Third patient dies from acute liver failure caused by a Sarepta gene therapy (biocentury.com)

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.

Comments (27)

yegle · 1h ago

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)

crgk · 2h ago

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 · 2h ago

Imgur really hates VPNs, and will show that bogus error page if you're not using a "nice" connection.

andrepd · 2h ago

Lol, so meta.

Also: very sad, but it would be great if it was just imgur doing this; it's the whole internet.

bhaney · 2h ago

Now to refresh this comment until HN randomly goes down

miyuru · 1h ago

Mirror: https://beeimg.com/view/m8002460503/

SchwKatze · 3h ago

You found the easter egg gem!

The fact that google's engineers cared about doing that it's pretty funny

henry700 · 2h ago

Probably done over a decade ago. Today we wouldn't see this

pi_22by7 · 2h ago

oh, for sureee

hnlmorg · 50m ago

That explains why we aren’t talking about it today then.

fnordpiglet · 39m ago

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 · 36m ago

You don’t know when that was written.

kartoffelsaft · 17m ago

It had been written by (at the latest) September 2008:

https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/09/best-gmail-error-m...

JadeNB · 3m ago

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...

jabjq · 25m ago

If you use Google to find this string you will find very old references. (“Very old” is relative)

mister_mort · 2h ago

Always leave a message in "impossible" code paths, you never know who might read it in the end.

rc_mob · 1h ago

You have 7 different gmail accounts eh?

Alex3917 · 1h ago

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.

zaik · 2h ago

Confuse your coworkers by telling them you "won Gmail once".

ChrisArchitect · 2h ago

Ask HN: GCP Outage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605732

larrymcp · 1h ago

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

hinkley · 1h ago

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 · 44m ago

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 · 39m ago

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 · 14m ago

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

JadeNB · 4m ago

> 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!)

pphysch · 1h ago

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).