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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

What are you talking about? I use them all the time to type out a url I found on one machine for use on another machine or for sharing with people.

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And would it matter if the shortener you used for that disappeared a couple years later? The stupid part was sticking a middleman into millions of links permanently posted on public websites and assuming these giant free services would keep running forever.

There are worse things that could happen than shutting down too. Someone with control of an old shortener domain could set up spoof versions of the site that a link used to forward to and use it to harvest passwords or get people to install malware.

I don't follow your argument but my use cases are always short lived (<24h).

My point is that lekevicius is correct that they're a terrible idea for long term use. If you're only using the shortened URL for a day, the downside/risk is a lot smaller.

Water is a terrible idea if you drown in it, it still has one or two uses.

Unless your machines are air-gapped and disconnected from the Internet - aren't there better ways to send text these days than typing it in by hand?

No there aren't. Do you suggest setting up nginx on one machine as a reverse proxy to the long link the second machine can access? Many ways for sure but typing out a few letters is the easiest. I do this for regular desktops but I do it more on headless machines or when installing an OS.

Email? DM? Text message? AirDrop?

Firefox has a feature where, if you're logged into firefox, you can see what tabs are open on your other browsers. It makes sharing links across computers trivial.

You can also right click a tab and directly send that tab to another device.

Chrome has a similar feature when sync is enabled: the "tabs from other devices" section of the History page (Ctrl-H). The context menu for tabs also includes an option to send the tab to another device.

You have to login with the same account, biggest drawback.

I am installing gentoo and you want me to email,dm, text message or airdrop links?

Ok, maybe you mean mobile only: i have a wifi only android phone that I don't use email on, none of those options work.

QR codes work for me PC -> mobile ('Create QR code for this Page'), but I haven't really pursued the other direction... I usually post to Twitter and delete it to get the t.co link now that goo.gl is done.

Bit.ly is faster than opening up a camera app for me

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