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

200 points by donohoe ↗ HN
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?

179 comments

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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
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!
These images would actually make fantastic Anki cards, for anyone looking to log these in their memory banks.
is this the first ever 404 page that isn't actually a 404?
Well, given what the site is doing I don't think they could really return all those status codes for the various pages and still show the images in all browsers. I think httpbin.org may be closer to what you're looking for

Also, I've been on the Internet long enough to know that there are unquestionably other sites misusing status codes, made worse by our graphql friend cheerfully packaging server errors in 200 responses

Still this old classic: https://github.com/abc/xyz
Why did they remove the parallax effect?
Parallax effect Github 404 was the best. I even had a coffee mug of the design they officially sold (with the text to the effect of 'This isn't the drink you're looking for') but someone took it and they no longer sell them, which was very disappointing.
Wow, yeah. I hadn't seen a GitHub 404 page in a while (new job, don't code much anymore) and my first thought on seeing it was that the 404 page was broken. That would have been an odd recursion.
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

I’ve always thought that this implies that somewhere in Amazon’s systems there is an API that serves pictures of dogs.

And I just like knowing that.

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

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

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.

And probably the reason why no one at FT blinked an eye and said "you can't have fun on our site like this because it is very unprofessional"
Out of all the fun 404 pages, this is the best I've seen
It's like they're calling themselves out.. delicious
Fun crash course in economics while you're looking for a missing page
I learned so much about economic systems!
This is extremely awesome, love this
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?!"

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.
"maybe go try some wasabi pea dust ice cream."

I can't recreate the error now, but going to www.moosejaw.com in the EU used to give me the error "we can't offer products in EU... We're working on it. but until then, maybe go try some wasabi pea dust ice cream." I have a screenshot, thank god.

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 )

Really good. Also your website is too awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks! (As for the 404, there may be something other, soon.)
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.