The Most Underrated PDF on the Internet (July 2023)

Answers to Will Manidis (@WillManidis), July 2023: “what is the most underrated pdf available online” (what is the most underrated pdf (July 2023)… (tweet)). He asked the same question again in November 2024; that thread is The Most Underrated PDF on the Internet.

Routing record. Kyle aggregated the replies by hand on 2026-10-05: 121 links posted, 113 unique. This page records where every one of them went. Every PDF was identified from its own first page, not its filename, and compared against the existing collection by URL, by file hash and by title, because the same document often arrives from a different host.

What the repeats say

• The Gateway Process report — 5 mentions (four from the CIA Reading Room, one from The Black Vault), plus a Medium write-up of it. It was already in the library from the November 2024 threads and is now at 7 recommendations, level with the Pepsi deck. See CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.
• The Pepsi “Breathtaking” deck — 2 mentions here, 7 across all three threads. Pepsi — “Breathtaking” Brand Identity
• 2 mentions each: The Secret Teachings of All Ages (the copy from bin Laden’s Abbottabad library), What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory, Birds on a Wire, Chicken Chicken Chicken- Chicken Chicken, and the Simple Sabotage Field Manual (once as the CIA scan, once from Project Gutenberg).

Already in the library — counted, not duplicated (12)

• Valve — Handbook for New Employees
• FM 3-05.301- Psychological Operations Process — Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures — This thread posted the December 2003 edition (439 pages, FM 3-05.301 / MCRP 3-40.6A), archived beside the existing copy.
• A Mathematician’s Lament
• Pepsi — “Breathtaking” Brand Identity (2×)
• Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
• Simple Sabotage Field Manual — Posted once as the CIA-declassified scan (regmedia.co.uk) and once as the Project Gutenberg text. (2×)
• CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5 — The 1983 Army report “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process”. Posted four times from the CIA Reading Room and once from The Black Vault. (5×)
• An Option Value Problem from Seinfeld
• Chicken Chicken Chicken- Chicken Chicken (2×)
• Startup Engineering — Market Research, Wireframing and Design
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
• Prometheus Rising

New to the library (64)

• A Complete Collection of State-Trials, Volume 5 — Thomas Salmon (ed.), 1730
• A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers at Full Speed — Chris Helzer, 2020
• A Unifying Review of Linear Gaussian Models — Sam Roweis and Zoubin Ghahramani, 1999
• Algebra, Topology, Differential Calculus, and Optimization Theory for Computer Science and Machine Learning — Jean Gallier and Jocelyn Quaintance
• ALT Codes Reference Sheet — UsefulShortcuts.com, 2006
• America Against America — Wang Huning, 1991
• Attention Is All You Need — Ashish Vaswani et al., 2017
• Barra United States Equity Risk Model (USE3) Handbook — BARRA, 1998
• Birds on a Wire — P. L. Krapivsky and S. Redner, 2022
• Broken Neural Scaling Laws — Ethan Caballero, Kshitij Gupta, Irina Rish and David Krueger, 2023
• Calculus Made Easy — Silvanus P. Thompson, 1914
• Categorical Informatics- A Functorial Approach to Data Integration — David I. Spivak, 2015
• CLOSURE — why the lucky stiff, 2013
• Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets- The British Railway Mania of the 1840s — Andrew Odlyzko, 2010
• Dez Blanchfield — Speaker and Advisory Profile — Dez Blanchfield, 2022
• Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy? — Alfred G. Cuzán, 1979
• Emotional Labor- Regulating Emotions for a Wage — Alicia A. Grandey and Gordon M. Sayre, 2019
• Evidence-based Software Engineering — Derek M. Jones, 2020
• Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant — Kathleen M. Trauth, Stephen C. Hora and Robert V. Guzowski, 1993
• From Sundials to Atomic Clocks — James Jespersen and Jane Fitz-Randolph, 1999
• Genocide Waged Against the Black Nation — Mutulu Shakur et al., 1988
• Getting Real — 37signals (Basecamp), 2006
• How Doctors Die — Ken Murray, M.D., 2013
• How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor — Warren E. Buffett, 1977
• How to Hack Into Bus Stop Advertising Spaces — Brandalism, 2016
• K-HOLE #3- The K-HOLE Brand Anxiety Matrix — K-HOLE, 2013
• Knowledge and Justification — John L. Pollock, 1974
• Life Guide — Josh Humi, 2026
• Loose Threads- The Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group — Daniel Elizondo and “The Hermetic Penetrator”, 2023
• Lorde and Jack Antonoff — An Emotionally Broken Journey — @luckiies
• Method of Swinging on a Swing (US Patent 6,368,227) — Steven Olson, 2002
• NASA Graphics Standards Manual (1976) — Danne & Blackburn, 1976
• Never Split the Difference — Summary Cheat Sheet — Unknown (Famvestor), 2019
• Newton’s Principia (1846 English edition) — Isaac Newton, trans. Andrew Motte, 1846
• Non-Cap Weighted Indexes — Clifford S. Asness, 2007
• On the Rheology of Cats — M. A. Fardin, 2014
• Partial Intimations of the Coming Whole- The Chongqing Experiment — Cui Zhiyuan, 2011
• Pitching Hacks — Venture Hacks (Nivi and Naval Ravikant), 2009
• Planning U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces for the 1980s — Congressional Budget Office, 1978
• |GTFO, Volume 1 — Travis Goodspeed et al., 2017
• Politigram & the Post-left — Joshua Citarella, 2018
• Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh- Calculations on Avian Defaecation — Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal, 2003
• Robert De Niro’s Method- Acting, Authorship and Agency in the New Hollywood (1967–1980) — Richard Colin Tait, 2013
• Semantic Composition in Visually Grounded Language Models — Rohan Shrirang Pandey, 2023
• Space Settlements- A Design Study (NASA SP-413) — NASA / Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow (eds.), 1977
• Statistical Physics of Human Cooperation — Matjaž Perc et al., 2017
• The Art of Revolution — Jonathan Fields, 2014
• The Barra US Equity Model (USE4) Methodology Notes — Jose Menchero, D. J. Orr and Jun Wang, 2011
• The Butterfly — Emily Brontë, 1842
• The Cook and the Chef- Musk’s Secret Sauce (preview) — Tim Urban, 2015
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to a Biotech Startup — Peter Kolchinsky, 2004
• The Illusion of Reality- The Scientific Proof That Everything Is Energy — Unknown, 2018
• The Origins of Logistic Regression — J. S. Cramer, 2002
• The Overfitted Brain- Dreams Evolved to Assist Generalization — Erik Hoel, 2020
• The Playboy Interview- Marshall McLuhan — Marshall McLuhan, interviewed by Eric Norden, 1969
• The Secret Teachings of All Ages — Manly P. Hall, 1928
• The Straussian Moment — Peter Thiel, 2007
• The Value of Science — Richard P. Feynman, 1955
• The Vignelli Canon — Massimo Vignelli, 2010
• Verus Vision — Michael J. Toutonghi et al., 2018
• Walking Through Walls Training System (US Patent Application 2006-0014125) — John St. Clair, 2006
• What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language? — Paul Nation, 2014
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory — Ulrich Drepper, 2007
• Youth Mode- A Report on Freedom — K-HOLE, 2013

Books — sent to the anti-library instead (16)

In-print books posted as pirated or unofficial PDFs are recorded as anti-library cards pointing at a copy to buy, and the PDF is not archived. Public-domain or author-released texts already on the anti-library got a sighting and a local copy.

• Crypto-Current — Nick Land (new card)
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects — Ted Chiang (new card)
• Probabilistic Graphical Models — Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman (new card)
• Stretching Anatomy — Arnold G. Nelson and Jouko Kokkonen (new card)
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed — Paulo Freire (new card)
• The Boron Letters — Gary C. Halbert (new card)
• Nine Stories — J. D. Salinger (new card)
• Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun — Wess Roberts (new card)
• The Red Book (Liber Novus) — C. G. Jung (new card)
• Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss (new card)
• Self-Reliance (Emerson) — already on file; sighting added; local copy saved
• Everything Is Bullshit — already on file; sighting added
• Blindsight — already on file; sighting added; local copy saved
• The Network State — already on file; sighting added
• As a Man Thinketh — already on file; sighting added; local copy saved
• Memoirs from Beyond the Grave — already on file; sighting added

Link-only — no PDF to archive (18)

• Bittensor — A Peer-to-Peer Intelligence Market (whitepaper) — A web page, not a PDF: the Bittensor whitepaper by “Yuma Rao”. link
• Susan Greenhalgh, “Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China’s One-Child Policy” (The China Quarterly, 2005) — JSTOR, paywalled. How a missile scientist, Song Jian, adapted Club of Rome models into the one-child policy. link
• Srivastava et al., “Predictions of Enhanced Chemical Reactivity at Regions of Local Conformational Strain on Carbon Nanotubes: Kinky Chemistry” (J. Phys. Chem. B, 1999) — ACS, paywalled. Posted for its subtitle. link
• Yokoo and Oshima, “Is bacteriophage φX174 DNA a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence?” (Icarus, 1979) — Paywalled. A real 1979 paper that checked a virus genome for an alien message. link
• “Dancing Israelis” FBI report (Scribd) — Scribd; login wall. A 9/11 conspiracy staple. link
• Justin Brady, “Trust channels” — A blog post, not a PDF. link
• Wikipedia, “Probability density function” — A pun: the PDF people actually use most. link
• pdf2go, “PDF Turns 30” — A blog post on the history of the format. link
• “bulletin-may26.pdf” — A Rickroll: the PDF is the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Not archived (song lyrics). link
• Medium, “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” (Accessible FOIA) — A blog write-up of the Gateway Process report; the report itself is in the library. link
• “Vedas” (Scribd) — Scribd; login wall. link
• Eriugena, Periphyseon (De divisione naturae), 1968 edition (archive.org) — Lending-library only; in copyright. link
• Simple Sabotage Field Manual (Project Gutenberg) — Counted toward the existing Simple Sabotage card. link
• Zhu et al., “An Ultrafast and Ultra-Low-Temperature Hydrogen Gas–Proton Battery” (JACS, 2021) — ACS, paywalled. link
• DEFUSE proposal (DocumentCloud) — The 2018 EcoHealth Alliance DARPA proposal central to lab-leak debates. Blocked to scripts; not retrieved. link
• Gateway Process report (The Black Vault copy) — Counted toward the existing Gateway Process card. link
• “Make L$D Fast” — A parody of the “Make Money Fast” chain letter. Not archived. link

Connections

• PDF Collection — Master
• The Most Underrated PDF on the Internet
• The Greatest, Rarest PDF on the Internet

Where this came from

• Will Manidis’s “most underrated PDF” thread, July 2023