advance.
They should write a book: How to lose your customers' trust before they try your product.

The way they handled this situation is disaster.
I don't agree that a talented indie developer can't build an immersive, beautiful iPad app. The problem is that it's not worth the risk of investing the time to build it only to get rejected by Apple. Mac apps do not have this problem.

Maybe the only way to mitigate the risk of the capricious app store gatekeepers is to build enough relationships with Apple to bypass them (like ngmoco seems to do). Maybe that requires being a big(ger) company.
Oh, lighten up ;)
Ask HN: Please review my startup.
They're being open and honest. How else should they handle it?