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Some people link to archive.org to future-proof against dead urls.

That’s kinda backwards. One should point to the source and if that is no longer available then fire up the Machine.

In this case the archive.org link is a 403 for me while the original works.

I like what Firefox does where if a site 404s it checks to see if there is a Wayback Machine snapshot for it and automatically loads it.

Firefox doesn't do that. An extension to Firefox does.

I suspect you misunderstand some of the point.

When you make a posting on HN or anywhere else and cite a URL, that URL could go down years later. Your historic posting then has a dangling URL. You can't go back and edit old postings to fix it.

Also, some content changes. The URL is valid, but the cited material is not there. With the archive, you can point to a specific date when that was retrieved.

I get a 403 as well, no point in linking to something unaccessible just because reasons. Gdpr is hard but people in Europe should not be denied access just for the sake of immutable URIs

Wait what? https://web.archive.org is inaccessible to you because you are European? FWIW: I am European, and it works for me.

it's kind of rude, it's a bit like Google showing large snippets in the web search results so that users never have to leave google.com

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