Billion Dollar PDFs | Hacker News Reader

Billion Dollar PDFs

billiondollarpdf.com

67 pointsrafaepta26 comments

I liked the idea, but this literally could have been a list. The AI-generated pages with filler text create a stark contrast in utility compared to the influential nature of the listed papers.

> It didn't just move capital; it birthed a brand-new, multi-trillion-dollar alternative asset class out of thin air.

aight imma head out

It is time for us to vacate this solar system, I don't like it here anymore.

Websites like this are all sort of ephemera.

I imagined there would be something about solar panels or other influential real world tech but its all crypto, AI and boring finance

The Tesla one talks about solar panels.

Move billions of dollars != help society in any meaningful way. In fact many of the cited papers have been considered extremely harmful to society.

You're introducing a moral claim that this site does not make.

I'm just stating my opinion here. Whether it's considered moral or not is left to the discretion of the reader.

Absence of such a claim is a commentary on its own, intended or not. Economic activity is almost always presented as a positive thing. It’s said to create jobs, generate wealth, increase production, etc. And here most of the things on the list moved massive amounts of capital without producing any of the positive effects. We get an odd WWW proposal that did actually produce those effects, but for each of those we also get a dozen of blockchain links. I’d say same goes for AI. While it has more utility than blockchain ever did it’s hard to say it was net positive overall to date.

Which of these papers “have been considered extremely harmful to society” by a significant number of people who wouldn’t be classified as cranks?

I’m asking specifically about claims that those papers have harmed society. Not cop-outs like “the author does things I don’t like”.

Bitcoin?

Less "extremely negative" - but there's at least a few "net-negative" things here: for example, the Ethereum and Web3 papers. Smart-contracts and NFTs failed to create any meaningful value or have any lasting economic impact, while their negatives at the time were well-reported (and let's include "crimes against taste" in that too).

What a stupid list. Heavily biased. I'd just like to point out that a large bulk of these papers depend on the existence of the computer and yet Alan Turing is not even on the list.

I followed the footer links to the site's author and his other work and I'll dare say my impression is that the whole thing is engagement bait to draw attention to his VC investment firm from other people who also think bollocks like this is somehow inspirational[1] - also not helped by how the other footer link goes to an obvious AI slop blog on Beehiiv (a "hiiv" of scum and villainy; for bots who get banned from Substack).

[1] https://x.com/jeremygiffon/status/1965535859073319334

Really interesting list, thanks.

The link to the original for Scion Capital is a 404 FYI: https://billiondollarpdf.com/entry/burry-scion-subprime/ - the original seems to be included towards the end in the PDF at the top of https://www.michael-burry.com/scion-capital-michael-burrys-l... and is fascinating reading.

What does "strict receipt" mean? Every entry seems to be labelled "strict receipt".

EDIT: The Warren Buffett one is also a 404: https://billiondollarpdf.com/entry/superinvestors-graham-dod... - what's going on? Are people taking these PDFs down in response to high traffic from this site? Or you put these links up without checking them?

https://www.superinvesting.com/pdf/The-Superinvestors-of-Gra...

Wild to see NFT nothingburgers next to "real ideas". Also very bizarre to see 2026 thinkpieces floating around in the same space as Gates' internet memos.

Maybe these are more million dollar PDFs than billion dollar ones, if only because there's enough VC money churning around for "friends" to give any idea by people in a certain segment a minimum of funding no matter how bad it is.

The problem with many of these kinds of works is that they are a product of a provincial SV mindset that is largely unaware of the broader world or anything at all outside of its cultural and economic ecosystem, so it winds up being a super narrow slice of conventional, mostly boring topics that everyone in SV rehashes over and over.

Wouldn't it be interesting to learn an influential work that changed how health care professionals run hospitals? Or a document that changed how mining works? A paper on Wright's theory of manufacturing scaling that explains the solar revolution? A thesis on how the world's factories moved from pneumatics to servo systems and why? How a policy thesis changed federal regulators' approach to approving rare disease drugs? Maybe Hayek's views on socialism and information theory, or perhaps an influential thesis on how antitrust monopoly regulation should work?

But instead it's a bunch of crypto and AI stuff that everyone in tech already knows about, rewarmed again for its hundredth serving.

That NFT entry leads to a 404, and even if you Google the one quote they provide from it ("You do not understand NFTs yet, but you will"), the only reference to it is the "Billion Dollar PDFs" site.

There's other web3 nonsense sprinkled about too. I agree with sibling's view on this (provincial SV mindset).

Given that the stock market completely crashed upon the release of DeepSeek-R1 it's fair to say that it was a negative billion dollar PDF.

The facebook pitch deck is a broken link

edit: same with youtube

This site does a terrible job of curating what is supposed to be a limited, selective list. I tried to access the first 60 entries. 11 of them were dead links. 4 were just links to advertisements for books (very much not a "memo, a deck, a whitepaper, a thread").

Should we then add a pdf for early pdf specs?

navelgazing.com was taken

*according to techbros

god i hate this so much

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