The best April Fools event this year is reddits drawing canvas. I am already watching it the whole day and it's very interesting to see how the different "groups" interact, e.g. the current "war" between the German and French flag.

You can see a timelapse here: http://spacescience.tech/place/

I hadn't even heard of this until now! https://www.reddit.com/r/place/

Someone should seriously do a PhD thesis on this thing. Such a wealth of human interaction.

> Someone should seriously do a PhD thesis on this thing. Such a wealth of human interaction.

Yes, all the subreddits/factions/projects created for this subs and their interaction between each other is highly fascinating. If I were in social/behavioral science I would be very tempted to do research and write about it.

I guess you could at least write one paper just about the blue corner in the bottom left. It started very strong but then somehow it lost steam and people left for other projects.

Wow, I just went back to look at it after ~18 hours and the entire thing has changed. It's much more structured now.

There's an option in the HN settings to change the color of the topbar. When I first signed up I didn't know why it was there (I still don't) but I changed it to a fetching shade of green[1].

I've had it that way for so long that HN always looks odd to me when I log out and it goes back to orange.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/r6tbAt4.png

I use it as an obvious visual indication of whether or not I'm logged in. Usually it’s because I’m not using my primary browser, which means I should be testing something but instead ended up on hacker news… somehow. Good reminder to get back to work.

Is this an April's fool joke? I can't find this setting.

You need 250 karma. Some history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498128

Damn karma limits. So close, yet so far.

Same, I feel so close and I didn't even know this was a thing! My wife always changes the color on the iPhone app to whatever holiday/season it is. The current color is the Cadbury egg purple.

Well, maybe 35 more generous people will donate their upvote to you this April Fools Holiday so, you too, can pick whatever damn header color you like.

Happy Holidays! (I already donated my upvote to The Cause.)

Hahaha, this made me laugh.. My good deed for the day has been upvoting a comment to allow someone to change their hackernews header colour.

It's taking me a while to parse this event.. I'm going to turn off the laptop and go get a drink now. Maybe two.

Damn you internets! What have I become!

I have finally found a good use for April Fools: Advocating silly behavior on HN of a sort that normally gets frowned upon.

That actually does square the circle.

Every other time I have suggested upvoting someone past a karma threshold so they could do a thing, I got downvoted into the negatives. Because, clearly, someone hitting 250 karma and getting to pick their own header color is an enormous threat to the social pecking order and quality of discussion by completely destroying the signal value of karma ranking.

I shall be back next year to repeat this experiment and see if it works again (assuming I remember).

Only if HN had RemindMe! 365 days "April Fools upvotes".

Well, I assume you will have your 250 by then. Just comment and/or post articles. You aren't too far from it.

Thank you for your contribution to The Cause!

Did it work?

What a tease

What do you expect on April 1st?

No? The option is under "minaway".

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/EmO0gz1.png

It should be called "topcolor"

There's a karma threshold for it to appear, for some reason.

My favorite is #F6F6EF. It's so classy! http://i.imgur.com/El12iud.png

I'm #6698FF. Never tried anything else. http://i.imgur.com/wpvvd0p.png

I went for #00ff00 myself.

I have mine set to grey so people can't spot what I'm up to from the other side of the office ;)

I set mine to #cc3300 - a darker shade of orange - because otherwise when Flux kicks in at night the bright orange seems to become super-bright orange!

http://imgur.com/m9PNYfw

Mine is some shade of lavender. Because lavender is the bestest.

After many years, HN pretty much replaced Slashdot as my technews drug of choice. I think they noticed at Slashdot that quite a bunch of their loyal following left for the orange stuff. Fun joke though.

Who remembers that time back in '99 when suck.com parodied Slashdot? [1]

It was very silly, the top headline was "Linux Possibly Defamed Somewhere"

[1] http://www.suck.com/daily/99/12/13/daily.html (the layout has not aged well on this one, sorry. pre-CSS days)

That's good

The bad thing is I thought this was part of the April Fool's joke:

"An anonymous reader writes: A "spaceshot" company that emerged from Y Combinator three summers ago and is targeting a revolutionary change in the way computers work has landed $64 million to help it in the race against much bigger tech giants. Rigetti Computing, which operates out of Berkeley and Fremont, is tackling quantum computing and going up against research being done by the likes of IBM, Intel, Microsoft and others... Rigetti is building a cloud quantum computing platform for artificial intelligence and computational chemistry. It recently opened up private beta testing of 'Forest', its API for quantum computing in the cloud. It integrates directly with existing cloud infrastructure and treats the quantum computer as an accelerator."

Then the link said March 28. Well, good luck to them on their quest to disrupt quantum computing, cloud computing, AI, and chemistry all at once. :)

Well, when I visit slashdot.org (without an ad blocker), I realize why I use hacker news. Only three articles fit on one page.

dammit. I was fooled!

saw the design and though "if I wanted only titles I'd be at HN". then I looked for a "old design" link. when I found none I actually deleted the site bookmark from my phone! the worst part is that I've been there long enough to know even the less obvious than pony April fools pranks.

/slow clap, Slashdot.

Hint: if on mobile, enable "request desktop site"

Slashdot still exists?

I posted this last night and was immediately flagged. HN can be so fickle...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14010978

I liked sparklepony pink better.

That was almost a decade ago... Times have sure changed.

Edit: over a decade ago, actually! https://www.cnet.com/news/good-one-slashdot/

11 years :(