There's real irony there in it being an article about delivering value to society through making useful technology.
Ha, that's actually kind of impressive, in a really perverse sort of way.
I'm so glad Scribd is helping with the effort to carve the open web into a series of uncooperative fiefdoms.
Used the $$ selector in Chrome to find Scribd's .ff0 elements, copied them into SublimeText, did some regex work to clean out the tags (a span element for every line? with absolute positioning? Really Scribd?), and then exploited the fact that paragraphs got jammed together with no whitespace between the last punctuation and the beginning of the next paragraph to use a regex to auto-break the paragraphs.
Not pretty, but should be readable.
In other communities, to circumvent asinine ploys at lock-in, someone would just brute force the pdf file with a burner facebook login, and repost it. But then, you'd still be stuck with a pdf.
Unfortunately the transcript is missing past a point. I haven't checked to see if that's the case in the original document.
edit - Looks like I should've refreshed the thread first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12514873