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

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall theme

  • Thread is a large collection of memorable or clever 404 pages, plus some technical discussion of HTTP status codes and error handling.
  • People value 404s that are entertaining, informative, or on-brand instead of generic “page not found” messages.

Types of favorite 404 pages

  • Brand-aligned visuals: dogs (Amazon), cats for status codes (http.cat), Lego/Pixar/Blizzard/Heinz themed illustrations, Spotify’s “404s and heartbreaks.”
  • Joke or meta-text: Financial Times’ economic “explanations” for missing pages, NPR’s fine-print humor, Wireshark and other pop-culture references, IMDb’s random movie quotes.
  • Minimalist but witty: MIT’s old haiku-style 404, simple text gags like patron-saint-of-lost-things, or deadpan “The requested URL was not found on the server” with attribution as a mock proverb.

Interactive and game-based 404s

  • Puzzle or game elements: slider puzzle (Mercury), Space Invaders and other mini-games, Discord’s hidden snake (via Konami code), Thingiverse’s interactive graphic, Wendy’s and Taco Bell animations.
  • Interactive color or art experiences: color-controlled gallery layouts, random daily art, custom fortune cookies, creative topographic map metaphors.

Storytelling, nostalgic, and retro 404s

  • Long-form microfiction: Adult Swim’s rotating dark stories.
  • Retro aesthetics: 90s-style pages, ZX Spectrum/teletext-like screens, references to defunct MMOs, old-school Flash compilation pages.
  • National or cultural nostalgia: broadcasters’ 404s that mimic legacy TV test cards or local references.

Personal and self-promotional 404s

  • Many commenters share their own 404s: existential monologues, random poetry, interactive boards, search-focused pages, or simple jokes.
  • Some explicitly reuse others’ text or JS and are open about it.

Nostalgia for “lost” 404 pages

  • Several beloved 404s have been removed or changed (old GitHub parallax page, Bloomberg’s monitor-throwing image, Grooveshark panda, old Reddit, Google “xx-hacker” and pirate versions).

Technical discussion of 404 behavior

  • Clarifications that a page can display custom content while still returning HTTP 404.
  • Criticism of APIs that respond with HTTP 200 but encode “404” semantics in JSON.
  • Brief discussion of 204 vs 404, browser behavior (often ignores 204 body), crawler implications, and misuse of status codes (e.g., errors wrapped in 200 by GraphQL).