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Groxxyesterday at 6:40 PM1 replyview on HN

I'm somewhat fond of including a UUID for that reason. As long as they can copy-paste it into Google, they can get results that are precisely the errors from your application, unlike "error 55324". The same works internally: zero ambiguity which system it came from, and it's trivial to find the full history of the error (message). It's not great for verbally communicating tho.

But yes, I can get behind making things nicer to read and less technically scary, but include enough detail so that people can solve their own problems if needed. There's a decent chance that the software will outlive your desire to support it.


Replies

pseudohadamardtoday at 10:28 AM

IBM have been doing this for centuries, each error comes with a code you can look up for more information. Although this is probably way too late, all nix/nux utilities should come with either a magic ID string you can copy into Google to find all the other people baffled by the same error message ("Quadrant change in relocatable expression", that's an actual error message), or just an option to launch a browser with said info, because the message itself ain't giving you anything to go on.