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Comment by larrymcp | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is, this error message is hardly less useful than the recent trend of error messages which say only, "Something went wrong".

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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.”

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.

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"

> 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!)

Could make cute pictures and brighten support staffs day. 'I got a pig telling a chicken that the barn is closed??'

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!".

How much do you want to owe in license fees for their likeness?

Oh, boring bean counters...

Animals are way more cross culture compatible

lmfao this is genius and would work better than text

That’s a good idea - and even technical users would find that more memorable than 1198854 versus a 1197854 error.

I think you're going to find people mistaking one animal for another.

Error detecting/correcting codes!

The pig is laying down.

The horse is eating.

The bird is sitting.

If you say you saw a pig eating, you misremember.

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!

Writing helpful error messages is definitely a skill. And I too get annoyed at unhelpful error messages.

But I don’t think your point invalidates mine.

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).

At least it’s not https://twitter.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594.

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