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The Financial Times’ 404 page
- kristopolous 5y agoThese are all good jokes. They've got some real comedic talent somewhere in those offices.
- jklinger410 5y agoTheir fonts are great!
- joecool1029 5y agoThe old bloomberg 404 from some years ago was pretty good: https://web.archive.org/web/20160311202451/http://www.bloomberg.com/video/76764754-outlook-for-stocks-in-hong-kong-south-korea.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160311202451/http://www.bloomb...
- andylynch 5y agoThey used to have a bunch- this was always the best one.
- mdp2021 5y agoI do not understand what they meant - if they intended to mean anything - with the de-composing puppet. An in-joke?
- SapporoChris 5y agoMy interpretation is: The artificial construct of a man striking the computer is/was running on the computer that was struck. So the artificial construct inadvertantly destroyed itself. Perhaps implying that violence is not a good solution. An odd bit of humor, but I liked it.
- WGH_ 5y agoI understand it as a part of "crappy CGI" aesthetic.
- aspenmayer 5y agoIronically, I’m getting an offline message from IA now. https://twitter.com/aspenmayer/status/1452406960263942156 https://twitter.com/aspenmayer/status/1452406960263942156
- hoherd 5y agoSGI used to have a random selection of crying baby faces.
- Waterluvian 5y agoI love it. So much. Does anyone else get a ~10vh white bar at the bottom when they begin scrolling?
- sellyme 5y agoNo. Possibly your ad blocker is trying to get rid of the Nikkei footer and only doing half the job?
- plantain 5y agoThe level of care and attention to detail isn't limited just to their 404's - I find the FT is the best paper out there for macro issues.
- DaftDank 5y agoFT is one of the few papers online that I feel is worth paying for. I agree they are good on macro issues for sure.
- pauldelany 5y agoI think I recall Chomsky saying something along the lines that the financial press is the most reliable because it isn't in their economic interest to mislead their audience.
- pid-1 5y agoOne of the most eye opening experiences I've had related to press was working in a hedge fund and being able to access paid political research reports. No BS, no childish manipulation, just crude analysis of a bunch of people competing for power.
- amvalo 5y agoDo you remember what they were called?
- arjunrc 5y agoI am interested in this as well. The regular media can be monotonous or driven by agendas. Would be great to find content created by folks paid to write unbiased, say it like it is.
- polycaster 5y agoAfaik that‘s what Stratfor does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor They provide a free weekly newsletter as well.
- sushsjsuauahab 5y ago"The best outcome was unachievable, so you arrived here instead"
- salawat 5y agoStory of a surprising proportion of human existence.
- sushsjsuauahab 5y ago"While you probably do have what it takes to be a doctor, which would have been an optimal outcome for many sick people (and a sub-optimal outcome for protectionist, labor-supply limiting organizations), at some point in life you were not permitted to continue attempting to become a doctor. This could have happened because you failed biochem, failed the MCAT, or ran out of money along the way. And now, by path of least resistence, you are selling medical devices."
- qnsi 5y agoat least it loads fast
- codetrotter 5y agoI like that 404 page. Also, the page you were actually looking for is probably https://on.ft.com/3lJQa6w https://on.ft.com/3lJQa6w Here’s an archive version of that link too https://archive.ph/62boB https://archive.ph/62boB
- ColinWright 5y agoI appreciate that you might think that, and thank you, but I was only interested in the 404 page.
- oolonthegreat 5y agonow that is only weirder what is the meaning of "3lJQa6w" then ? surely you didn't randomly type that ?
- ColinWright 5y agoThis one was sent to me, but in a similar situation when someone said a 404 page from a particular site was fun, I simply mutated an existing genuine page until I had a URL that 404'd.
- dylan604 5y agoML fails again. They need better traning data
- amirmc 5y agoInteresting. That specific page is blank but others redirect to a more useful 404 https://www.ft.com/thispagedoesnotexist https://www.ft.com/thispagedoesnotexist
- Thorrez 5y agoThere seems to be a bug that sometimes it responds with an empty page (0 content length) with a 404 code, and sometimes it responds with a full 404 page.
- sva_ 5y agoIt's a good page, but also gets posted quite often here https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=ft.com%20404&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- Bluestein 5y agoThis is the kind of page tha the early internet thrived on. So quaint. Quirky. (Now it is all just becoming a big, walled, advertising network ... sigh.)
- Thorrez 5y agoGoogle's is a little quirky: https://google.com/foo https://google.com/foo "Error 404 (Not Found)!!1" Full disclosure I work at Google.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hvenev 5y agoOther google domains serve different 404 pages on different URLs sometimes, for example: - https://www.youtube.com/djhjwhfkffs https://www.youtube.com/djhjwhfkffs - https://www.youtube.com/varz https://www.youtube.com/varz - https://www.youtube.com/abortabortabort https://www.youtube.com/abortabortabort
- geofft 5y agohttps://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/1282882643277656065 https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/1282882643277656065 seems to explain it - "varz" is one of the "z pages" (a convention that by now has leaked outside Google), so it's handled by the Google web server infrastructure, not by the YouTube app. And "abortabortabort" and a few others are commands that are restricted at the load-balancer level.
- jeffbee 5y agoSome of this style has leaked out in different places. For example Envoy (and Istio, if I recall correctly) implement the /quitquitquit handler.
- aasasd 5y ago> HTTP Error 4O4 > 404 Unfound > The Web Server cannot give you the answers you need. Please check your life to ensure the path is correct. Did you press the right keys in sequence, and click with a firm but gentle hand? Are you paying attention? This may be a message, but it's not a mistake. > Please contact the server's administrator if chaos persists. > http://www.joseph.ca http://www.joseph.ca
- ColinWright 5y agoEdited ... As the child of this comment points out, I got this wrong. I was multi-tasking, and didn't read carefully enough. If they delete their comment (which is now no longer relevant) then I'll delete this one and leave things tidy. (they probably won't notice ...)
- ByThyGrace 5y agoYou need to pay attention. GP is quoting a different 404 page than the one linked by OP. :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ColinWright 5y agoIt appears to be suffering the HN "Hug of Death". Here's the version from the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20211024193418/https://www.ft.com/3lJQa6w https://web.archive.org/web/20211024193418/https://www.ft.co...
- mattkevan 5y agoTragedy of the commons strikes again.
- wolverine876 5y agoTo pick on a comment probably not meant as serious economics: It is most emphatically not a tragedy of the commons. We don't commonly own FT.com or share in its use. It is privately owned and thus a tragedy for FT's owners, if it significantly impacts their profits. Probably not.
- sellyme 5y agoThey know. They're referring to the page this thread is about, which lists Tragedy of the Commons as a reason for a 404 with this explanation: > Everyone wanted to view this page, but no-one was willing to maintain it.
- krallja 5y agoThe Wayback Machine seems to be suffering, as well: Temporarily Offline Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. Please check our Twitter feed for the latest information. We apologize for the inconvenience.
- pdpi 5y agoThe Rolling Stones’ site had the best (and most obvious) 404 page ever — an embedded YouTube video for You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Sadly they’ve since removed it
- dixie_land 5y agoSurprised no one has mentioned dogs at Amazon yet https://www.amazon.com/dp/skdkjdh https://www.amazon.com/dp/skdkjdh
- _trampeltier 5y agoSiemens has a pong game on there 404 page. https://new.siemens.com/de/dhhji https://new.siemens.com/de/dhhji
- Anther 5y agoI like this one! Rather fun to play also.
- _trampeltier 5y agoYes, not so easy and the sound, just great :-)
- cbm-vic-20 5y agoSomewhere, some ops engineer is being pinged because the alerting system has noticed a huge increase in hits to the error page.
- justin_oaks 5y agoI was thinking the same thing, but that engineer should have a really short investigation as to why it's happening. Access logs often include the HTTP Referer header, which would make it easy to see that all the traffic is coming from Hacker News. Even so, if I were the one to submit the URL to Hacker News, I'd probably make the URL path something like /showing_404_page_to_Hacker_News so it's impossible for someone reading the access logs to wonder what's going on.
- human 5y agoThe engineer is already on HN and foresaw it before it happened.
- techdragon 5y agoOr the engineer is the one that posted it and already had the next 24hr window declared ahead of time to prevent the false positive.
- divbzero 5y agoThis huge increase in hits is accounted for by the “Behavioral economics” explanation: “The influence of psychological factors caused you to act in a manner that would not be expected of a purely rational actor.”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- i2shar 5y ago> Demand increased and a shortage occurred. The engineer then sat back and smiled at how their server continues to serve this page just fine despite the HN demand :)
- grn 5y agoI love that kind of attention to detail. It's easy to treat the 404 page as something not needing any thought at all so it's refreshing to see some still care about such seemingly irrelevant details.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoLove it! Here's mine (the site is very old -from last century): https://cmarshall.net/Error_404.html https://cmarshall.net/Error_404.html Inspired by Douglas Adams (From HGTTG).
- rpmisms 5y ago> Socialism If you were to get the page you wanted you might get a better page than someone else, which would be unfair. This way at least everyone gets the same. I chuckled. FT is going to get angry tweets about their 404 page.
- coder-3 5y agoTIL UX designers are behavioural economists
- slg 5y agoIt is funny that you can see the bias in FT's politics in the descriptions they use. For example, the trickle-down description genuinely reads as if written by a supporter of that economic theory in that it frames that theory in a positive economic light. Meanwhile the socialism one is written by someone intending to mock socialism and isn't even accurate to socialism. It is more a descriptor of communism than socialism.
- bo1024 5y agoThat caught my eye too. The others all looked reasonable (including Marxism) but the socialism one sounds like a caricature of an ignorant facebook post.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoYeah, that one didn't quite work -- I was trying to think of what a better one would be. I think the proper tone is parodying what someone who believes this might actually say, and they're fairly on the button for the rest of them. Something about the page's utility being made redundant through common ownership? (Economic jokes are hard.)
- gorgoiler 5y agoMy read of the trickle-down one-liner was that it was taking the piss just as much as any of the others, FWIW.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pyuser583 5y agoI don’t like 404 pages. We shouldn’t be giving an HTTP Status Code to an unsophisticated end-user. Better to just redirect to the index, and give a welcome message explaining what happened.
- cblconfederate 5y agoI wonder if this 404 page is still being considered by search engines for SEO purposes
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoIf it returns a 404 status code then search engines will generally effectively ignore it
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoIn fact Google even attempts to detect "soft 404s" and will not index those either. That's when it thinks the content wasn't found but the server still returned a 200 response. This can happen in any application but I think they developed it with SPAs in mind
- graderjs 5y agoFreakonomics: there is a surprising and commonly undervalued secondary market for 404 pages, and you just realized you purchased a bootleg, which is nevertheless priceless: https://archive.md/MzOrc https://archive.md/MzOrc
- myrandomcomment 5y agoThe FT is well worth the cost. I read it cover to cover everyday, which is what I am doing now in the dark (PG&E). The weekend edition is always amazing, with great interviews (lunch with the FT). I still miss David Tang’s column (he died) as well as the humor of Mrs. Moneypenny. Janice Robinson wine column is worth the time if you are into wine.
- davidjytang 5y agoFirst time seeing my name here. This is a strange personal motivation.
- thicknavyrain 5y agoWas OP mistakenly implying you had passed away? Or do you just happen to share the same name as the FT author?
- red_trumpet 5y agoI guess OP was talking about someone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Tang#Other_roles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Tang#Other_roles
- davidjytang 5y agoI just happen to share the name. Sorry for any confusion.
- thazework 5y agoOnly one of these explanations is pluasible.
- Ansil849 5y agoBasically a version of the two cows joke - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_have_two_cows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_have_two_cows
- richardatlarge 5y agoNot sure about this one Quote: Laissez Faire Capitalism: We know this page is needed, but we can't force anyone to make it. Shouldn’t it be that there’s no profit in making one I like it better because it’s true
- scaglio 5y agoI too inserted a themed-joke in my personal website with short stories: https://crooked.ink/notfound https://crooked.ink/notfound I really do like funny 404 pages, they add something unique to the browsing experience.
- jammaloo 5y agoThat's a lovely site, the design really gives me e-book vibes.
- scaglio 5y agoThank you! That was my intention :)
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI remember a 404 page with the following (I don't think it was unique to that website): > Once upon a midnight dreary, While I websurfed, weak and weary, Over many a strange and spurious website of hot chicks galore, >While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, Suddenly there came a warning, And my heart was filled with mourning, Mourning for my dear amour. >'Tis not possible!, I pleaded, But my browser, so conceited, Remained blank, I then repeated, Just a blank and nothing more. >With a scream, I was defeated, For my cookies were deleted, So i begged, no longer seated, "Give me back my free hardcore!" >Then, in answer to my query, Through the net I loved so dearly, Came its answer, dark and dreary: Quoth the server, 404
- pepoluan 5y agoHalf expecting "It's dark here. You're about to be eaten by a grue."
- xyz11 5y agolove it!XD loads fast also.