Not all documents that contain text can easily be turned into HTML documents that preserve the original formatting and are readable. That is certainly true for the vast majority of people outside the readers of Hacker News. Actually, it's probably true for many of the people who _do_ read Hacker News. Scribd clearly serves a purpose here. If you don't like the presentation (Flash), then don't go to Scribd links off of Google. In fact, you could probably write yourself a Greasemonkey plugin that removes Scribd results from your Google results in 10 minutes!

Edit: Alternatively, there's probably another startup in here that does exactly what Scribd does but instead of using Flash just uses HTML and CSS. Then you'd have the best of both worlds, in theory, if it matters that much to the user.

scribd seems to spam google a lot, I always find scribd in my results and when you go to the page there is nothing relevant to what I was looking for.