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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I never noticed this until now: how does the scribd script work on HN? Does it automatically suck in the PDF after it's been posted? I didn't realize that clicking on [scribd] takes you to an actual scribd page (I just thought it was the convention that people used to indicate that the link goes to a PDF).

Also, why scribd? (API I'm guessing?)

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I don't understand why you would ever want to ruin a perfectly good PDF by letting Scribd anywhere near it...

I used to like being able to read PDFs in the browser, which Scribd let you do, but now the browsers I use (Chrome and Safari) both have in-browser PDF reading that seems to work more smoothly than Scribd for me, so I've switched to the opposite preference. I do occasionally click on it for PDFs that I expect to be large (such as this one) where I just want to skim a few pages without downloading the whole thing.

I always vote up posters that de-scribd pdfs in the comments.

> why scribd?

Scribd went through Y combinator.

It works like this: http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/...

By which I mean, it just appends the posted URL as a scribd url parameter, it doesn't actually "scribe" it...

What does "scribe" mean in this context?

When I click on the link, it redirects me to http://www.scribd.com/doc/969071/All#full. At a glance, view-source appears to grab each page from http://scribdassets.com. I think Scribd is clearly serving the material from their own site. Is there a different mode for cases where they have permission from the copyright owner?

Looks like just a direct link to the UC Berkeley site - no scribd at all.

The [scribd] part of the title is the link to scribd.

Yeah sorry, should've been clearer. The [scribd] bit is actually its own link, which I found out by accidentally clicking on it instead of the rest of the link title.

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