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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

Or at least include a URL to a web page explaining the error and what you can do about it

No please don't do this. I have lost count how many times I tried to follow a link only to get a 404 page. If there is an issue where the app gives the user an error, show the error details & context directly and list the possible mitigation steps right then and there.

A URL with specific content is just another thing that now needs to be maintained along with the code and failure modes.

I think Windows BSOD including QR code was pretty clever idea, although unfortunately it's halfbaked in that it's just a fixed generic URL instead of something specific to the error.

The problem with bootloaders is they really can’t spare a lot of storage. Storing different QR codes for all the common errors might be asking too much.

Currently EFI partitions are on the order of 300-500 MB for common installs, that'd allow you to store millions of PNG-compressed QR codes.

Or even better, a small library which'd allow bootloader to generate it on the fly.

On my system the full qrencode binary is 85K, and it supports a lot more output formats than needed in this application.

http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/index.html.en

That said, with iPhone cameras supporting live OCR and URL detection, a QR code would be unnecessary.

You don't need to store the whole QR code, just code to convert an URL into a QR code. Or a good, short URL that can easily be typed, e.g. "microsoft.com/errors/1234"

A 50 character capacity QR code requires a whopping 137 bytes to store as a raw image.

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