[HN Gopher] Dear valued user, You have reached the error page fo...
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Dear valued user, You have reached the error page for the error
page
Just got to this error page by refreshing my Gmail tab, seeing the
Gmail error page, and then refreshing the error page and getting
this. Never seen this posted on the Internet before, but I thought
it was interesting.
Author : Alex3917
Score : 175 points
Date : 2025-07-18 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (imgur.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (imgur.com)
| SchwKatze wrote:
| You found the easter egg gem!
|
| The fact that google's engineers cared about doing that it's
| pretty funny
| henry700 wrote:
| Probably done over a decade ago. Today we wouldn't see this
| pi_22by7 wrote:
| oh, for sureee
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That explains why we aren't talking about it today then.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Source code isn't written afresh every day. The point was
| the code was written at a different era and the current era
| wouldn't produce this sort of code, and presumably you
| wouldn't see anything but a generic 500. This is likely
| because product managers can't stand free thought and
| action amongst engineers as it doesn't appease their bean
| counter overlords sufficiently.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You don't know when that was written.
| jabjq wrote:
| If you use Google to find this string you will find very
| old references. ("Very old" is relative)
| kartoffelsaft wrote:
| It had been written by (at the latest) September 2008:
|
| https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/09/best-gmail-
| error-m...
| JadeNB wrote:
| Wow, seeing someone (presumably) unironically saying
| "This is why we love Google" was definitely a throwback
| to an earlier time.
| https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/09/best-gmail-
| error-m...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| That's pretty presumptuous, but especially so when there
| are comments parallel from googlers pinning the date and
| it's easily determined by using this very powerful
| information retrieval tool called "Google." Not to
| mention the possibility I work at Google, or that I wrote
| it myself!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Ask HN: GCP Outage?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605732
| crgk wrote:
| I'm getting an imgur error page, but it seems this post is meant
| to be an image of a Google error page?
|
| I've reached the error page of the image of the error page for
| the error page. We're too deep.
| Tiberium wrote:
| Imgur really hates VPNs, and will show that bogus error page if
| you're not using a "nice" connection.
| andrepd wrote:
| Lol, so meta.
|
| Also: very sad, but it would be great if it was just imgur
| doing this; it's the whole internet.
| bhaney wrote:
| Now to refresh this comment until HN randomly goes down
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| You have reached the error reply to your valued comment.
| Please send this comment in an email to all your relatives or
| a bunny will die.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: Very Important !!!
| miyuru wrote:
| Mirror: https://beeimg.com/view/m8002460503/
| mister_mort wrote:
| Always leave a message in "impossible" code paths, you never know
| who might read it in the end.
| zaik wrote:
| Confuse your coworkers by telling them you "won Gmail once".
| RandomBacon wrote:
| They'll just think you're going senile and politely agree,
| telling you to go back and surf the information superhighway.
| larrymcp wrote:
| The funny thing is, this error message is hardly less useful than
| the recent trend of error messages which say only, "Something
| went wrong".
| pphysch wrote:
| What would you expect? IME these are mostly unforeseen 500
| errors, logged internally, and not something a client can do
| anything about (or should know anything about, for security
| reasons).
| hinkley wrote:
| Have you never dealt with customers reporting errors?
|
| Something went wrong is what they will tell you and expect an
| answer. Doesn't matter how fancy and detailed the error, you
| will get back, "it's broken fix it."
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Back in the early days of my career and supporting end users,
| I used to constantly get people say: "xxx
| doesn't work. I just get an error"
|
| They would never tell me what the error message actually was.
| And when I asked, the reply often was "I
| don't remember. I've closed it now".
|
| It used to wind me up rotten. I can forget non-technical
| people not understanding the error message. But common sense
| should have kicked in that the error message is important to
| share with the person trying to fix said error.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple,
| distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo in
| that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"
| Xss3 wrote:
| Could make cute pictures and brighten support staffs day.
| 'I got a pig telling a chicken that the barn is closed??'
| tough wrote:
| lmfao this is genius and would work better than text
| netsharc wrote:
| I was thinking celebrities, but then people will
| misidentify them.
|
| Each micro-service (in 2025?!?!) would have different
| pictures of a particular celebrity, for different
| errors.. so if the user says e.g. "I see Taylor Swift
| doing..." the support can say "Let me forward you to the
| S3 people!".
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple,
| distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo
| in that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"
|
| This sounds like the thing that they do in parking
| garages where each level will have a color, an image, or
| sometimes even a musical theme. (Which is to say, it
| sounds like a good idea!)
| lostlogin wrote:
| That's a good idea - and even technical users would find
| that more memorable than 1198854 versus a 1197854 error.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think you're going to find people mistaking one animal
| for another.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| You can dunk on lay people all you want, personally I'm a
| lot more furious about fellow programmers who thinks it's
| OK to show an error that says "file not found" without any
| context like the filename.
|
| Like, help a brother out!
| rc_mob wrote:
| You have 7 different gmail accounts eh?
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Yeah unfortunately they are tricky to get rid of once you have
| them. In theory I can forward the email from one account to
| another, but in practice it's hard to think through all the
| weird security issues that might arise from doing so.
| dpedu wrote:
| I've got one I made as a teen, a more professional sounding
| mature address, one for school, two for two separate google
| apps domains, and one for work. They pile up over time.
| yegle wrote:
| This was added in 2004. Before this change, the error message
| was:
|
| > If too many of these happen, someone will be paged. If you
| still see this after half an hour, send mail to
| xxxxxxxxxxx@google.com
|
| (For curious folks working for Hooli, the magic number is 472481)
| exiguus wrote:
| Error page of the error page made me smile. Somehow, this makes
| total sense to me. Consider a reverse proxy where the origin is
| down and displaying the 'real' error page is not possible because
| of that. Alternatively, imagine a CloudFront function or Lambda
| experiencing the same issue, or encountering so many redirects
| that it interrupts and simply shows the error page of the error
| page. Nonetheless, I agree that you shouldn't see this issue very
| often.
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(page generated 2025-07-18 23:01 UTC)