Ask HN: Happy 404 Day. Whats your favorite 404 error page?

[donohoe]

Many of the best, most clever, 404 error pages have disappeared over the years. What are the current highlights, or ones that survived the test of time?

[HPsquared]

Financial Times has my favourite: https://www.ft.com/404

A range of spurious economic explanations for why they couldn't serve the page.

[nerdjon]

What is interesting, until you called it out I did not look past the beginning and I wondered... why is this impressive?

It just kinda blends in like many other sites have a site map on the 404.

That is well done, simple but a good fun if you look at it for more than a couple seconds.

[olddustytrail]

I particularly like:

"Liquidity traps We injected some extra money into the technology team but there was little or no interest so they simply kept it, thus failing to stimulate the page economy."

As I imagine tech teams across the world thinking, "Wait! We could have just kept the money?!"

[jimbokun]

I learned so much about economic systems!

[unkulunkulu]

Ok, you win! I gave up at some point and started scrolling impulsively to check if this is an infinite feed generated by some llm query. Turns out it was finite.

[FredPret]

Out of all the fun 404 pages, this is the best I've seen

[tumidpandora]

Fun crash course in economics while you're looking for a missing page

[btbuildem]

It's like they're calling themselves out.. delicious

[deltarholamda]

That is hilarious.

[alexb_]

This is extremely awesome, love this

[ijijijjij]

they didn't ask LLMs yet?

[nathell]

https://www.thesistersofmercy.com/error404page.html (written by Andrew Eldritch himself, like the whole site!)

Also:

  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pron surfed, weak and weary, 
  Over many a strange and spurious site of 'hot xxx galore',
  While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
  And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
  "’Tis not possible!", I muttered, "give me back my free hardcore!"
  
  Quoth the server, 404

[4ndrewl]

Never thought I'd see a Sister's reference on HN. Well played.

[bombastry]

Adult Swim's 404 page always has a dark, sometimes surreal, shaggy-dog story that ends with a reference to the page being 404.[1]

The page seems to return the same story each time you access it (at least on the same day). I'm not sure when they change from one story to another. The author has posted some of the other stories on other sites.[2][3][4][5] I still vividly recall reading this one in particular (although this reproduction is missing the bolding of the text in the second to last paragraph).[6]

[1] https://adultswim.com/404

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/adultswim/comments/l48nii/the_sites...

[3] https://www.jchristopherarrison.com/crash

[4] https://www.jchristopherarrison.com/bar

[5] https://www.jchristopherarrison.com/departuredate

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/adultswim/comments/9efd3s/adult_swi...

[p1mrx]

I'm surprised that the "!!1" title on https://google.com/404 has survived so long without some manager making it more corporate.

[ct0]

could take months and at least 2 google product closures to get that fixed

[Nition]

They've already removed http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/, which used to show Google in 1337-speak.

[curious999]

I am curious about what that hidden reference is to

[paxys]

Slack's 404 page (https://slack.com/404) is a throwback to Glitch, the MMO game that its founders pivoted from.

[mgomez]

NPR's is one of my favorites: https://www.npr.org/404

[macintux]

I suspect I've seen that multiple times over the years without ever reading the fine print. Nice.

[Cloudef]

Here's mine https://sivu.jp/404

[nerdjon]

I do particularly enjoy Amazon's https://www.amazon.com/404

Someone else mentioned Github which is always funny until you realized you followed a bad link to a repo you were looking for.

Thingiverse has a great one when you can force it to happen: https://www.thingiverse.com/nonexistant404page/designs

[ss64]

404 pages should have a different favicon so that when opening multiple tabs in the background you will notice something different. Here's mine with a little easter egg when hovering over the numbers: https://ss64.com/404

[lagniappe]

I'm going to ask a stupid question at my own peril.. please go easy on me

Does serving a 404 page still allow the response of 404 as the response code? or is it technically a 200 since it is serving the custom 404 page successfully?

[bntyhntr]

If you think about it, any response you get is a "200" by that definition since the server successfully gave you...something.

The browser usually has no special handling for most response codes, so serving a 404 page with a 404 status code is fine/expected and lets things (browser, scraper, etc) respond appropriately. I don't think the browser treats it specially but if you were scraping, you'd obviously want to ignore that result.

It is frustrating to work with APIs that return something like 200 { meta: { status: 404 message: "field <x> not found" } }

and browsing is no different.

[ss64]

If you request a page like www.ycombinator.com/monkeybusiness There is no page called MonkeyBusiness so the webserver will throw a 404 error and either display a default page generated by the web server software or optionally a custom page. In reality the 404 page will have a different url that you never see.

If you happened to know that the page was www.ycombinator.com/error404.html Then you could load that page directly and it would return 200 OK

[everfree]

In very simplified terms, "404" is just a number that's included in the "invisible" HTTP header of the web page you're visiting. Whether this number is "200" (success) or "404" (not found), it doesn't affect how your browser renders the web page.

Technically you could have a website where you serve real web pages full of content using the (wrong) 404 code, or serve web pages that tell the user "not found" using the (wrong) 200 code. It would massively mess up bots, search engines, browser extensions, and any other software that needs to know whether a page actually exists - but it would be fully browsable like normal by a human with a web browser, since humans don't see or read HTTP headers.

[gwbas1c]

Brave offers to check the Wayback Machine for a cached version of the page.

Basically: 404 tells crawlers that the URL is invalid.

The HTTP server also has to return something,. It could simply return 0-length content and allow the browser to show its error page, but that wouldn't be "on brand."

[shrewm]

I had a similar debate with coworkers about returning 404 when a DB webhoook query found no rows. It added extra complexity to client code trying to figure out if it was a bad URL, bad query, or just no rows.

[datascienced]

It is a good question! The 404 status code is useful context. The browser (or user agent, crawler, your code!) can act however it likes in response to the 404. A browser will render the page still, thus all the funky 404 pages since sites can apply their branding to the error. If this were not the case the browser might show a generic message to the user (people would get used to this).

An example of where the browser might ignore the body is in a 301 redirect.

[richardwhiuk]

It's a 404 with a body.

By convention, if you don't return enough content, the browser will render it's own not found, but if you do it'll render it.

[Climato]

Http codes are the codes of the application not a technical transfer code.

Btw there is a status code 204 which means ok but no response body.

[BlameKaneda]

I'm a fan of this 404 page of dancing construction workers. I think the original page got taken down, but it's available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRkJk303ppw

[ninju]

Don't let the music start playing (after 5 seconds) because soon after that you will be hooked

[elashri]

My favorite and most creative 404 page I saw is for ROOT CERN software *

https://root.cern/404/

It is the error you wish was true in your life.

* Used as C++ interpreter with devilish syntax to help physicists do data analysis.

[masswerk]

Shameless self-promotion: https://www.masswerk.at/404

( There were several others over the years, here's the previous one: https://www.masswerk.at/status/?404 )

[dkindler]

I'm able to trick your page into going twice :)

https://ibb.co/qkhjv9R

[abhinavstarts]

Really good. Also your website is too awesome. Thanks for sharing.

[nickt]

I love the World of Spectrum 404 page [1], which had a mention here last week [2].

[1] https://worldofspectrum.org/404.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39870902

[rob74]

Wow, it's even responsive!

(My browser window is one half of a 4K monitor, so the Spectrum screen is shown in "portrait mode")

[dewey]

IMDb has random movie quotes: https://www.imdb.com/404

[zote]

I somehow took a liking to this one, really simple and a bit funny as Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. https://diopitt.org/404

[cratermoon]

One time I lost something important at work. I asked a co-worker about it and she suggested we do the St. Anthony prayer, so more-or-less to humor her and to take my mind off the worry I went along.

The important thing was found later that day, in a very unlikely place.

YMMV.

[AnimalMuppet]

Shared here a few days ago (and not by me - I'm stealing someone else's stuff here): https://www.ft.com/errors/page/404

[ninju]

The text at the top is rather standard boilerplate 'page not found' verbiage, but the justifications according to the different economic theories listed afterwards is the hidden gem of this page!

[madsr]

I like the Norwegian Army's: https://www.forsvaret.no/en/404 The version in Norwegian language looks more like a bullet hole for some reason: https://www.forsvaret.no/404

[imzadi]

https://http.cat/404

http.cat is one of my favorite resources. I get to find out what the status code means and see a cute cat.

[mooreds]

This is ours: https://fusionauth.io/404

Darn storm troopers can't find a droid to save their life.