
Why wasn't this page found? - johnny313
https://www.ft.com/content/a67df690-8def-11e9-
======
magicalhippo
I chuckled the first time I saw Texas Instruments' 404 page.

[http://www.ti.com/product/XYZLMZM23601](http://www.ti.com/product/XYZLMZM23601)

edit: noticed Analog also has a cute one

[https://www.analog.com/en/products/xyzad5423.html](https://www.analog.com/en/products/xyzad5423.html)

~~~
zodiac
The circuit is not a circuit :'(

------
justhw
Neat!

There have been some entertaining 404 pages that came up on HN in the past.

1\. Bernie Sanders
[https://berniesanders.com/sdfw](https://berniesanders.com/sdfw) 2\.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=404&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=404&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
robbyoconnor
I love this so much

------
ogeiczvm
Sometimes governments have a sense of humour:
[https://www.govt.nz/404](https://www.govt.nz/404)

~~~
Keloo
lol, New Zealand is missing from the map.

~~~
fencepost
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...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/ikea-reportedly-apologizes-
for-leaving-new-zealand-off-a-world-map.html)

~~~
FooHentai
IKEA is a special case for New Zealand, the story goes that NZ slighted IKEA
in some way a long time ago, something like being unwilling to provide
favorable zoning for a flagship store, and this resulted in IKEA leadership
blacklisting NZ. This is often given as the reason that no store exists even
today.

Quite possibly not true, more likely is that the small population and
logistics complexity makes it uneconomical to service, especially for a brand
that depends on scale.

Apparently they're launching a store soon anyway.

~~~
rsynnott
IKEA-type shops were literally illegal in Ireland until recently (the law was
changed in 2005 to allow limited types of shops, including IKEA, to have more
than 6k sqm) and I don’t think they ever left us off their maps.

------
gpvos
On the early web, mit.edu had this:

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

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

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

[http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_carlos_williams...](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_carlos_williams/poems/16997)

~~~
JetSpiegel
That was not featured on Paterson.

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

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

~~~
jakear
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.

------
pmiller2
I guess I'm easily entertained, but I always liked Amazon's "dogs of Amazon"
404 pages: [https://www.amazon.com/404](https://www.amazon.com/404)

~~~
HNLurker2
Of all the 36 dogs. Soju is in an ad: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Animal-Plush-
Squeaky-Christmas-East...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Animal-Plush-Squeaky-
Christmas-Easter/dp/B07CK3X4TQ)

------
magicalhippo
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/](http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/)

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

~~~
HNLurker2
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](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCSkzHxIcfoEr69MWBdo0ppg)

~~~
crispinb
> 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.

------
benj111
"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.

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

~~~
medmunds
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
This one fits even better:

>Tragedy of the Commons

>Everyone wanted to view this page, but no-one was willing to maintain it.

------
pawelos
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).

------
fpalmans
I actually followed the link and was entertained. +1 would read again.

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

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

~~~
benj111
What are you talking about? All the parties have been crystal clear on Brexit.
"Brexit means Brexit", what's unclear about that?

------
RocketSyntax
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.

------
riboflavin
Try clicking on the narwhal...
[https://www.dremio.com/xyz](https://www.dremio.com/xyz)

------
jrockway
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?

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I did the old Douglas Adams Marvin 404:
[http://cmarshall.net/Error_404.html](http://cmarshall.net/Error_404.html)

------
kylegordon
Courtesy of my employer, we have a tailored 404 as well :-)

[https://www.linn.co.uk/foo](https://www.linn.co.uk/foo)

------
0wis
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...](https://www.bryanbraun.com/2018/04/01/several-ways-to-hide-easter-
eggs-on-your-website/)

------
jormungand
One of my favourites: [https://gymbox.com/404](https://gymbox.com/404)

------
didymospl
This is brilliant but the old 404 on Bloomberg is probably still my favorite:
[https://imgur.com/gallery/9Es6Z82](https://imgur.com/gallery/9Es6Z82)

~~~
rahulroy9202
imgur too : [https://imgur.com/ghdhgf](https://imgur.com/ghdhgf)

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

------
archon810
[https://www.androidpolice.com/404fjfjfjd](https://www.androidpolice.com/404fjfjfjd)

Refresh a bunch of times, as they change.

------
floathub
Boating related, boating failure:

[https://floathub.com/foobar](https://floathub.com/foobar)

------
black_puppydog
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.

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

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

------
robbyoconnor
This is absolutely amazing

------
djsumdog
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.

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

------
longcommonname
I like this one.

OperationCode.org/pageoops

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

------
tempguy9999
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
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
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.

~~~
Avamander
A web page can function without JS, but a lot of things seriously aren't
doable with just HTML5, no matter how hard you try.

~~~
vbezhenar
Nobody complains that Google Maps are using JS. People are complaining that
developers abusing JS just to show simple page or video which is perfectly
doable with HTML 5.

~~~
Avamander
Showing a simple video isn't simple without JS, it's just clunky in all
aspects.

~~~
kbenson
I think you're mistaking simple for something else. Simple can easily be
clunky. I would even say simple is _often_ clunky.

Making something elegant, and full of features, and pretty is often complex.

~~~
Avamander
It's not simple even for the developer to use the video tag if you want a
thing that works.

------
smitty1e
Trumponomics:

\--

We will make this page

Great again with excellent

Negotiations

~~~
smitty1e
Woe to emperors

Who are parading smartly

And have their buff called

~~~
smitty1e
Amusing it is

To see comments carpet bombed

Or applauded. Why?

------
kqr
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](https://two-
wrongs.com/404)

~~~
yorwba
Based on your username and [https://xkqr.org/](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.

~~~
kqr
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.

