My interpretation is: The artificial construct of a man striking the computer is/was running on the computer that was struck. So the artificial construct inadvertantly destroyed itself. Perhaps implying that violence is not a good solution. An odd bit of humor, but I liked it.
This huge increase in hits is accounted for by the “Behavioral economics” explanation: “The influence of psychological factors caused you to act in a manner that would not be expected of a purely rational actor.”
I was thinking the same thing, but that engineer should have a really short investigation as to why it's happening.
Access logs often include the HTTP Referer header, which would make it easy to see that all the traffic is coming from Hacker News.
Even so, if I were the one to submit the URL to Hacker News, I'd probably make the URL path something like /showing_404_page_to_Hacker_News so it's impossible for someone reading the access logs to wonder what's going on.
I think I recall Chomsky saying something along the lines that the financial press is the most reliable because it isn't in their economic interest to mislead their audience.
One of the most eye opening experiences I've had related to press was working in a hedge fund and being able to access paid political research reports.
No BS, no childish manipulation, just crude analysis of a bunch of people competing for power.
I am interested in this as well. The regular media can be monotonous or driven by agendas. Would be great to find content created by folks paid to write unbiased, say it like it is.
Bloomberg terminal bundles a lot of mid tier analysts, but all the market leading analyst firms sell their copy for FAR more than what Bloomberg will pay.
The analysis industry is fascinating, you're essentially paying gobsmacking amounts of money to a single journalist to follow 1 stock.
There seems to be a bug that sometimes it responds with an empty page (0 content length) with a 404 code, and sometimes it responds with a full 404 page.
The FT is well worth the cost. I read it cover to cover everyday, which is what I am doing now in the dark (PG&E). The weekend edition is always amazing, with great interviews (lunch with the FT). I still miss David Tang’s column (he died) as well as the humor of Mrs. Moneypenny. Janice Robinson wine column is worth the time if you are into wine.
https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/1282882643277656065 seems to explain it - "varz" is one of the "z pages" (a convention that by now has leaked outside Google), so it's handled by the Google web server infrastructure, not by the YouTube app. And "abortabortabort" and a few others are commands that are restricted at the load-balancer level.
> The Web Server cannot give you the answers you need. Please check your life to ensure the path is correct. Did you press the right keys in sequence, and click with a firm but gentle hand? Are you paying attention? This may be a message, but it's not a mistake.
> Please contact the server's administrator if chaos persists.
I love that kind of attention to detail. It's easy to treat the 404 page as something not needing any thought at all so it's refreshing to see some still care about such seemingly irrelevant details.
The Rolling Stones’ site had the best (and most obvious) 404 page ever — an embedded YouTube video for You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Sadly they’ve since removed it
This one was sent to me, but in a similar situation when someone said a 404 page from a particular site was fun, I simply mutated an existing genuine page until I had a URL that 404'd.
It is funny that you can see the bias in FT's politics in the descriptions they use.
For example, the trickle-down description genuinely reads as if written by a supporter of that economic theory in that it frames that theory in a positive economic light.
Meanwhile the socialism one is written by someone intending to mock socialism and isn't even accurate to socialism. It is more a descriptor of communism than socialism.
Yeah, that one didn't quite work -- I was trying to think of what a better one would be. I think the proper tone is parodying what someone who believes this might actually say, and they're fairly on the button for the rest of them. Something about the page's utility being made redundant through common ownership? (Economic jokes are hard.)
That caught my eye too. The others all looked reasonable (including Marxism) but the socialism one sounds like a caricature of an ignorant facebook post.
"While you probably do have what it takes to be a doctor, which would have been an optimal outcome for many sick people (and a sub-optimal outcome for protectionist, labor-supply limiting organizations), at some point in life you were not permitted to continue attempting to become a doctor. This could have happened because you failed biochem, failed the MCAT, or ran out of money along the way. And now, by path of least resistence, you are selling medical devices."
To pick on a comment probably not meant as serious economics: It is most emphatically not a tragedy of the commons. We don't commonly own FT.com or share in its use. It is privately owned and thus a tragedy for FT's owners, if it significantly impacts their profits. Probably not.
> Socialism
If you were to get the page you wanted you might get a better page than someone else, which would be unfair. This way at least everyone gets the same.
I chuckled. FT is going to get angry tweets about their 404 page.
Freakonomics: there is a surprising and commonly undervalued secondary market for 404 pages, and you just realized you purchased a bootleg, which is nevertheless priceless: https://archive.md/MzOrc
In fact Google even attempts to detect "soft 404s" and will not index those either. That's when it thinks the content wasn't found but the server still returned a 200 response. This can happen in any application but I think they developed it with SPAs in mind
