Billion Dollar PDFs

51•rafaepta•1h ago

Comments

vkaku•48m ago

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

fny•45m ago

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

vkaku•42m ago

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

p-e-w•41m ago

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”.

donbox•36m ago

Bitcoin?

DaiPlusPlus•24m ago

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).

mkw5053•47m ago

The facebook pitch deck is a broken link

edit: same with youtube

MinimalAction•42m ago

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.

cognician•38m ago

> 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

rtpg•37m ago

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.

voidhorse•34m ago

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.

DaiPlusPlus•13m ago

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

jstanley•30m ago

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".

urikaduri•27m ago

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

ares623•21m ago

navelgazing.com was taken

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Comments

Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS

MacKenzie Scott's Giving, in Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs)

Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

Tiny Emulators

Designing and assembling my first PCB

So you want to learn physics (second edition, 2021)

Billion Dollar PDFs

Why Vanilla JavaScript

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper

A Peek Inside Jim Henson's Creature Shop, Where Whimsical Puppets Are Designed

Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

How we can reduce traffic congestion

Kode Dot Programmable pocket device for makers, pentesters and geeks

LARP – Revenue infrastructure for serious founders

Architecture Description Languages [pdf]

Why write code in 2026

I Learned to Read Again

Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

Deir El-Medina Strikes

Mechanistic interpretability researchers applying causality theory to LLMs

Automation Without Understanding

Flash-MSA: Accelerating Million-Token Training with Sparse Attention Kernels

I love LLMs, I hate hype

Against Usefulness

Gameboy is back ( no signup)

Circular Obstacle Pathfinding (2017)

The One-Step Trap (In AI Research)

Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring