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If you/anyone didn't notice, it's actually a link to view the PDF in a flash viewer on Scribd. Scribd is YC-funded, and they've been doing this for a while. There was some minor disagreement over the desirability and ethics of this, but nothing came of it.

Personally, I prefer Google's viewer to Scribd's: http://docs.google.com/viewer

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OK, this finally motivated me to make a userscript that replaces Scribd links with Google docs (I didn't realize it was so easy to construct a link to their viewer).

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/63596

I'm sure Scribd works just as well if you have Flash installed, but I don't. I like my local PDF viewer but I have to admit sometimes not having to download the file is nice.

Does anyone actually click this? It would seem that the "Invalid upload" bug would have been discovered/reported much sooner than this.

I think that what usually happens is that when you send a link to scribd that doesn't exist, it downloads the document and immediately presents it to you in their UI. Therefore, it would seem that the bug is related to scribd, not HN.

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