
Bernie Sanders' 404 page - duggieawesome
https://berniesanders.com/404
======
philangist
I don't follow politics at all, but the more I read and hear about Bernie
Sanders the more I like him. I'm sure we've got a few political experts on
Hacker News so I'd love to hear if you guys think he actually has any chance
of winning the presidency.

~~~
TimJRobinson
As someone who was born in Australia and now lives in Amsterdam I feel like
he's the most sane politician in America. I still don't understand why
Americans are so insistent on keeping their "Bad for the people, good for
business" policies.

If you're in the 1% sure that makes sense, but for everyone else life is so
much nicer with free healthcare, good vacation time, maternity leave, good
public transport, proper prisoner rehabilitation, and strong welfare safety
nets.

Having a high GDP country is cool and all but wouldn't you want a much nicer
life instead?

~~~
andrewfong
Thomas Frank took a stab at this question:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansas%3F)
Worth a read.

From my perspective, there's no one answer, but I've noticed a handful of
things:

* Race - Most democratic socialist countries tend to have more homogeneous populations. The U.S. has sizable African-American and Latino-American minorities, often segregated into their own neighborhoods, and that often informs how the white majority votes -- i.e. things like welfare and prison reform are viewed as handouts to people not like themselves. You might say it's comparable to how perceptions of Greek laziness inform German attitudes towards debt cancellation.

* Geography - The U.S.'s political system grants a disproportionate power to sparsely populated states (e.g. a state like Wyoming has more electoral votes per person than California, and states like Iowa and New Hampshire have a large say in how the presidential primaries turn out). This matters with respect to policies that might be considered urban-centric -- e.g. public transportation.

* Militarism - The U.S. is the only country that regularly projects force halfway around the globe, and it's super expensive. Every dollar spent on bombs is a dollar not spent on healthcare. It's a good question as to why American voters constantly favor military might, but it's not necessarily an irrational choice. Or rather, you could argue that it wasn't an irrational choice during WW2 and the Cold War, but that the development of a military-industrial complex has had lasting effects on American politics.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Every dollar spent on bombs is a dollar not spent on healthcare

The US spends more on healthcare -- measured in total, and per capita, and as
share of GDP -- than any other OECD country, even though it and Mexico are the
only OECD countries without universal healthcare. It spends more _out of
public funds_ on healthcare (again, by all three measures) than many OECD
countries providing universal healthcare spend in total, while _also_ spending
more in private spending on healthcare than it does in public spending.

While the US spending about as much (a while ago it was a little more, right
now I think its a hair less) as the rest of the world combined in military
spending may be argued to limit resources for other activities, it is
manifestly _not_ meaningfully constraining health care spending.

~~~
MaysonL
Healthcare ≠ pharmaceutical corporate profits and inflated physician salaries.

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ceejayoz
There seems to be a trend to interesting/funny 404s for presidential
campaigns.

[https://www.barackobama.com/45325r/](https://www.barackobama.com/45325r/) has
a "thanks, Obama" GIF meme.

[https://www.bobbyjindal.com/dfka](https://www.bobbyjindal.com/dfka) blames
the 404 on Obama with #ThanksObama" too.

~~~
patorjk
For the barackobama.com 404 page I got a message that said "Sorry, we couldn't
fetch that page for you." and a gif of some dogs chasing after a ball.

~~~
jlewallen
There's a "Thanks, Obama" gif towards the bottom. I missed it at first too.

~~~
patorjk
aaaah, now I see, thanks!

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dmschulman
I think we have The Atlantic to point to for making campaign 404 pages a
"thing". They've been including a blurb about the 404 page on each candidate's
website on their 2016 Election Cheat Sheet
([http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/2016-ele...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/2016-election/384828/))

404 pages are an opportunity to hide an easter egg but I wonder what
presidential 404 page got The Atlantic focused on this trend in the first
place.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Isn't it Bernie Sanders', not *Bernie Sander's?

(Edit: or Sanders's, indeed. That's what I'd usually write.)

~~~
coldpie
Most manuals of style say that "Sanders's" is most correct, but will allow for
"Sanders'". I strongly prefer the former. It's logical if you think of it: s'
is always for plural nouns that end in S, 's is always for singular. "The
cats' milk" vs "James's hand." This way also matches pronunciation.

It gets tricky to keep straight when you have plural nouns that don't end in
S. I know "Men's clothes" is correct. But I'm not sure what to do with fish.
"The fish's pond"? "The fishes' pond"?

(In any case, just because a word ends in S does not mean it needs an
apostrophe. Many, many English writers need this lessen pounded into their
head. I lose brain cells every time I see someone write "want's".)

~~~
r3bl
Man, it's no wonder that people like me two aren't speaking English natively
get confused about that whole *'s thing.

~~~
Someone1234
As a natively speaker let me just confirm: English is a very inconsistent
language, where rules just as often result in doing the wrong thing as they do
the right. Many native speakers get the 's/'/s/ies thing wrong, as well as
two/too/to, and so on.

I feel bad for anyone learning this language.

~~~
pilif
> I feel bad for anyone learning this language.

clearly you have never tried out German :-)

As a German native speaker who generally has a lot of difficulty learning
languages, I can assure you that English was a lot more feasible for me
compared to anything else I tried.

(Of course you'll find an error in this comment - that is bound to happen in
any comment talking about language mistakes)

~~~
r3bl
In my experience, German was a piece of cake. Sure, it's a bit difficult at
first, but pronunciation is easy once you figure it out and the grammar is not
that hard.

Dutch, on the other hand... :)

I've been trying for five or six months now to pronounce 'Groningen' right,
but I never succeeded. If there's one 'g' in a word, I can pronounce it. If
there are two letters 'g' in one word, it's practically impossible for me.

~~~
p_eter_p
"Scheveningen" is the one that stopped me in my tracks.

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mxfh
Wish he could possibly record a video response for all the HTTP status codes.
Especially interested in _417 Expectation Failed_ and _451 Unavailable For
Legal Reasons_

~~~
sdenton4
"My name is Bernie Sanders and I am a teapot."

~~~
Malic
I see what you did there.

For the rest of you: 418 I'm a teapot (RFC 2324)

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iamthepieman
I wonder if this says more about Bernie or more about his supporters. The
video almost reminds me of how I talk my 88 year old grandfather through
computer tasks.

------
rabidonrails
I can't be the only person who thinks he sounds like Seinfeld's George
Steinbrenner
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJtDt10fRqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJtDt10fRqw))

~~~
mikesickler
You're not. And it makes sense, since Sanders and Larry David (who voiced
Steinbrenner on the show) are both from Brooklyn.

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dataker
It might seem weird for young adults, but many 60+ would believe it's a quite
useful and easy 404.

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lnanek2
Pretty nice UX, actually. Even a stereotypical grandma with no knowledge of
the internet would probably have a high change of getting being told to scoot
down to the nav below with a hand gesture and head back. Bet it retains users
on the site better than a 404 without the video would.

------
arjunrc
Does anyone have a transcript for this? For the folks like me, who have access
issues at work.

~~~
pil4rin
Hi, this is senator Bernie Sanders the good news is you're at the right
website- and it's a really good website. The bad news is you're at the wrong
page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll find your way back home
to where you should be. Thanks very much for being a part of our campaign.

~~~
mrtobo
He says "scoot down", not "scroll..."

Corrected:

Hi, this is senator Bernie Sanders. The good news is you're on the right
website - and it's a really good website - the bad news is you're at the wrong
page. Just scoot down to the bottom of the page and you'll find your way back
home to where you should be. Thanks very much for being a part of our
campaign.

------
quotedmycode
I've been following him since I took the 'isidewith' quiz. I hadn't even heard
of him before, but he's 96% compatible with my stances.

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone instead of voting for a certain candidate,
voted on the issues, and the candidate who voted most like the population
would win... and their votes would be made public.

~~~
tvanantwerp
I took the isidewith quiz and got something like 80% for Bernie Sanders.

Then I took the quiz, intentionally answering the opposite of everything I
actually believe. Still about 80% for Bernie Sanders.

I'm at a loss.

~~~
natmaster
It's called propaganda.

------
kazinator
Most 404 accesses are from people probing a server for common URL's belonging
to vulnerable web applications.

Thus my 404 page is a honeypot, and too many 404 accesses in a short period
results in an automatic IP ban.

~~~
3pt14159
I would reconsider this approach that you have. I run web crawlers for fun and
profit and there are several pages that you can assume a website might have,
like robots.txt, humans.txt, sitemap.xml, sitemaps/sitemap-index.xml,
blog.example.com, blog, etc.

If someone is trying to get to admin.php, sure, ban them. Or if they are not
following robots.txt. But sitemaps are not reliable enough sometimes and not
all crawlers are meanies.

~~~
kazinator
> _I run web crawlers for fun and profit_

Not _my_ fun and profit, though.

~~~
bkmartin
You don't know that. He could be running a crawler that builds a service that
ends up sending you very valuable traffic... Or you could be right... Not
really enough info though.

~~~
kazinator
There is plenty of info, namely that the service doesn't exist now, and that
we can recognize and allow its crawler if it ever becomes successful. It just
doesn't make sense to allow every tom, dick and harry's crawler on the promise
of some future benefit. That's like delivering and opening every spam e-mail
in case there is a nugget in there.

The idea of saying yes to everything is comically explored by Jim Carey in the
film:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Man_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Man_%28film%29)

------
jnpatel
I'm just curious from where in his campaign management the impetus to pay
attention to this sort of detail would have come.

~~~
abrahamepton
My guess, from having worked on statewide campaigns and following politics for
my entire adult life (which is to say, I have no fucking clue but am happy to
posit my opinion): his campaign knows their base includes a lot of young tech-
savvy folks, and their tech team (who is well aware of this fact) wrote a
quick script for him to spend a few minutes reading in front of a camera one
day when he was at HQ. I would imagine the entire point was to generate
exactly this discussion on exactly this (and a handful of other similar)
website(s).

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tomjen3
Warning: the page auto plays a video. Apparently its HTML5 so flashblockers
don't work.

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mindcrime
I'm no fan of Bernie Sanders in general, but I have to admit, that was pretty
nifty. Good jooooeerrrrb, Sanders Team!

------
mgiannopoulos
An auto-loading video just because you ended up on a wrong URL? With a great
part of visitors being on mobile, is this really the best use for bandwidth?

~~~
ebbv
On mobile the video won't start automatically loading. It waits 'til you hit
the play button. At least, not on my iPhone. I don't know what Android does.

~~~
noir_lord
Doesn't autoplay on Android either (I'm on 5.1.1).

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davidy123
It's not a good 404 though. Telling people to go back home and search, while
probably the site reorganized their content without providing updated
pointers.

~~~
zxcvcxz
Not to mention it's an autoplay video with sound... Let's be honest, this is
getting upvoted because it's Bernie Sanders.

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VMG
not really interesting content

55 upvotes and 4 comments

weird..

EDIT: 5 new upvotes in less than a minute

~~~
morganvachon
He's an interesting candidate. From what I've seen he's not your typical
politician, and he seems to mesh well with the current twentysomething crowd
despite being from the tail end of the "Greatest Generation" himself.

I don't know how much of a chance he has to win the presidency, but I can say
that I like him much, much better than any other candidate (and I'm not a
political kind of guy).

~~~
spoiledtechie
Are you comfortable with a socialist leading a capitalist society? I sure am
not.

~~~
morganvachon
This kind of weaselly divisiveness is exactly why I don't get political. There
is no answer to your question that can't be twisted into calling me a
socialist/Marxist/communist/Nazi/pinhead just because I happen to like a
certain candidate who does things differently than the usual Clinton/Trump
types.

