I hated that shit. I'd load Slashdot and there was no real content or it was difficult to find real news amongst all the crap. It's not funny. It's annoying.
Some of the april fools things can be annoying, but I have a big shrug for there being less real news for a day. Anything important will get through and most days don't have much interesting news anyway.
Would you be annoyed if HN went offline just for the hell of it for a day every year?
But you're right, I was an extremely angry person back then. Many years of therapy and deliberate ongoing work and I'm a radically different man. Thank goodness I got to the other side.
There were some years in the 90s and early 2ks that had good april fool's jokes, and that was what bubbled up. Not everyone did, so the novelty also made the "meh" ones seem better. By 2008ish everyone was doing one, and most of them weren't very good. By 2012ish marketing got involved and almost all of them were terrible and unfunny.
It was a nice tradition but, like many things, the scene got too big and corporate. It was a zombie tradition for a while then slowly faded away.
In fact when cloudflare started releasing serious things on 4/1, I found it to be a refreshing subversion of the trope.
The problem is that their current capacity is literally full. They were running a highly profitable business for the last 2-3 years and recently switched up the strategy to build more datacenters to meet the ai demand.
I can see they want to do it as they are currently demand constrained.
I'm subscribed to the DO newsletter; let me skim the archive. What they introduced in the last couple of years was: per-second billing, various identity providers for their SSO, managed Postgres upgrades, storage autoscaling, a NAT gateway, "bring your ow IP", etc. Yes, they do actively build out their GPU offerings, and access to open-weight models, but it's by far not the only thing.
- DigitalOcean at NVIDIA GTC 2026: Building the AI Factory for the Agentic Era
- The Proven Home for AI Agents
- The Richmond Data Center: Our newest facility engineered exclusively for AI, featuring NVIDIA HGX B300 systems and a 400 Gbps non-blocking RDMA fabric.
- Frictionless NVIDIA Partnership
- Expanded Model Catalog
- 1 click NemoClaw (Alpha) Droplet
- Network File Storage standard tier and expanded availability
7 AI items. One non-AI item. I stand by my comment.
After wasting 6 months, I chose to delete my account.
Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened.
Facebook is also guilty of this.
I set up a Facebook account for a relative around 2006. The e-mail address is name_facebook@ a domain that I control.
Every six months or so, Facebook will send out almost daily e-mails for a month saying "Person x commented on your post!" or some variant. You know how I know this relative of mine didn't make a new post?
Since all the alleged comments are allegedly from people he knew, and not new strangers, I find it hard to believe that someone has been impersonating him on Facebook for the last 15 years.
How do you know they are not commenting on old content? FB could be pushing old content like 'remember X from 18 years ago' and then someone comments about remembering their friend under an old photo.
Surprising fact I just noticed about the next Moon landing attempt -- it'll take up to 22 launches to get everything into space needed for the attempt.
That's good, actually. We need to develop the capability to stage/assemble in-orbit, as this would relax a lot of hard constraints on size and complexity of the missions.
HN used to work fine on an Nokia classic phone until last year. Sadly it doesn't any more, since they switched the CA to something that is not in the OS root trust. If HN wouldn't enforce HTTPS, it would still work fine.
Nice. Do you just use your 5 as a stationary iPod, or do you dual-carry with a modern device as well? Curious on if you also use it to wi-fi the web on your local LAN periodically too, of it that was just a periodic test to check if HN worked.
I use it around the house to Airplay music to various devices.
A number of things don't work, or work in unexpected ways, mostly because Apple doesn't allow me to log in to iCloud with such an old phone.
I can't control lights with the Home app. But Airplay works fine. The phone doesn't know what a HomePod is, but it shows up with a regular generic speaker icon, like the AirMac I have hooked up to my stereo.
Sometimes I have a few minutes to kill, and I pick it up to look at HN. The New York Times web site starts to work, but the login page doesn't load at all. WSJ blocks me at a "verifying the device" screen. WaPo half works. eBay works some, but no pictures. Ditto for Wikipedia.
There's a lot of things you take for granted on a new phone that you only realize when you're using an old phone. Like you didn't used to be able to quickly scroll an entire web page it's only a screen at a time in iOS 10. You can't grab the scroll bar on the side and move it, either.
And 99.9999% of people don't realize the genius of the camera island. It makes it so much easier to pick up the phone if one end is elevated a bit. With a completely flat phone, you end up dragging/scraping it along the table in order to grip it, which scuffs the surface. And if the table is really smooth, it's surprisingly difficult to lift the phone straight up.
Why can't you log into iCloud? unless somethings changed in the past year or something broke between ios 6 and 10, it should work. I'm still signed into my iPad 2 running iOS 6 (granted, iirc the root cert expired a bit ago so you need to update that). the 2fa is also a bit weird, you have to input the code after your password (eg: if your password is password123 and the code is 789 you'd submit password123789)
I think that might be a thing with apples Advanced Data Protection if you have it enabled, which is understandable since the software needs to know how to un-encrypt the data. If you don't have that enabled, then ignore this and assume apple decided to kill a whole lot of devices (particularly their macs, I know a surprising amount of people still on 10.15)
Not really. Jupiter alone is good enough. Its huge mass accounts for almost all of the gain you get from any such slingshot. Launch windows from Jupiter to anywhere occur every 12 years. Voyager's alignment was captivating, but realistically if it hadn't happened, we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions instead.
It should. I miss the days when tech was interesting and fun.
Even Steve Jobs, for all his later-day revisionist hard-assed reputation, enjoyed the occasional Easter egg, inside joke, or April Fool's joke.