This change makes those types of content completely inaccessible to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Which is funny since Buxfer released their iPhone interface to Hacker News this same day.

Edit:

I'm sure something will change about this, but until then here's a bookmarklet that rewrites iPaper urls to point straight to the original files (take out the line breaks when you make the bookmark):

    javascript:function%20revertScribdLinks(a){for(var%20i=0;i<a.length;i++)
    {a[i].setAttribute(%22href%22,a[i].getAttribute(%22href%22).replace(
    /^.*\.scribd.com.*\?url=(.*)$/,%22$1%22))}}revertScribdLinks(
    document.getElementsByTagName(%22a%22));

Nice code, but no need for this. We'll be looking for the iPhone user agent and redirecting automatically to the original file soon. Also, the link to the original file is going to be preserved, either on our side or on Paul's.

It appears to be a Flash wrapper for PDF that breaks my keyboard shortcuts, scrolling (by either spacebar or mousewheel), zooming, and searching.

Is this an improvement on some platform, like Windows? Could you whitelist those platforms, instead of blacklisting iPhones?

I suppose I could have my browsers (on Mac and Linux) claim to be an iPhone for HN, but that seems like a silly hack.

I suggested (222 days ago) a way that'd make it easy for me to remember at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661

    http://<address><uri> becomes http://<address>.pdf.scribd.com<uri>

    http://www.janestcapital.com.pdf.scribd.com/yaron_minsky-cufp_2006.pdf

Instead of pdf.scribd.com it'd obviously be nicer if it was just scribd.com. It's easy in BIND to set a wildcard record for everything except the subdomains you actually use.

It may come down to personal preference, but you can already cleanly pass the PDF's url as a GET parameter to /slurp.

So, your URL would become:

  http://scribd.com/slurp?url=http://www.janescapital.com/yaron_minsky-cufp_2006.pdf

I understand that, and you've definitely done the important part of making it so docs don't have to be uploaded via a form. That's a big deal. I think if you made it really easy to remember people would get in the habit of doing it when they linked. They're not going to go to your website and find "/slurp?url=" every time though. It should be simple enough to remember off the top of your head.

"Documents on the web causing you pain? Just add scribd.com to the domain!"

Yes. I'm a cheesy bastard like that. Thanks for responding.

sorry, but I prefer to be redirected to the original url

maybe there should be a supplementary shortcut to scribd, that would be more reasonable.

Or maybe the title should point to the iPaper version and a [PDF] or [PPT] link pointing to the original URL should be automatically placed next to the title. No need to include it manually part of the title for those kind of files.

sounds good

I agree on the supplementary link think. I'd much prefer to be able to get the original document.

Sorry this is unrelated, but I must see the integration in action.

Lorem ipsum pdf: http://jedidiah.stuff.gen.nz/marbles-presentation.pdf

Hm. Guess iPaper integration ain't in comments. That's kind of sad. Why not?

EDIT: Someone else made a test story that linked to a pdf: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134854

this should have been submitted as a pdf ;-)