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It would be interesting to read but I have to say it's just too infuriating what that Scribd crap does to the web. They ruin a perfectly good way of displaying documents just so they can "solve" the problem they created themselves.

That's just ridiculous and I will never ever again click on or upvote anything that has a scribd URL. Scribd truely shows the ugliest face of the ad funded web. It's innovation turned on its head. Ruin something just to extract some money from "fixing" it in a horrible way. It's pathetic and it's an intellectual disgrace.



The trouble with Scribd is it tries to legitimize PDF for browsing. We'd be better served by a tool that rescues the text and images from the boneheaded universal print-derived layout that assumes a very high resolution portrait display and pointlessly huge margins. Google has a lot of trouble with this, but bless them for trying.


I find PDFs a pleasure to read. They are better typeset, the lines aren't ridiculously long, the fonts look beautiful and the pages give me a feel of how much I've read.


I've found in the discussion below a link to a non-scribd version and submitted that separately:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953834


a pdf inside a zip file inside cnet?

that's just as bad, if not worse, than scribd.


In that case, also from further down in this same discussion, a direct link to a PDF:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-Ge...


Nah, if I want to download the pdf from scribd (to, for example, use a search function that actually works), I have to upload a document of my own or pay a subscription. Cnet is much less of a hassle.


I quit clicking on them because every single time I tried to load a Scribd page Firefox would lock up and then crash. I really hate them.


I agree, even though Scribd works pretty well in Chromium. In Firefox, it used to crash the browser all the time. I wish people would just use Google Docs as a PDF viewer on the web. Just prepend https://docs.google.com/viewer?url= to any PDF URL and there you go. Or even better, link to the PDF and give me the option to handle it as I want. I have a Chrome extension that uses Google Docs as a PDF Viewer, but also lets me download it. No more Adobe Reader, ... just Scribd still gets in the way.

//offtopic


Is there any way to simply "hide" and "show" the menu at the bottom? It seems like there's only an option for "auto-hide: off" which leaves the panel open the whole time, or "auto-hide: On" which means it keeps popping up and down the entire time I read the article, which is even more distracting.


I wonder why didn't the author use Google Docs or maybe a blog post.


if you want to download as a pdf, and object to creating account, then feel free to use the throwaway I created - nomail+12345@nomail.com nomail12345 pwd:12345


You're being melodramatic.


Great to hear you have an opinion on the way I express my opinion. Do you also have an opinion on the matter itself?


The matter itself is a list of sleep hacks.

The worst thing about Scribd is the way it obligates people to ruin perfectly good HN threads with meta-commentary.


You do have a point and I was aware of that unfortunate side-effect of my comment. I'm doing it rarely. But this is also a site for people who make decisions on how stuff is published on the web and how to monetize it, etc. So I think it's not completely useless to have that kind of meta debate sometimes.




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