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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

At least you can google for the error code, instead of having to search for a textual phrase and wade through countless pages of not-at-all-related crap.

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Or even worse, localized error messages. Good luck trying to 1:1 translate it back to English while remotely troubleshooting issues on your parents' computer.

Just write clear and explicit error message (like “Not a valid Microsoft controller”), you shouldn't need to Google it in the first place!

You should still add an error code, so that people can look for additional documentation about the error on your official doc, but having obscure errors and assuming people will look on Google to see if someone on reddit or stackoverflow has more idea about what the problem could be is criminal laziness.

Your choice is a) "0x82d60002: Using unauthorised accessories compromises your ..." or b) "Error: Using unauthorised accessories ..."

There is no c) "Not a valid Microsoft controller" option. Which one between a) or b) is more likely to lead to resolution? Note, Microsoft also offers phone and/or chat support to Xbox users.

Where do your two options come from, and what makes you think there couldn't be an alternative?

Also, what do your alternatives have to do with the question whether it's better or not for the error message to be localized?

And why are error codes supposed to be 32bits long in the first place?

TFA.

This is the typical lazy answer, but there's a problem here: We haven't been talking about the article itself since half of the thread though, so I don't know what you're referring to.

To get back to the topic, there are no reason why there couldn't be a good error message (there's no “two options” when you write your error messages) and if the error message is good enough so you don't have to Google it, you can and should localize it so the majority of the people of this planet could in fact read it. And you also want to put a error code available in case you still wanted to investigate about it, but there's little reason for this error code to be 32bits long unless you have 4 billion different possible errors in your app…

Or just an “Oops :(” error message that’s even less useful.

printing (errc, strerror(errc)) instead of just `errc` would have costed them literally 0 seconds and would have helped a lot. Instead they removed everything but error codes and "Oops :("

I get better error messages from the firmware of obscure embedded chips than from Microsoft Windows

> Instead they removed everything but error codes and "Oops :("

According to the article, they didn't. The pop up has the error code and a descriptive error message. And no "Oops :(".

It really should be both. Code for more information/short hand and text so you know a little bit about why, right now since the issue may be quick to resolve.

> At least you can google for the error code

And find what information? Try turning it off and on again, update & reboot, then clean the registry?

On contrary, incorrectly typed generic error message leads to that types of boilerplate. Numeric error code correctly entered and searched usually leads to either description of exact widespread problem and workaround, or absolutely nothing, very binary and efficient.

Oh I'm not really saying that's better, just that the above is the kind of pain I remember from using Windows.

The solution to every error code in Windows these days is sfc /scannow and dism /Online /Cleanup-image

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