Why wasn't this page found?

I remember a 404 page that was a Brickles game you could play. It was in flash, so if it is still around somewhere, and was never ported to Javascript, it's not easily viewable.

robbyoconnor2• 7 years ago

This is absolutely amazing

riboflavin• 7 years ago

Try clicking on the narwhal... https://www.dremio.com/xyz

magicalhippo2• 7 years ago

This got me thinking. Instead of a fixed 404 page, using something like what the Post-modernism Generator[1] uses[2] to generate a web-page, kinda best-effort style.

Could be fun :)

[1] http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

[2] http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/

HNLurker22• 7 years ago

Post modernism generator reminds me of a 9 year old trying to impress me with big words but all in all clever but schizo jumping from topic to topic.

Postmodern philosophy should explain simply and most of them do: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCSkzHxIcfoEr69MWBdo0ppg

crispinb• 7 years ago

Postmodern philosophy should explain simply

It's not always possible when precisely what is being attempted is to sketch ideas inexpressible with simple denotational language and concepts. What late Heidegger & much of Derrida write is outside the limits of 'commonsense'.

Of course one can contest whether the whole enterprise is meaningful at all, or whether their specific attempts succeed, but 'explaining simply' just isn't relevant to what they are trying to do. It's like claiming you're asking a poet to be more prosaic, which amounts to asking them not to write poetry at all.

0wis• 7 years ago

Good laugh and a good summary of FT branding ! Any other ideas to create fun easter eggs ?

First lazy search for a good starter : https://www.bryanbraun.com/2018/04/01/several-ways-to-hide-e...

pmiller2• 7 years ago

I guess I'm easily entertained, but I always liked Amazon's "dogs of Amazon" 404 pages: https://www.amazon.com/404

HNLurker22• 7 years ago

Of all the 36 dogs. Soju is in an ad: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Animal-Plush-Squeaky-Christmas-East...

blowski• 7 years ago

That’s brilliant - Funny without being unusable. But I wouldn’t want to be the person monitoring their 404 errors right now.

zaphar• 7 years ago

Hopefully they're m monitoring system knows the difference between direct 404 access and legitimately not found pages.

jakear• 7 years ago

The URL provided is just a page UUID with some parts deleted, not "404.html" or whatever. So it really is a "legitimately not found page", but would be hopefully be flagged as "spike in 404 errors due to dead link [...] on news.ycombinator.com" by a reasonable CMS.

gpvos• 7 years ago

On the early web, mit.edu had this:

    I ate your web page.
    Forgive me, it was juicy
    and tart on my tongue.

dgzl• 7 years ago

I guess that counts as a haiku, no? Very cool.

boffinism• 7 years ago

It's also an homage to a very short but non-haiku poem by William Carlos Williams:

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_carlos_williams...

DHowett• 7 years ago

This reminds me of the web browser that shipped with BeOS (1995-2001), NetPositive. It would replace 404-status responses and network errors with haikus.

There's an archive of those haikus at https://8325.org/haiku/!

    Yesterday it worked
    Today it is not working
    The web is like that.

Doctor_Fegg• 7 years ago

The Liberal Democrats (Britain’s centrist, pro-European party) have a nice line in 404s: https://www.libdems.org.uk/aaaa

I recycled an ancient found image for my own site (OpenStreetMap-powered bike directions on quiet roads/trails): https://cycle.travel/aaaa

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

For those not in the UK, the older man on the LibDem site is Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Labour, the official opposition party. The breast slapping was an awkward missed high five during the last general election where Labour unexpectedly won far more seats than predicted. He is not seen as a "handsy" politician - this incident is far more "awks" than "yuks"

The 404 joke is that Labour has for several years being trying to avoid having a clear official policy opposing or supporting Brexit

GordonS• 7 years ago

The even bigger joke is that when asked, Labour always say "look, we've been very clear on Brexit"

leocassarani• 7 years ago

That's a good line, but I think Labour did it first and the Lib Dems are parodying the high-five https://labour.org.uk/aaaa

bpye• 7 years ago

I'm fairly sure the Lib Dems were doing the 'funny' 404s first. I'm not sure if archive.org keeps 404 pages though.

Ayesh• 7 years ago

I really like your missing cycle poster. Too relatable (lost 2 bikes in Amsterdam).

aasasd• 7 years ago

Citing from an early-web travelogue:

On average, three bikes are stolen from a Norwegian in their life. Question: how many bikes, on average, does a Norwegian steal in their life?

gnicholas• 7 years ago

I had to open a second browser to see what was so funny — in Brave, it just gives a normal-looking 404 error.

ComputerGuru• 7 years ago

You have the option to intercept web page errors on (perhaps by default). Microsoft was famous for doing that in IE.

jormungand• 7 years ago

One of my favourites: https://gymbox.com/404

jimnotgym• 7 years ago

Did HN just hug a 404 page to death? That is pretty surreal!

ce42• 7 years ago

Doesnt surprise me to be honest.

I've seen this in the past where a backend google search appliance search was triggered for 404 with the query being parts of the 404 url.

That overwhelmed the search appliance and led to thread exhaustion on the component in front (ridiculous search timeout)... in the end the whole site went down.

gberger• 7 years ago

I've read the second sentence 5 times, but I can't understand it. Could you rephrase it please?

jcims• 7 years ago

Go to ft.com, accept the declaration of cookies, try again.

medmunds• 7 years ago

Even more so, the page offers a theory to explain that:

Speculative bubble
The page never actually existed and was fundamentally impossible, but everyone bought into it in a frenzy and it's all now ending in tears.

krackers• 7 years ago

This one fits even better:

Tragedy of the Commons
Everyone wanted to view this page, but no-one was willing to maintain it.

smitty1e3• 7 years ago

Trumponomics:

We will make this page

Great again with excellent

Negotiations

smitty1e3• 7 years ago

Woe to emperors

Who are parading smartly

And have their buff called

smitty1e3• 7 years ago

Amusing it is

To see comments carpet bombed

Or applauded. Why?

ogeiczvm• 7 years ago

Sometimes governments have a sense of humour: https://www.govt.nz/404

Keloo• 7 years ago

lol, New Zealand is missing from the map.

rgoulter• 7 years ago

Also, current Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern featured in a tourist ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HynsTvRVLiI

(Though AFAIK it was reddit which popularised the joke first)

wyldfire• 7 years ago

Apparently it's relatively common: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/

fencepost• 7 years ago

The page was revised in April, so it may be a reference to Ikea leaving the country off of a map: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/ikea-reportedly-apologizes-f...

lucasverra• 7 years ago

this french one is awesome

https://www.gouvernement.fr/gouvernement/le-systeme-d-inform...

They are simulating a meeting to define how to announce that the resource is gone! :)

avip• 7 years ago

slack has an eye-pleasing page https://slack.com/pi

w1nst0nsm1th• 7 years ago

Magic... On tablet you can swipe through the scene.

mediumdeviation• 7 years ago

It's a recreation of the game that Slack pivoted from. They also released most assets from the game into the public domain https://www.glitchthegame.com/

baxtr• 7 years ago

Are you sure it’s meant to be funny? The entire features some strange errors, like Sweden/Finnland being glued to mainland Europe?

vages• 7 years ago

Europe got a really bad wrap in this picture. My guess is that it's the result of a bad automatic vectorization of a raster picture.

But I think that a missing NZ would stick out like a sore thumb to New Zealanders. Just like the Fennoscandian errors you mentioned sticks out to a Fennoscandian like me. It's intentional; no doubt.

basch• 7 years ago

look at the filename https://www.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/error-map-with-nz-gone2.j...

error-map-with-nz-gone2.jpg

tempguy99997• 7 years ago

Quite amazingly neither of these pages work without JS.

How difficult is it to make a page saying 'not found' using static HTML, perhaps with a GIF if you want minor animation.

I mean, how difficult is it to not use tech that you don't need?

Edit: loved the FT 404 though

dangrossman• 7 years ago

You need JavaScript to use the web in 2019. It has nothing to do with difficulty. You also need an ID to get into the boarding area of an airport and you can't smoke in restaurants. It's never going to be 1995 again. It's time to stop complaining about this.

klez• 7 years ago

Those are not remotely the same. A web page can function without JS. It's not something you need to display some text and some images. And it's not harmful to others. Smoking in a closed space is.

Also, I can't believe every time this refrain pops up we need to be reminded that js not loading is not only a problem for those deactivating it explicitly but also in those cases when it didn't load for any number of reasons (like a bad connection). You're doing your visitors a disservice if you need js to load static text and pictures.

tempguy99997• 7 years ago

You need JavaScript to use the web in 2019

No you don't. Nor should you ever if the page doesn't need it.

Having your code running on my machine always was and always will be a security risk. If you don't understand that you shouldn't be in that job.

You also need an ID to get into the boarding area of an airport and you can't smoke in restaurants

Respectively, that's because a boarding area is not a public area, and relevance of smoking to this?

It's time to stop complaining about this

No, it's time web devs understood the implications of their job, and the risk they put their users at if done improperly.

An axiom of technology design: Simplicity. If you don't need X, don't use it.

Edit: so you're the "Founder of Improvely: https://www.improvely.com" which "Track, Test and Optimize Your Online Marketing". That explains something. No, no, no, you're not going to track me. I am not your data point.

lofikrom• 7 years ago

Lots of ad and script blockers block JS nowadays, you can definitely go without it. For my browsing habits at least, I find I can disable JS globally and selectively unblock it when I come across a site that does require JS. It's doable, and a tad bit safer too.

benj1114• 7 years ago

I'm surprised by the downvotes for this. There are downsides to using Javascript for everything, so it isn't a free lunch.

Move fast and break things is increasingly less defensible for what is a mature technology that the world relies on. And Moores Law is a thing of the past, it isn't really tenable to just take the view that hardware will 'fix' your performance problems. Then there are the security and accessibility considerations.

I suppose Javascript is the single use plastic of the digital world. In its place there aren't really any good alternatives, that doesn't mean you should use it everywhere.

jsmeaton• 7 years ago

It’s being downvoted because it’s a boring tired comment that adds nothing new. These discussions are had in nearly every thread.

dang2• 7 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20490102.

tempguy99997• 7 years ago

Forgive me, I don't recall reading about this act in your guidelines - what does detaching it mean? I can still see it in the original thread even when not logged in.

Also, for my own record, do you consider this discussion inappropriate to the subject of natty 404 pages? Asking as I kicked it off.

black_puppydog• 7 years ago

This is a blank page with uBlock/uMatrix. Fitting. And also the reason I haven't read a single FT page in over a year.

kqr2• 7 years ago

One thing that annoys me about funny 404 pages is that they tend to assume that either a) the content referenced by the URL was deleted intentionally, or b) the user mistyped the URL. While in practise, the majority of the time I hit a 404 page, it is due to malpractise by the webmaster. A 404 page has to be very funny to offset the fact that it often is very unhelpful and blames the user for the webmaster's faults. (Fortunately, I found the FT Page submitted that funny, unlike many of the others in the comments.)

In that light, I find 404 pages like these refreshing for recognising the situation for what it is: https://two-wrongs.com/404

yorwba• 7 years ago

Based on your username and https://xkqr.org/, it appears that you wrote that 404 page. You might want to state that clearly when you present it as an example to follow.

kqr2• 7 years ago

Oh, crap. I skipped proof-reading this one comment, thinking "what's the worst that can happen?" Apparently I can forget to mention that I'm linking to my own page!

I'm very glad you puzzled together the domain name and my username, to make this more transparent. I'm also terribly sorry you had to do what was my job in the first place. Thank you.

jessaustin• 7 years ago

It's still pretty lame that you're asking for coffee on that page.

allover• 7 years ago

To be fair, that looks like their site's footer (see blog), but agree it would make sense to remove it on that page, to not contradict the message :)

simonh• 7 years ago

At least the FT 404 page has the virtue of not being self-serving.

HeWhoLurksLate• 7 years ago

I read that as self-hosted the first time...

vackosar• 7 years ago

Personally these special 404 just waste time and create confusion. Just a blank page with 404 and standard "Page Not Found" would be much better.

hombre_fatal• 7 years ago

Yeah, I'd say it looks too much like a content page.

pawelos• 7 years ago

I wonder if this thread will cause an alarm on one the linked pages due to too high number of bad requests (and will make some poor employee investigate it on Sunday).

benj1114• 7 years ago

"Mercantilism The page is hosted by a foreign web server and is therefore banned to ensure the supremacy of our own software."

Isnt that protectionism?

Wouldn't mercantilism suggest the article was better being supplied from a different website.

RocketSyntax• 7 years ago

It seems to be becoming more of a problem on stackoverflow.

Organizations change their documentation site and then everything that links to the old one is irrelevant.

jrockway• 7 years ago

One of the most interesting parts of this is, at least on my computer, the link doesn't change to the "visited" color no matter how many times I click it. I guess since it 404s, Chrome doesn't want to make me think that I successfully visited it?

didymospl• 7 years ago

This is brilliant but the old 404 on Bloomberg is probably still my favorite: https://imgur.com/gallery/9Es6Z82

rahulroy9202• 7 years ago

imgur too : https://imgur.com/ghdhgf

karjaluoto• 7 years ago

When I first loaded this page, the post had exactly 404 points. :-)

longcommonname• 7 years ago

I like this one.

OperationCode.org/pageoops

mempko• 7 years ago

You can see how well they understand the theory by how funny the joke is. The marxist one is the least funny.

kylegordon• 7 years ago