404. PAGE Not FOUND | Hacker News Reader

404. PAGE Not FOUND

bloomberg.com

174 pointsmr5iff42 comments

Open articleView on HN

Also see

* http://www.bloomberg.com/404

* http://www.bloomberg.com/500

* http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/404

* http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/500

I wasn't expecting to find this on the front page considering they've been floating around Twitter/etc for over a week. But I'll certainly make use of the opportunity to say the new site is entirely Node based and the team is interested in hiring more good Node devs in NYC. Contact me if interested, email in profile!

Hey @apaprocki, The archive pages for bloomberg (at businessweek.com) seem to have dead links and redirecting to businessweek.com instead of the content article. Is that intentional? or maybe just in the process of being fixed.

This is the framework the site is running on: https://github.com/bloomberg/brisket

Maybe I am no fun, but I find this error page disorienting and a little disturbing.

Errors pages mean you've probably messed up somehow and are associated with user frustration. This page, and the other Bloomberg error pages posted in the comments, do not help to mitigate that.

Github does a nice job of walking the line of cutesy, but useful error pages. But then again, who doesn't love Octocat?

https://github.com/404 https://github.com/500

Edited for clarity

If I tilt my iPad the sign on that 500 page moves...

Cool! Looks like it'll do that in any browser + device combo that supports the device orientation API[1], including Safari on iOS and Chrome on most Mac laptops.

Here's little bit more information from a previous comment of mine, if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6547345

[1] http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/device/orientation/

Mouse movement over the graphic does it on desktop too, fyi

They are supposed to be humorous. How is github's better than bloombergs?

Funny stuff. What I find surprising is that these error pages are on the web site of Bloomberg news, a fairly serious and straight laced operation.

Don't worry, it shows just as much respect for good taste as the rest of their recent redesign.

Interestingly, it seems the 404 varies with the url: http://www.bloomberg.com/a http://www.bloomberg.com/news/a/ http://www.bloomberg.com/v

The first and last of those are likely Apache returning errors. Its definitely not expected behavior.

My guess is that it's a web developer who really wanted to do something amusing and was only allowed to do it on the error pages.

It's @joshuatopolsky http://bit.ly/1vfVRV3

I thought it was an old boring Java/C++ place, but it seems that they can have some fun :).

C++, sure, but their other main language is actually FORTRAN...

Yep, we have an entire hardware engineering team that maintains our fleet of time machines that we use to travel back to 1987 to recruit new FORTRAN programmers.

Actually, our second language is (server-side) JS.

I have a lot of friends who work at Bloomberg on Fortran code. I believe you that your #2 is JS, but either I have the weirdest luck of finding people who work at Bloomberg, or Fortran has to be pretty high up there.

"(server-side) JS"

Why would you pick an unmaintainable language for the server side?

Care to elaborate why you think it is unmaintainable? It has worked out well for us. We chose between Lua and JS and ultimately JS won because it was easier to find people who knew it and could be productive faster without training / time to learn Lua.

Well, take a look at this one: https://quotivator.net/wp-admin

This has to be Joshua Topolsky's idea!

Comedy gold. It's good to see that serious business has a sense of humor.

I still love the Lemmings 404 game here: http://www.romainbrasier.fr/404.php

How very nice that the top item of HackerNews is a 404 page.

No fun allowed >;(

Rather no pointless content allowed. I'd say that the level of fun shouldn't decide wether it should be on hacker news at all. Unless it's the "meaningful" kind of fun.

If it's the meaningless kind of fun together with meaningful content, then it should be judged by the meaningfulness.

These are the rules that I just made up. Let it be so.

A world where the point is to have war, I mean, fun.

You excepted a 417 page?

417 Exception failed

Since we're talking about 404s, are there best practices for orienting users? I have a site with 1-2 major resources.

Does it make sense to say something like:

------

Maybe you were looking for:

Resource 1 Resource 2

Credit goes to Stephanie Davidson http://paralleluniver.se/

Here's mine ;) http://njs.com.np/nosuchpage

I expected to find some cracks on Larry Page of Google. Having said that, I feel GitHub's 404 is one of the best.

http://www.google.com/404

wild status 404 appeared: http://www.cessor.de/404

Nice 404 page.

Perhaps you'd be interested in Glitch City Labs forums? (a topic from there got on HN frontpage before): http://forums.glitchcity.info

Probably that's the first #1 item on HN which always stays black/unread. Nice hack.

Not bad, quite sarcastic in fact.

Why?

Is this 4chan?

Sometimes the difference between business and 4chan is a hairs-breadth.

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